The Missing Key to Becoming a Disciplined Trader

Foreign.

I want to talk to you about the missing key that unlocks your hidden trading potential. In particular, the missing key that unlocks your ability to maintain emotional sobriety, emotional control, under the challenges of trading when uncertainty is there and when you could lose all that stuff. And when you're seeing opportunity and you want to go for it.

All that the. How do you get to that key? How do you find the key that unlocks that door that allows you to walk into emotional control, to discipline, impartiality? Well, that missing key is really understanding your emotional nature, as your emotional nature is just simply not built to trade. If you were to think of the worst nightmare that you could dream up for your emotional brain, it would be trading. Your emotional brain wants control over outcome. It wants to be right. It does not want to lose. It wants to win.

The problem with trading.

You have no control over outcome. You have. You have a skinny, skinny little edge that you're using, okay? And you're keeping the losses small, and you're letting the winners run. At least that's the way it's supposed to be. The problem is the emotional control. The missing key isn't there. And it's because we misunderstand emotional control. Disciplined. We don't grasp. Again, what we're saying is that brain of yours, okay, it wants to control outcome. It can't. It wants to be right. Win.

You don't know if you're going to win or lose, okay? And you do not want to lose. And in particular, it's a big one, because losing to caveman brain means death. It's life and death. It doesn't know about money. You've invented it with your highfalutin brain. But your caveman brain, that instinctual part of your brain, that mammalian brain, that emotional brain, doesn't have language centers. What it knows is threat and how to respond to it. It can be aggressive if it's an opportunity that would be over. Trading or threat could also be, you know, like, I'm taking a loss. It's getting closer to my stop. Oh, my God, what do I do? And suddenly, your emotional brain h acts, your thinking brain, because it sees that it has to fight for its life. Now, if you begin to grasp this going, you can sit there and bang your head against a wall for years. And traders do that, and they keep expecting a different result. They chase around for different knowledge and different ways of doing things. But the missing key is you. It's your understanding of emotion. It's not a feeling. It's not psychology. It's emotion. It is motion coming out of the body to interact with the. With a change in the environment. And until you learn to control that and manage that, it's going to be working against you. How do you do that? The first step is very clear. You have to first re understand emotions. Their emotional. Their emotional action potentials, biological action potentials that act before thought. Thought is an afterthought. And you're beginning to go, wow, you mean that when that, when that thing starts going against me and it hits my soft stop and I'm going, oh my God, oh my God, what is going to do? What am I going to do? Am I going to give it more forward? What am I to do? You have just went into the zone of caveman fighting for his life. When you're sitting there and you're looking at, you know, and you're getting bored and you're saying, oh, I'm just going to check other stuff. Trades are getting away from me. I could be trading if I were someplace else. And you find something it's not in. It's not in your system, it's not in your plan, but you go for it. That's caveman brain too. You not getting into a trade because, oh my God, what if I lose? That's caveman brand two. That's how powerful it is. Now, I often call that also the orphan, but it's the emotional brain.

And your thinking brain, many, many, many million years ago grew out of the emotional brain. And what you would see is enormous amounts of communication networks going from the emotional brain into the thinking brain. Okay, it has a lot of control over thinking. But you'd find two 19th century telegraph wires moving back into the emotional brain from the thinking brain. It's outgunned. You're going to have to learn to be able to say, you know something? Once I grasp an emotion is not psychological. It's not a feeling. It's a biological action potential. And it shows up anytime there's a change or fluctuation in the markets. As a trader, then you're on the way. And then you go, how do I work with an emotion? It starts with breathing.

Check yourself out, videotape you and you'll. What you'll notice is you're trading, you're tensing, you're holding your breath, you're doing all that. That's emotional arousal. The emotions triggered. It's on it. And if you just sit there fat, dumb and happy, it's going to just absolutely bulldoze right over.

That's the first thing, do you begin to see that if you don't grasp emotional nature and work with it, that old brain of yours is going to wipe out thinking brain all the time under stress. And that's exactly what trading is. Then you go, well, you know something, I understand, Randy, that my brain has adapted a particular way of responding to uncertainty, usually instinctually, and that's not good in trading. Okay, we want to think in probabilities. Caveman wants to think in certainties. And to be honest with you, the markets don't care if caveman wants to think in certainties. It's probabilities. And you're going, well, what kind of mind would actually work if I understand that I've got a survival based mind trying to trade, which is impossible, but what kind of mind do I need? Well, after you calm it all down, you produce mindfulness. You discover that all thinking is emotional state dependent. And what you're really doing is your job is to be a good chemist and to build an emotional cocktail out of discipline, out of courage, out of self soothing, very important, and out of impartiality. To be able to produce a mind that can engage uncertainty, that's the intentional mind, that's the traitor state. Of mind. To do that, it goes back to that missing key. Do you understand emotional nature in a way that you can build a workaround against that instinctive emotional brain of yours facing uncertainty and build it so that you can override that and move into uncertainty and understand uncertainty is viewed as the kiss of death to the, to the emotional brain. So you're looking at it and you're going, this is what I'm going to have to do. I'm going to have to find a workaround to be able to calm the emotions so they don't trigger and just wipe me out. And then I'm going to have to actually come to a moment of where I build the mind that engages the uncertainties, the challenges. I build the mind that engages the losses. I build the mind that engages the potential. Oh my God, what's going to happen here? The whole point is that you're in a place where you can do this and it has to be done now if you're going to survive. So I encourage you to come to the website, I encourage you to watch more of this, take a look at the videos, take a look at the readings, take a look at our courses and recognize something. You're at a place where you can either go natural selection or you can go guess what? You become the designer of the mind that engages uncertainty. Come and learn, friends. Come and learn.