The Illusion of Just Doing It

Just do it. You're trained, you know what to do, you know how to trade. All you have to do is go in there and just do it. Just enter the trade, just manage the trade. You know how to do it, but why can't you? This is the problem that nobody ever talks about in trading. It's a lot harder to trade than it appears to be. The very, very thing that makes you successful in another endeavor, say like business or corporate. You bring that back into the world of trading and it's going to be an albatross around your neck. It's a completely different animal and yet you don't see the difference. And you keep doing the same thing over and over again. Suddenly what's happening is your right brain, your mammalian brain, thinks of uncertainty very differently than a traitor needs to think about it. Okay, that's the point. As long as you haven't figured out how to work with the emotional brain, you're never going to get the ability to work with probabilities, to think and use that great fantastic knowledge that you have. Because ultimately what you discover in trading is this is, it's not really. You have to know, you have to have knowledge. That's just simply the cost to enter the game. What you have to have is emotional intelligence. You have to know how emotions work. You have to know what makes you tick. Particularly in the area of being scared, of actually turning toward your fear and being able to regulate your fear and to be able to transform that fear into concern. That's the biggest problem with trading is that ultimately you have an untrained brain and untrained mind.

And you bring that into trading. That is all probability based. The emotional brain is all about the certainty of survival in that moment. Short term survival value, self preservation. So you get in and you see something that's risk. Now what do you think a self respecting emotional brain is going to do? It's going to hijack thinking so that you don't do something stupid like survival value. And there you go. That's when you keep looking for more confirmation and don't get in the trade. That's when you get up out of your desk, you do all sorts of things. Avoiding having to enter trades, that's the whole thing. Or that's when you're sitting there and you've managed the trade, it's finally gotten into the black and there's this urgency to hurry up, get your profit now before it's taken away from you. That's what this biology looks like when it takes over your psychology.

Ultimately, what you're going to have to do to be truly successful, to be consistently profitable in trading is you're going to have to retrain the brain you took to trading. You're going to have to train that emotional brain in a way that it was not built to do. You know, when our ancestors were on the Serengeti, on the plains, and they had to have just lightning fast emotional reactions to things that could be dangerous, okay, that's great. Survival in that environment, it is not great. Thriving in a world of probability.

We evolved for certainty of self preservation. We have to become a brain and a mind that looks at it very differently. We have to become a probability based mind that turns toward uncertainty, turns toward risk, with curiosity, with a sense of discipline, with a sense of impartiality. Okay. And the key is you finally have to teach your brain that you cannot control the outcome. You let go of that illusion, but that's where most traders are stuck. A couple months ago I did a survey and 66%, two thirds of the traders in this group that I was surveying said that what their immediate motivation was while they were trading was to make money.

Unfortunately, when you have an outcome goal that says make money now, you're setting yourself up to lose in a world of uncertainty. Because making money you don't know. You can't control whether you make money or not, but you can control the mind that you're bringing into the moment of performance, the process. What you discover is as you train that brain and mind to be able to become a probability based mind. You're no longer thinking about your P and L statement. You're no longer thinking about whether or not you're winning or losing. What you're thinking about, what you're thinking about is the here and the now in this moment. What mind am I bringing into this moment right now? And your focus on literally mind managing your psychological process so that you are in the moment now and that gives you the best possible outcome possibility at that moment. That's what it's like, that's what has to occur. So you move from an outcome based mind to a probability based mind to where you encounter uncertainty and don't trigger fear or anger as survival impulses, but you trigger to concern and curiosity and discipline and impartiality. You have to learn to calm the fears down, otherwise you never get to being able to build a mind. But those are the big deals. Your brain's not equipped to do what you want it to do in trading without retraining, without rebuilding the question is, are you willing to do it? You can build a probability based mind, but you have to be willing, you have to be ready to do that. And you have to say, you know, it's not going to happen by magic, it's going to happen by changing neural pattern. That's how it happens. Friends, if you want to learn more, come to my website. Take a look at what we offer, take a look at the articles, the other videos, and see how you can go about designing the mind to work with probability rather than certainty. That's the gap between the wannabe trader and the trader who's consistently taking money out of the markets. That's it. Take.