Stopping the Pattern of Giving it All Back and More

Welcome everyone. My name is Randy. How with my trader state of mind. And the first thing I want to do is I want to make sure that you can hear me. We've had, we've had a harrowing last 15 minutes getting online. We're in North Carolina and we're on the edge of this hurricane. And apparently it's playing games. It's playing games with Gotowebinar and therefore playing games with us. So we just want to make sure that you can hear us. So if some very kind people just type in yes or no, and hopefully yes. Okay. And I would appreciate it. And we can begin to go. Yep, we got it. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Okay. Anybody that's been to any of my webinars knows that I hold questions toward the end simply because I've got a presentation, I've got a teaching that's here. And to be honest with you, people that know me, that know that they start disrupting me, I lose my train of thought. And that's not a good thing. So that was the main rule. And where we want to start is here. You know, I'm very clear that traders are hard working people. They work hard their craft, they really develop plans. Well, most do. And yet at the same time, somehow success in trading simply does not follow the same rules that produce other success in other areas. And what we're going to be doing is we can be looking at that situation now, okay. And we're going to be looking at it and going, what's actually going on here? So fasten your seat belts, let's go.

First off.

How many people have experienced this? Okay, you sit there and you've got some good trading days, you've got some good trading moments, you've had a great day, you've made some good money and you feel good. You feel, oh man, I finally got it. I finally figured it out. And then you go, wow, okay. And then, whoa. What do you do? You turn around and you give it all back. It doesn't make any sense. It's kind of like this photograph. You know, you look at it and go, yeah, that horse really shouldn't be able to stand on a rock like that and not fall completely off somehow. The logic that's being used to create that scene is a different logic than is being that that handles the rest of reality. And that's what we're looking at with trading. Maybe trading is a specialized form of reality that doesn't, it just simply doesn't obey the same rules. And that's what we Want to take a look at. Because a lot of it doesn't make sense is, you know, in the beginning what you find out about trading is everything's pretty much stacked against you. You're working with a random situation, you're learning a methodology that allows you to apply a structured standard practices upon that randomness. And within that structured standard, standard practice, it gives you an edge that allows you, if you ever do everything right, allows you to extract capital, more capital out of the markets than you give in. And then you have a good day and it works. And all of a sudden you're in the zone and wow, then it all falls apart. And all that time, all that time you've been just sitting there going, you know something, I'm so close to turning the corner. I'm just right there, you know, prosperity is just around, around the corner. And then, and again, particularly when you've had some good days, go, wow, look at this. I finally, I, I've made some good money here. I've done a good job. Wow, I've got this together. I finally got it together. Now all I have to do is continue.

At the same time. Oh, how many people this is. Most traders have a pattern of giving it all back and then some. Every time you think you figured it out, this is where it gets really tough. You're going, what is this? And what I want to do is, my proposal is this, okay. The real problem of giving it back.

Is not just psychological. There's nothing mysterious about it from a psychological standpoint. It's also very biological and emotional. And understand when I'm talking about emotions, to me I'm talking about biology. Emotions are biological. They take over psychology. And what we're looking at is going, you know, how, how do we get the head, how do we get the thinking brain in alignment with the feeling brain, with that emotional brain? This is what we're really looking at and what we, what's happening. We have an incredibly powerful emotional brain that has substantially more say so about what you do with your trading mind than you recognize. And that's important. That's what's important. Because ultimately what we're talking about here is learning how to take the thinking brain and the emotional brain and reorganize the relationship that they have with one another. That's a big deal. My promise to you is the mind that you brought to trading is not going to be the mind that brings success in trading. As a matter of fact, you brought a mind and a brain to trading that's absolutely stacked against your Ever having success.

It's built to control outcome. It's built to absolutely loathe uncertainty. It wants to be right even if it has to lie to itself and it wants to predict outcome. You know all those folks out there that get all these, all this, all this methodology, all this stuff going and they have a high predictive value, but they can't use it because they spend so much time doing the calculations that the trades already run past them. It comes down to you just have to get. Your brain has to get used to ambiguity. And yet that's going to freak the brain out. And the real question is, how are you going, how are you going to work with this very primitive brain that doesn't like uncertainty and is wired to really perform poorly under stress? How are you going to retrain it to live in perpetual stress of not knowing what's going to happen? Wow, that's a tough one, isn't it? Now.

If you really take a look at how the brain's built.

What you discover is this is all this highfalutin thinking that you're doing, all this logic, all this reason.

There is really no such thing as reason. There is rationalization.

Because ultimately what the thinking brain is doing is creating a story that supports what emotions have already decided. What the emotional brain has already decided. And remember, the deck's tacked against you is that the brain already doesn't like uncertainty. It considers a threat and it's hardwired to produce a sense of vulnerability. And that vulnerability through evolution is directly connected to fight flight. So there's a problem.

And this is where you start realizing.

What are the emotions and thinking behind the self sabotage of giving it all back.

The real key here is as we go through this, I want you to notice there's a certain observer that's going on in this game. Okay? I want you to notice that. And what I want you to notice is feeling good is a problem all your life. Feeling good is a good thing. Man, I want to feel good about this. Yeah, you know, I want to feel good when I win and hey, hey. And the other thing is I want to win. And all of a sudden we begin to go, well, you know something, I'm trying to win. You know, I have a daily allotment of how much money I want to make. I have all this stuff, I know what I need to win. As a matter of fact, often when I see that I'm not making my daily goal, I'm going to up my stuff and I'm going to make that daily Goal. I'm going to make that outcome goal. And yet at the same time.

The brain stacked against you. So this feeling good and this is where we start with self sabotage. And this is where we started about giving it all back. You have some good trades, man. I mean, you're like this guy singing seat, man. You see the really. And all of a sudden you book that profit. Whoa. And before you know it, you have triggered the dopamine reward system of the ancient brain. And it goes, man, this feels good. And a little cocaine goes out there and you sit. That's internal, legal cocaine that goes in there and makes you feel good. Before you know it. There's a problem.

Is that it releases dopamine and testosterone. Testosterone ought to tell you the willingness to risk and it makes you feel good and it makes you feel on top of the world, like it can do anything and it submits the habit. But this is the problem. It's for short term gain, not long term. This is where we get into trouble about winning is we have been brought up in a culture and also, and it's just not this culture, but it's really just winning. The battle of survival is that we want to win, we want to work hard, we want to be able to have a mindset that allows us to make things happen. And we think we should be able to do that in trading. But yet when we try.

We discover that the casino operating the markets operates with the different rules than we do. And they have the odds. Whoa. And all sudden you can get caught into wow. That emotion of wow, I need more, I need more, I want more, I want more. Or you know, hey, I feel good. I've actually was giving a workshop in China several years ago to a large group of financial community. And I had made the statement, you're not allowed to feel good while trading. And I had several people get up and just what do you mean you're not allowed to feel good? Now remember, these are Chinese who had experienced basically two to three decades of a bull market where you could throw darts and you could pick winners. And the guy said, I feel good all the time when I win. And I said that it's a setup because feeling good euphoria is an emotional state that has you believing that the good times are going to roll on forever. And all of a sudden you start really making stupid decisions based on that euphoria. And several people actually got up. Unbeknownst to them. There was. They were in the midst of a two point market correction in Shanghai market. And the Next day, people are looking at me going, golly boy, I don't feel very good. And they begin to realize, oh my God, this is what, this is what this American was talking about. You know, feeling good actually got us into trouble. So there you go, we're going into this thing going, okay, so this feeling good when winning, hold on to that thought because ultimately that dopamine rewards the winning behavior. And you feel confident, hello, I am in control. I've got this figured out. And now what you have is you have dopamine induced overconfidence. It has you believing that you've got it.

And that the good times are gonna roll on forever and that, hey, I have turned the corner. I am, I'm there.

That's where the real trigger happens, is you are led to believe and remember this is happening on a biological level. You're winning is a biological phenomenon that trips up the dopamine reward system, has you feeling good, and this is a biological system. You, that's you that suddenly also has psychology to it. And what you do from a psychological standpoint is you become overconfident. So.

This is what's called euphoria. Your thinking is skewed by the dopamine and there you are sitting in a trap. You don't even know it and you don't recognize that. Well, you know something, all thinking is emotional state dependent. I need to be looking at what kind of crazy thinking is coming out of my brain. But no, you don't do that. Okay, you are now primed friends.

For giving it all back. You're confident, you're flush, you're going, man, I've just won. I've made some money here. Wow, look at this. There could not be a more dangerous kind of emotion for a person trying to learn to be a successful trader. Most people think you know something. The problem really is about fear.

And in the early stages of trading, you know, learning to pull that trigger, fomo, you know, being able to stay in a trade and hit your targets and not leave all the money on the table and stuff like that. All fear based type of behaviors. Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of trouble there. But what traders don't realize is that that's just one problem that has to be mastered. A bigger problem is when you actually start producing the capacity of producing success and moving into the overconfidence and the euphoria and all that testosterone and dopamine that leads you to give it all back because suddenly you have won. Yes, I've turned the corner. No, you haven't. What you've done is you have learned, if you began to observe this thing differently, you've learned how to produce a particular kind of mind that is able to manage probability.

And in doing that, you hit a distribution of randomness that allowed you to extract capital out of the markets. Which, by the way, is what winning is in trading. It's not dominating your apartment. It is just landing on the right side of probability. That's all winning is. Takes kind of the wind out of the sails of, you know, feeling good, doesn't it? It should. So there you are. Okay, you walk into the ambush. Feeling good, feeling like, I've got this under control now I can turn the corner. I just have to keep it up.

And what you discover all over again, that feeling good has no place in a trader's mind when performing. You keep hearing that, you keep proving that to yourself, but you keep doing it. Because what you have is you have a limbic learning that is so wired in and is so untouchable by the thinking brain that the subconscious mind, I don't mean the unconscious, I mean the subconscious, that part of the brain that is below conscious threshold, that would be the limbic system, that would be the emotional brain. It doesn't have all that thought. It doesn't form like the thinking brain. It works on like, okay, I'm interacting with uncertainty. And this is what I found to be a good emotional base to act from. And what you discover is this.

Patience is also a form of action. The good traders are very patient people. They're not trying to win. They're trying to see what the market will give them.

It's the trying to win that really is the core of the problem. Can you win? Can you force winning to occur in trading? No, you can't. So now you're trying to control something that you really don't have control over. Where do you think that's heading? I'm trying to force it to happen my way. Well, the black, you know, the black swan is going to show up and blow up. The key is if you're patient, if you're realizing that, you know, I'm not in control here, what I am in is I can't. I can't control the outcome, but I can control the mind that I'm bringing to perform. And that says, well, I'm going to sit here instead of trying to make things happen and trying to be going saying, well, I've got it, I've got it. What you're saying Is, you know, what I'm going to learn how to do is to be patient and sit what the market will give me and what you do is you recognize what's very important that traders finally learn is as important as methodology, as important as platform is. What makes the difference between successful traders and successfuls that go the way of the dodo bird is that the successful traders recognize this is really about psychology. This is really about managing emotions, building the psychology of a probability based mind to replace the certainty based mind that you brought that was given to you by evolution.

Now, now we're there and we're going. Okay, I could see that. But there's also more we've discussed. One aspect of where the self sabotage of giving it all back comes from. When you start feeling confident that you have your act together, that you now know how to trade and that you know how to win and you're beginning to go, wow, okay, I understand how that gets there and I understand how overconfident comes from winning and understand how that gets me in trouble and how I give it all back and more. Because once I give it back then I get into revenge trading and I want to make it back up. You know, it doesn't suit this new he man guy that I am. But there's also another one, self sabotage of giving it all back.

There are numbers of people who come into trading who in their imaginations want to win money, they want to make money. But what happened is at the very bottom in the back of their minds, they don't feel as though they deserve to make money. And if you've ever come out of poverty, you might find find yourself in this stuff. No matter how much you crave money, no matter how much you worship money, when you start making money, what you do is you blow it up. It's kind of like this. I was reading the other day a guy who had won a $500,000 in a lottery and this was just like a couple years ago and he was being arrested for robbery, he was, he had blown through that and there he was robbing. And what you get is you gave him all this money but he blew through it at the very bottom of it, didn't deserve it. I've also had a guy that I worked with a couple years ago where he, he traded with a high six figure account and every time that that account grew and move into seven figures, what you would see him do after a while is he would lose back down into the high six figures again. This had been going on for seven or eight years before I met him. And he realized that obviously there's something going on here is that I know how to trade, but apparently I don't know how to trade. When I start working with a seven figure account, somehow it all flies off. And I'm like the guy there sawing the limb off and I cutting it off and suddenly I dipped back down. Ultimately, that man grew up in a family that really was told that nobody was worth a million dollars, will never make a million dollars. And he learned that on a limbic level that nobody's worth a million dollars. Well, he was living in that limbic reality, that limbic learning. And every time he hit that seven figures, the truth, the reality would pull him back down. That limbic reality, not reality, but the limbic reality would pull him back down to where he was, back to where he deserved to be.

So when you win, you can trigger some Olympic beliefs that basically are telling you that you don't deserve to win and make easy money. And it even outlines the amount of money you can make. And once you hit that threshold, what happens? You have to give it back. And then after you give it back and you've blown your account up, you start over again, you start building your capital back up, and then you go through the same thing over and over again. You know? You know, it's a very common one, believe it or not, even in America. And then.

This is, this is actually something that happened on an emotional level in the limbic brain. But then it became, it became a psychological prison. There was a belief, okay, that basically locked him into place that until he was able to disrupt that belief and to actually begin to see it in operation. And it's kind of like, who in the world would say, yeah, you know, I don't believe I deserve a million dollars? No, that stuff is carefully put away. You have to look at your trading account because it's the truth meter. It's allowing you to say, okay, what I really get is that I may be saying one thing. The talk I talk says one thing. But when I look at the trading account, the actual purveyor of my, basically the beliefs I'm projecting onto the markets, it's telling me there's something really, really wrong. And often is that you don't deserve to make the money.

And if you've ever had scarcity thinking, if you've ever grown up in tight circumstance where they're just there, you know, where there really wasn't that much money to go around, and people were always worried about Rent. They were worried about, you know, all sorts of things, about making it, you know, is that it. It's an adaptation that worked at one time but no longer works now.

Now.

The problem is very simple with limbic beliefs. It's not like you see it. It's not like, you know, oh, yeah, I can really see that thing. And at the same time, if you start taking a look at the way you act around money.

It'S very common to work with a person who worships money in that would be actually be called mammon. Okay, From a biblical standpoint, but they worship money and that they crave it. And if they think, if I only have money, then everything will be okay. And yet these are actually operating as limbic beliefs. They're implicit and they're operating at. Below the threshold of conscious brain. You don't see the primitive belief driving the performance. What you see is the result in your trading account. And this is where it really becomes important. So you're, you're sitting there and you're going, you know something I see, you know, I get it, is that if I start really looking at my trading account not in fear and going, oh, my God, is it going up and down? But if you start looking at it as that.

Well, what I'm really seeing, actually seeing the beliefs, my performance beliefs on a limbic level that are driving literally the way I perform under stress. And that's one of the big things, is that people can do very, very well when they're trading paper because what happens is the results aren't real, the risk isn't there. What your brain doesn't like is uncertainty, the ambiguity, and then compound it with risk.

Then the brain gets all bent out of shape. But then in dray trading, you have a tight time frame where suddenly the whirl happens immediately. And that's the stress. Not only is there uncertainty, not only is there risk, but there is a time element that is very tight and that's where people choke, that's where people give it up.

This is that. This is the whole thing. So what we want to do is say, you know something.

I see that I give back money and then some. I can see how it comes out of a sense of. It can easily come out of a sense of.

Of undeserving. It can come out of a sense of like, wow, you know, I just get all built and I built bent up and I end up there. And there's also that other one. There's also that other one of where, you know, the thing is, is that it's really more about you get lustful.

And you're going what? Lustful? What's luxe mean? Greed. I know. I said lust. Lust is when I, I want it, I want it, I want it. I want to make money. I want to make money. That's lust. That's not greed, that's lust. And what we begin to realize is this.

That your brain is really a space where emotional programs are vying for competitive control. And this is a scene that you're looking at right here, a scene from the Disney picture movie Inside out of where a little girl, you're looking at inside the little girl's brain. And what you're looking at is that.

The front one, the blue faced emotion is sadness. The blue haired emotion is joy. That green haired babe.

Is discussed. The red one, the red guy is anger. And the one in the back is anxiety. And these are five primary emotional programs. And what they're doing is they're sitting in front of the control panel of the girl and they're vying for control of the girl's mind. That's exactly, exactly the way emotional programs both compete with one another and cooperate with one another to build the self that trades. So they're competitive. And what we're realizing is, wow, you know something. So we've got these emotions and all of a sudden we add, you know something. There is also that other element that I was just talking about is self sabotage built on lust. So we have overconfidence, we have undeserving and we have lust.

Lust is a very primitive survival emotion. It was very needed and a lot of people associate it with sex and stuff like that. But don't, don't limit it there. You know, the thing is you again, you can lust for living in a neighborhood. You can lust for a particular kind of car, you can lust for a particular kind of spouse, you can lust for a particular kind of job and the power it has. You can lust like in the picture of this man for money. And this is what happens with a lot of people who get into trading that they don't see lust taking over yet. I work with a guy right now that grew up in an enormously poverty ridden area of the world and literally didn't have shoes, didn't have books and they had to walk to school and, and they had to follow the tree line because it was so hot that feet would burn when they came. When they immigrated to the United States, their mother ended up being a nanny and working for very affluent people. And she felt Tremendous guilt and shame that she couldn't give her children. What all these rich and affluent people have and what bred in their family was a lust for money. And in this guy, what would happen is he would do quite well. But in trades, when he, when we'd go in and the initial thing, when that thing, when that trade broke and it put up about two to three hundred dollars, he literally. And he had a target. But he, but it was something about that two or three hundred dollars that suddenly literally what he would, he said, oh, Randy, this is crazy. I'd given him assignment and he's going, it was crazy, Randy. What happened is I found myself going, I want more, I want more, I want more. So even he would get his target and he would book that profit. He would jump back in even if the trade had run out of steam, because he wanted more, more, more, because the lust had already taken over. So this is how primitive emotions can take over mind in a moment. And here we have it right here. Give me, give me, give me more, give me, give me, give me more. And this is what draws a lot of people into trading. They think that they're going to come in and they see this stuff and they, you know something, I can learn how to do this and I'm going to make a million dollars. I'm going to make a billion dollars. God, you know, you just do the numbers and ratchet this thing up. You can see the money. I can already feel, feel. I can already feel the wealth. Lust. Yeah, lust. And this is where you're going, wow.

So even when you're winning, are you really winning? You want more. And it's not the money that's the problem. It's the wanting more. It's the lusting for money that gets in the way. Now, when we look at this in all these three cases I've shown you of where we've examined overconfidence as euphoria. We've looked at undeserving and we've looked at lust. Okay? All three cases, belief and emotion work against the trading mind. And what I want you to do in this second image, we're looking of this man managing thinking mind and emotional mind. What I want you to do is hear the words of lot say, mastering others is strength.

Mastering yourself is true power.

What I ask of you to recognize is that trading is really about mastering yourself.

In trading, there is no mastering others. There is all. Everything is about mastering yourself. And that trading account, the health of that trading account is telling you how well you're doing. When you see that it's not working, you have to say, what is it I'm not mastering about myself. And if you're in, if particularly you've got to the stage where you're giving money back. These are the things, these three elements, these are the ones we want you to be looking at. These beliefs drive the triggering of emotions as you face and engage uncertainty. Friends, how do you manage emotions and how do you master productive beliefs for re for working with probability? My promise to you is the ones you brought to trading are not going to work.

You bring a mind that wants to win and not lose, yet you have a situation where you need to become a damn good loser.

You need to be such a good loser that you keep those losses small so they don't grow and blow up perfectly good money. You also need to become the winning you begin. I have to redefine what winning is. In my mind, winning no longer means control outcome. I feel good because I've control outcome. No, all it means that you performed well to such an extent that you were given an edge in probability and that time you landed.

On the side that provided money to you. That's all winning is. In the world of trading, in the world of business, in the world of sports, it can mean something completely different. But in the world of trading, it comes down to winning is just landing on the right side of probability. Interesting is George Soros was once talking where and he had just made $2 billion on some very complicated trades he had made. And in the interview he was actually saying, well, you know something. And he's very broken, heavily accented English. He says, you know, I left a billion dollars on the table.

And the interviewer says, oh, that's so bad. He says, no, no, it's not. You know, it's gotten to the moment where I didn't know whether or not the I didn't know if it was going to be stable enough to continue. And I just thought that $2 billion is a pretty good day's wage. And everybody laughed and all that kind of stuff. And he said, he just matter of fact, he said, you know, what happens is that I don't have to go make up for it, but I'm just going to go find another billion dollars. I want you to listen that he's just going to go find another billion dollars. It's that kind of confidence, not based on overconfidence, but based on his performances over time that allowed him to do that. He had mastered himself. He was experiencing true power. And the first thing you go is like, well maybe, maybe I need to understand what an emotion is on a different level. Yes, you do. The first place to start is recognizing that an emotion is not.

A feeling. It's not even psychological. An emotion in today's neurological neurobiological world is actually considered to be a biological action potential that is triggered every time there is a change in status in the relationship between an organism, that would be you, the traitor and the environment in which the organism is embedded. That's the markets. And all of a sudden you begin to realize, oh emotions, emotions happen the moment that there's a perturbation, the moment there is a disruption to the standard, to the standard process. Yep. Now when that emotion triggers.

Okay, if there is a disruption, the emotion triggers. That emotion hasn't really taken quite a life yet. The first thing it has to do is have to arouse, it has to start getting energy. And what you would see it in your body is you would start seeing tense muscles. You would start seeing a hyper focus of attention and you would also start noticing, wow, my heart's beating, my breathing is either stopped or running fast. What you're experiencing is emotional arousal. The emotions getting energy, getting ready to go and do something. Then the next part of that emotion is the feeling state. People confuse feelings with emotions all the time. The feeling is the actual chemistry of the emotion in the body taking over the mind. Because at some moment that arousal of the emotion is going to hit a trip switch.

That trip switch flips it from arousal to where the chemistry of that emotion is flooding the body and the brain. If it's cortisol.

You experience fear and anxiety. If it's testosterone and that feel good dopamine chemical, then all of a sudden what happens is that wow, man. And got some aggression there with that testosterone. What you've got is fight flight. But then you go, okay, well okay, now the emotion that motions got energy. Now it's moving, it's going to figure out a direction. That, that's called, that's called motivation. And the basic thing is fight flight. But when you look at it, it's really a void attack within avoidance. What you find is running, hiding, okay, freezing, submitting. Every one of you has done all those. You know, who hasn't run from a trade, who hasn't frozen on a trade? Who hasn't submitted to being overwhelmed before? Yeah. At the other side it could go from motivation to aggression attack. Where all of a sudden anger gets involved and you get revenge. Trade you over trade. You're going to make the markets pay.

Whoa. Then you're going, okay. What's driving all that? What's driving all that is the belief that the limbic system has already laid down about your worth as a human being, about your power to be able to engage and work with uncertainty. And what I want you to hear that is that limbic brain created that. It produces a limbic learning. And it's not like it's automatic. It's not like it's posted right in front of you. What it says. A lot of the work I do with my Friday clients is about figuring out what the limbic brain has decided and why it's so hard for people to wake up before they slam into the wall again.

This is the main thing is you. Now you're beginning to go, well, if I understand an emotion, then I begin to understand the way I can work with emotions to be able to mollify them so that I can work within a more effective mind. Yes, now we're talking. Because the first thing that you do once you begin that is you have to learn how to disrupt the emotion with regulation. You have to, you know, and when you're looking at this emotion meter, you're looking at an emotion that doesn't have a whole bunch of energy. The one thing that you don't want to see is that emotion trigger, because at some moment it's going to arouse, and at some moment it's going to hit the trip switch and it's become a feeling, and you're going to experience hijacking. That hijacking could be freezing. But what we're talking about today, that hijacking can be overconfident. It can be the undeserving, or it can be the lust that leads to giving it all back.

This. This is what's done. And what happens is you have to learn how to work with the arousal of an emotion. Right now I'm working with a guy where we just started, and he says, you know, it's really difficult because I. I keep doing your exercises and I'm trying to do the breathing. I'm trying to do this while I'm actually in the trade. And it's really hard, Randy. It's really hard. I said, yeah, it's not normal. It's not what's been habituated. But do you want to continue doing what you've been habituated to do? Lose money? He says, no. I said, yeah, this is why we're learning how to do this. And right now we're doing it small and we're building it so that we finally get the moment of where we're ready to go, but we have to be able to regulate it. But more than that, what we also have to do is regulating an emotion is not going to change the problem.

What has to happen is you have to regulate the emotion or you never get to the door of the mind, but yet you have to become mindful of when the emotion steers you off course. You have to be able to see that the emotion hijacks trading. You have to be able to see this part of trading that has been invisible to you. This is the limbic learning stuff. You have to learn to have a way, and that's mindfulness of where you become mindful. You begin to realize that you and your thoughts are not the same. You and your beliefs are not the same. Yet at the same time, most of your actions, even in trading that you're doing, 95% of them, are subcortical. They're happening without your knowledge, friends. They're not in your thinking brain. They're in your emotional brain. And you've ignored the emotional brain.

Danger, danger, danger. You have to learn to see the invisible. And then as you develop this mindfulness, this is when it starts. Gets interesting because you begin, oh, my goodness gracious. Is the mind. If the brain.

Is a space where emotional programs are duking it out from control.

Of who forms the self that engages the environment. The mind is a committee where those voices, where those emotional programs are given voice. Right here you're looking at an image between two Alphas, and you begin to realize, wow, there's an internal struggle going on here. Well, this is what's happening in your mind. This could be, get in, get in, get out, get out, get in, get out. You know, hold this back, you know, jump into this thing, make money. And the other part could be you. You see that there is this struggle going on in the mind. And it just so happens that trading amplifies it. Most traders say, well, you know, I really don't want to deal with that part. You know, I just want to think positive thoughts. Can't do that, man. Positive thinking, look, feels good. But the thing is, in trading, it does not work. It is a struggle going on within the mind between parts that want to destroy you and parts that want to empower you. And you have to learn how to work that program. That's what you have to learn how to do. And then you go, well, Randy, that sounds really good, but how do you start doing that? Well, you start realizing that.

Part of your human nature, I would call it the inner critic is incredibly destructive. There was an experiment done at UCLA in the late 60s or early 70s where they recruited kids from, from UCLA to become guards, like in a prison. And then they recruited graduate students in psychology to become the prisoners. The key is that the prisoners were in on the take. They knew, they knew the game that was being played. The guards, the kids from campus who were just getting some money for Christmas didn't know what they did. They were told that you're going to classically condition, that's Pavlokian type of conditioning and you're going to condition these prisoners to obey commands. And when they don't obey commands, what you're going to do is you're going to give them a shock. Yeah, yeah, yeah, everything's fine. So they were put into a room, we had a Runway one way mirror. And they were looking at the, the prisoners, the graduate students on the other side. And they're both bolted in like an electric chair. And they were told to resist, you know, to be, to be defiant. And over a period of less than 24 hours, those kids, just college students turned from college students to people who knowingly were giving electrical shocks in the lethal range to the prisoners because they wouldn't obey requests, they would actually watch the prisoners die. At least they thought they were. It created a lot of problems as you might imagine. But the thing is, in 36 hours they were able to turn perfectly regular college students into killers. Now like I said, it created a huge stir, but that potentiality is existing within everybody. At the other side there's also much more powerful parts of the self. There are, there are parts of yourself that if you listen to that, you grow and you, and you become a much more empowered human being. Both those are going on and it really depends on.

This is happening in the radar. Your awareness. Are you listening? And what you can do is you can learn to be able to master the mind that you bring to the performance of trading. But if you don't, this is what you get right here in euphoria, lust and greed. The beliefs are about power and control, very basic stuff. And people just think I'm going to make a million dollars and if I make a million dollars, I'm going to really matter. I'm going to be really a somebody, I'm going to have status, I'm going to have all this freedom, all this stuff, and boy am I going to be cool yet. They've really been seduced by the emotion and this is where you go, I need to be able to take this part, this temptation where the inner critic is just seducing me into the big bucks and realize, no, this is really about the mind I bring to performance. And this is where you get it. A disciplined mind leads to happiness and an undisciplined mind leads, leads to suffering. That's a quote from the Dalai Lama, who by the way is quoting the Buddha. This is not the mind that you brought to trading, but this is the one you need. There are other emotional programs, but these are the emotional programs that you need to train to appear. When uncertainty, risk are engaged, discipline, courage, self soothing, impartiality.

Whatever is getting in the way of those emotional programs from arising, you need to master. There will be fear that you have to master, there will be grandiosity that you have to master. But the key is, is that the key is to know how to grow and train emotional program.

That's the key. The ones that you came stock with, the ones that has a brain that wants control, wants to be right and wants to predict.

And then when it engages uncertainty, it feels vulnerability and automatically wires to fight flight. Those are not the emotional programs that you need. Those are the ones you came stock with. And if you have a winner's mindset, it may have worked in corporate work, it may have worked in business, but in trading it doesn't. So we use a process called memory enrichment that allows us to be able to go in to specific memories and actually access those emotional programs that did in fact happen to you. They're not make believe, they're not affirmations, they're not visualizations. These are things that actually happened. Are they affirmative positions? Are they visuals of other memories? Yes, but they actually happened. And this is where it becomes very powerful because those things happened under stress. You can pull them up under stress. And that allows you to train the mind to be calm in the storms of uncertainty. That is how it's done, friends. You know the problem with that, with affirmations.

And visualizations is that they feel good. However.

When you are trying to do them under the conditions of stress, they break down. And that's a very serious problem. You actually need the experience of saying this did in fact happen under stress. I can pull up this emotional program that operates stress. That's what has to be done. So you're saying, okay, I know that I have a historical mind that was built to deal with uncertainty one way. And I know that, I know that it's not going to work with trading. I know that If I am going to produce long term success in trading that I need to be able to produce discipline, courage, patience and impartiality. And you can do it. So friends, bottom line, this is about cultivating your mind. This isn't about prosperity thinking. This isn't about manifesting wealth. This is about building a mind that can engage uncertainty and building that mind so that you bring that performance mind into the management of uncertainty. That's what it's all about. You can leave all the, all that other stuff about, you know, imagining wealth and just thinking positive in the background. But what happens is because you can't control whether or not you make money or not, you don't really control. You do not, you do not train the subconscious mind. What you do is you, you rebuild it from the limbic understandings that it arrived at at one time and you build it into a mind that limbically can handle uncertainty. That's a chore. That's, that's, that's not easy work, but it can be done. Now how do you do this? Well, besides wishing and hoping, my, my encouragement to you is this, is that we're starting, we're starting one of our group courses. They're highly regarded.

And they start really soon. We encourage you to look at this group course and go, wow, you know something? Randy's teaching the very skills that I need to be able to retool my brain from the survival brain that I inherited from evolution to the probability mind that I can design to engage uncertainty. Yes, that's what you can do. That group chorus includes five group sessions with me. And the recordings are, they're all recorded because we work all over the world, we have people that can never show up. And you receive copies of all that. You have a virtual classroom and have unfettered access 24 7. The class starts September 12th. Okay. And if you start early, if you get it together before the 7th, you get a free $199 emotional regulation workshop. And it's really there because I want you to start early. We already have nine people in this course. Okay. Yeah, this is, and by the way, this is day after tomorrow. You're gonna have to get on it. You're have to decide whether or not, you know, you really want to be the one designs the mind or whether or not you still want to just fall into this thing of where you give it all back. The key though is that what you're learning is these skills. And the faster you do it, you need to have the emotional regulation work under your belt. At least a little bit before you show up for class or you're going to feel really lonesome there because everybody else will have been there. I encourage you, if you are looking for a cost effective way of building the brain and the mind, this is it, friends. I encourage it. And right there, you'll see, basically it's on our website and there's the, there's the, there's the link and she'll type it in. Okay. And by the way, yeah, the, the cost is 1195 or five payments of $239. And you know, our view is that we just want to make it affordable and we want to be able to see you be able to build that mind. And that's the main thing right now. But we also have an individual course that's really built with 10 consults with me on Skype over a much longer period of time. But right now what we want is to say, you know something.

I know the mind that I brought to trading is not going to work. I know that I can do all the reading in the world and I can quote trader psychologists backwards and forwards. But the thing is, is they still don't teach how to build the mine you need for trading. You'll discover in this course that we teach how, that's the main thing. Otherwise at least go get the free ebook, the free book that comes with this, check things out.

Look at the book and there is enormous amounts of.

Articles and videos that are available from the website. So I ask you to do that. But the main thing is I ask that you take responsibility for the mind that you bring to trading. The truth is, is that.

It'S all the knowledge in the world.

That you can quote in a classroom is not going to produce success in trading. You're going to have to build your psychology. Okay. And until you grasp that, you're going to have problems and there's always going to be a struggle, there's always going to be ambiguity and uncertainty, but you can in fact.

Control the mind that you bring into the moment of performance. And this is the invitation today.

Is to take that and run with it and say, yes, it's time for me to get serious about the mind that I'm, I'm trading with. The mind I'm trading with really needs some help. So anyway, I want to thank you. I want to thank you for being here. And if you have some questions, we have just a few minutes and if you have some questions, I'll be happy to answer them. Okay? Just type them in and then what happens is I'll answer a few that come along. There was a question that was written that I had up here. Where did that go?

And I had gotten a couple questions that were written in by a very clever person. Says, I'm not going to be here, but can you. And he says, can you explain what an emotional hijacking is? And I'm going, you know, that's a really good question. An emotional hijacking is when the observer that you are perceives risk in the environment and it exceeds your capacity to manage that risk automatically. There's a firing that occurs in the limbic brain, and it goes toward fight flight. And what's happened is your thinking brain is just simply the electricity. The thinking does not go that way. It goes to fight flight. That's. That's what an emotional hijacking is.

Okay.

And here's another one.

If I know I am supposed to plan my trade and trade my plan, why can't I do it when the money counts? That's because your brain.

Is not wired to do it when the money counts. Your brain is built to control outcome. It's built to not want to risk. And you're putting yourself into a situation where you can't fool yourself.

And that's why you can't do it. The truth is the uncertainty and the vulnerabilities there, you have real risk. And to the emotional brain, that real risk is biological threat. It doesn't seem separate biological threat and psychological threat. So there you go. And it just so happens that when that emotional learning happens, it's actually in your bloodstream in.003 seconds. If it sends the. It sends the message up into the thinking brain. That takes 0.25 seconds. Okay. Okay, we have. We have. We have time for one more question if you. If you have it. Otherwise, we can just kind of stop right there. And I don't see any. Well, I want to thank you folks, and it's been my pleasure to be able to have this time with you. And I thank you for coming.

And the recording of this webinar will be on the website tomorrow. Okay? So I wish you a great, great career in trading, and I wish you to be able to find and build a psychology that really handles ambiguity and uncertainty and risk from a probability standpoint. Take care, my friends. Good night.