The Missing Key to Success in Trading

The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen only mode. Welcome, everyone. My name is Randy Howell with Trader State of Mind. First thing, can you hear me? I always like to check that out instead of talking out into the metaverse and finding out nobody's hearing and put it in the question box. Okay. Just simply, why would be great. And that would be. I know that we would be. Okay then. Yes. Okay, we're here. Okay, friends, we are here to really explore what in the heck is actually going on. You know, you start out, you're smart, you look at trading, you see the upside, and you go, wow, this is really cool. And all I have to do is create a plan and then follow that plan and everything's fine. And then you get into it, and that is when you find there is some missing key that you do not recognize that is truly holding you back. And you think, why can't I find it? But in the meanwhile, you keep running into a brick wall. That's what we're here to explore today. Now, for those of you who haven't been to one of my webinars, is that I hold questions to the end. And we generally have a few questions at the end that. But you can write them in now. You can put in the question box. Write in it. And so we'll have some questions to talk. Talk about rather than waiting for everybody stumbling around trying to figure out a question. So with that, let's go. Okay, now what I want to do initially is let's really define this thing. Let's start saying what produces success in trading and what I want you to recognize. There are three components. That first one, you all know about. Absolutely. That trading system, boy, I've got bells and whistles, I've got this, I've got that. But the truth is, if you don't have a really good system, you can miss entries, you can miss all sorts of stuff that may be slow, all sorts of stuff. So you really have to have a good trading system platform that you can use that it. That is rigorous enough to meet the markets and what the markets do and the speed of the markets. First thing. Second thing, easy also is. And that's where all the people are there trying to help you. And that's the methodology. How do you manage risk?

How do you find a way to be able to extract more capital out of the markets than you put back in, by having an edge. And there's lots of people that have edges. And you know what happens is they. Some give away, some are expensive, some are moderate Whatever. And basically the deal is this. If you leave your emotions at the door, you're gonna be fine. The problem with that kind of thinking is that it is impossible to leave your emotions at the door. You will find out a little later today that emotions, you are the embodiment emotions. So living yourself at the door doesn't allow you to trade or could be dead doing it. The third part, that, to be honest with you, I don't think anybody really, really wants to hear about.

Trading psychology. You know, how the state of mind that you bring to trading, what you discover really quickly, and this is the assumption that I use in my work, is that your trading account.

Is the truth meter, about how effective your beliefs are, about your ability to manage uncertainty. If your beliefs are effective, I'm not saying if they're good or bad beliefs. I'm saying, are they effective or not effective? And being able to extract more capital out of the markets than you put back in. And what you discover is this. If you're a typical human being, the answer is emphatically no, is that you do not come equipped with a brain that produces a mind into trading that allows you to be able to take your trading system, your platform, and your risk management and apply them with an edge.

It's not me saying this, just take a look at the retreat looks. What happens is the average life of a trader is about three years. They burn through their capital or their spouse gets really angry at them and finally they just get out because they can't crack it. They don't know. They try. They're trying hard.

This isn't about trying, but this is about something else. And then you go, okay, but these are the three components that lead to a healthy trading account. And what we're saying is by now, if you've been trading for two, three, four years, you've probably run into the wall enough to know that you're repeating the same problems over and over and over again. You're expecting a different result, but you keep getting the same. The same things happening over and over again. And that is what we want to look at in terms of, like, trading psychology. But to be honest with you, it's really more about emotional intelligence. It's more about understanding what the brain's up to and whether or not you're beginning to figure out how to work with the brain to be able to produce a particular kind of mind at a particular time, or whether or not you're trying to force your will onto the markets, onto everything else. This is key and ultimately it comes down, I don't know very many traders.

Who initially think that they have a problem. They walk in and they have this idea that, yeah, I know that I'm have to work hard, I'm going to have to really force myself to learn this stuff, but at the same time, I'm going to find a system and that system is going to let me be able to produce consistent profitability. And because they don't think trading psychology is a problem. They don't. You don't. Look, I mean, two guys that I worked with that were in a small hedge fund when they first started this stuff, they got really lucky. They found a, almost a sure bet in the markets. And they did that for several years and then the laws changed and all of a sudden they couldn't trade. But when they first started, they looked at themselves and they said, me having a problem. They did a couple of these trader psychology tests and they scored really well. They were the guys who were going to really do it. They probably didn't know some of the straighter psychology tests are rigged. Okay, now the truth is though, your brain is going to produce blind spots that you become blind to what you're blind to, you don't see it. Now that may sound weird, but the truth is, is that we often come to a moment of where the blind spot's there, we don't see it and we run into it. And the truth is this, at this particular point, blind spots don't hurt until the risk is real and there's no reset button. How many people in here are successful when they're trading play money? When they're sitting there and just, yeah, they're in sim, what happens? There's a reset button and all of a sudden what happens is, guess what, you know, you, you just go on and it's okay. And all of a sudden you look at that and it appears you can mint money. And it may be even the trading people who are teaching you to trade are just seeing that and they're telling you, okay, look at what you're doing. All you have to do now is transfer this to live trading. You've got it. It seems so doable. Yet.

At the very moment when you're really risking live capital, what you're doing.

Just the moment you need your logical mind, your focus evaporates. Emotions, survival motions, anger, fear, anxiety kick in and you might impulsively start trading. And before you know it, you're dead in the water. So the deal is this.

In the presence of real risk with real consequences. Rational thinking just simply goes missing in action. And that's what a lot of people discover. They come to the moment of where they think, all I have to do is be rational. The problem is.

Believing that the human being is rational is an illusion. What we are, we are not rational human beings. We are rationalizing human beings where the emotional brain has already made a decision.

Okay? And what happens is that your thinking brain rationalizes. It creates an alibi. That's what it's worth. Otherwise, you're going to have to learn how to work with your emotional brain to be able to produce what I call the emotional cocktail that allows you to engage uncertainty and not see it as threat, which is what your caveman's brain is doing. But it's just simply.

An act that you're doing repeatedly, and it may or may not win. You no longer attach to it being a threat, a threat or an opportunity. What you're doing, you're saying, what does that really control here? And what you really control, guess what? Not the outcome, but the mind you bring to the management. Because what happens? Let me show you what happens. You see that little critter down in the bottom of that brain?

That's the amygdala. It is shaped like an almond, and there are two of them side by side. And it just so happens that, that the amygdala is part of the brain that when you get hijacked, it just so happens this part of the brain is already there. It's already activated. And it has the emotion as chemistry in the bloodstream in nanoseconds. So you're already cranking up and you're already seeing, by the way, you don't see risk and reward. You see threat and opportunity. And threat is a much bigger, stronger word than risk management. Now, this is actually managing the mind that engages a perceived threat.

If you've ever revenge trade, if you've ever over traded, if you've ever just not gotten into trades, if you've taken skinny profits, you know what the brain's response, the amygdala's response to threat is? It's in the bloodstream as emotion long before the thinking brain ever gets the material to kind of chew on it. So right up front, what we're doing is we're beginning to recognize there's something really wrong with the brain that you brought to trading. It's not wrong, is that it's been an adaptive organ that has allowed us to. To do fantastic things as a species. But what happened is that the emotional brain controls the Thinking brain. The thinking brain really is a servant of the master of that emotional brain. And the amygdala is at the center of that emotional brain. And when it acts, it's just simply short circuits. Thinking brain. And all of a sudden you're on pure emotion, you're pure fear, pure, you know, I'm going to make this trade, I'm going to go. And the dust clears and something really has happened. So the key is what actually happened to your logical mind that you need for being able to trade effectively. Let's start, let's start exploring that. Let's.

Basically your brain on trading. Trading is your brain's worst nightmare. If you want to know what your brain is built, remember your brain was built on the African savannahs about six and a half million years ago. It is built to perceive threat far off and avoid it so that you can't get eaten by the saber toothed tiger. It is also built to be able to protect the fruit trees in the forest and that you protect them from other humans. That's, that was a big deal. And you're getting there and you're going, okay. That's what your brain is built to control environment, control outcome. It is built to predict the future. It is built to be right. Because if it's not right, it's somebody else's meal. Okay? So you're ultimately forcing your brain to engage uncertainty and risk where you are not in control of the outcome. And you are trying to say, I can force you to be able to do this. And what you discover is that willpower is good for a moment. But the truth is when your emotional brain triggers, it's like you can become an 800 pound gorilla. It just wipes it out. So when you start getting stressed, when you start getting anxious, when you start getting, I want to get in, I want to make money, I want to make money, is you have already been taken. That's the whole point. And out of that you're going, well.

You know something, it's not your fault. It's just the way your emotional brain was put together to deal with uncertainty. And let me tell you this, is that your emotional brain was built first, it's called the medium, the mammalian brain.

And when you take a look at a snake, all he has is a brain stem. He has a very limited emotional response. It's just action, it's not thought, it's nothing, it's not even feeling. But what happens is we have a brain that was built to be able to sit there and go.

Okay, it was built to be able to control the outcome. It was built all that. So the deal is, it's not your fault you're having problems in trading. It's not your embarrassment. The mistake that you have made is thinking that the brain that you picked up from history, you were born with, learned with, that you take to trading is going to work. The rules of success in trading are enormously different than the rules of success like in sports, in business and sales and management. They're very different. And what happens is you've got a brain that you've trained for one thing and you're taking it to another galaxy and you're asking it to be something different. So the deal is this, you know, ultimately if you take a look on the right, you see the little part of this iceberg and that's the thinking brain. Yet that's all you can see. You can't see the rest of the job. You can't see the emotional brain that's underneath all that water. Now, some people call that unconscious. I don't like that word. I don't think it's highly effective. You can call, you could call it the subconscious though, because ultimately what your emotional brain does that controls 95% of your decisions is it will find a solution to a generalized condition, a threat, an opportunity, and it will wire a pattern that fires when that opportunity shows up. And it's necessary to do that because otherwise you would get your thinking brain doing so much work that it would just clog and it would just spin and spin and spin like sometimes my computer does. So what you're doing is you have automatic responses to different kinds of conditions out in the environment. And what you're doing is because you do not know how to manage it. First of all, the understanding of emotion you have probably is way too limited. And how to manage that emotion isn't there. So what happens is you don't know how that emotional brain triggers all the time because it evaluates threats, not risk. And it does it to survival. And it doesn't distinguish between psychological discomfort, oh my God, it's going against me, oh my God. And biological threat. The saber toothed tiger is trying to get his claws into me. Doesn't, can't tell the difference. And yet what happens is that you're sitting there all the time thinking that, oh yeah, I can discern this is risk. Not, not to your caveman brain, not to your emotional brain. And so let's start. First, let's start and say, you know something, what is it I need to Understand and what you need to understand first, I'm going to explain to you what I understand.

To be an emotion. Okay?

An emotion in today's world, neurobiology is a biological action potential that triggers when there is a change to familiar status. What that would mean is like for instance, when you're just sitting there and the trade's kind of going in your direction and everything is going fine, suddenly it turns around, starts going against you. That's a change in the environment. And by definition, an emotion is going to trigger. And that emotion is not feeling. That emotion is action oriented. It's going to have you doing something. And most of the time it's being triggered to survival instincts where you're doing into fight flight. Rather than saying, well, I need to step back and I need to observe and decide what mind I'm going to bring in this moment. No. So now we have an idea of what an emotion is. It is not psychological, it is biological. That takes over mind and they are far more powerful. They're in the bloodstream in 3Ns. Whereas the sensory feed that goes to the new brain takes 0.25 seconds to even get the information. There you see the mismatch. Now, now let's talk about an emotion in terms of the components. Because.

This is where, when you start using my work, this is where we begin to understand an emotion and we learn how to work with an emotion. Not like big, strong, tough guy, but understanding the components so that we can interrupt and we can change around. For instance.

When you feel that accelerated heart rate, when, oh my God, it's going against me, oh my God. When you feel the tension in your body, you know, when you sit there and hold your breath, what that is, is emotional arousal. That's the trigger has triggered. I mean, the emotion has triggered. And now that emotion is getting ready for action. It's ready to do something. So the body's cranking up and this is the place where, you know, obviously I teach a lot of breathing, a lot of emotional regulation, a lot of mindfulness. And this is where you interrupt an emotion.

Because if you get past this, the emotion becomes a feeling. Now, a feeling from a neurobiological standpoint is the chemistry of the emotion in the body changing. The way you perceive thinking is now compromised. You have a sense of it. You may have a sinking feeling in your gut. You may have a sense of oh my God, or you may have a sense of acceleration. Boy, I'm going to make a lot of money. All that stuff that's the emotion having already hit a key moment in getting ready and cranked up and a switch going off. And then that emotion is in your bloodstream and in your synapses as chemistry, altering your perception of the world, which is not a good plan. The third part of that emotion is motivation. What is the emotion asking you to do? Your survival instincts. When you have a perceived threat going against me, what happens is to attack or avoid. Yeah. If it's going against you, God, you cannot allow it to win because you know if you let it win, you're gonna, the saber tooth tiger's gonna eat you. You have to fight to the last breath. And that's how revenge trading happens. An avoidance. You say, well, I'm just not gonna get in the trade. Or, you know, I've got this moment right now where I've got a little skinny profit. But you know something? I know I should let it, just see if it'll go to target. But you know, I'm gonna take my money now before it's taken away from me. Avoidance of. Avoidance of making a mistake. Okay. The other thing though is approach. That's the. What we want to do is in attack and avoid. We want approach, which you would know by curiosity, by calmness, impartiality, looking at something. So we want to shift attack avoid to approach motivation, because again, it's going to take action. The difference is attack and avoid are based on fear or anxiety. Approach is based on being concerned and recognizing that you need to get your mind right. Okay. And attack avoid, you don't have to get your mind right. All communications being broke, it's. It's running, getting your big muscles ready for running or fighting. The next piece is meaning. This is the beliefs that you have about your ability to manage uncertainty. And to be honest with you, you may say what you want to say, but when you take a look at the health of your trading account, it's telling you what your beliefs are. And most of the time, if you happen to be a trader with a normal brain, it's not looking good. The last thing is temperament. You know, sometimes our genetics, we just get, we win the genetics lottery and we get exactly the brain we need to be able to mold into a trading brain. Otherwise what happens, we also may be born more anxious than other people, more risk tolerant. Those are just simply part of our nature. The question though, if you begin to understand this, if you begin to understand this.

You probably had no, you probably have no clue what I just talked about in your normal vocabulary when you work with me. You learn this because I'll be asking, well, where was the arousal? Where was the feeling? And what's the meaning? And by the way, those meanings. No rocket science. What happens, a tragic mistake in trading is that the trader gives winning or losing the ability to be able to decide whether or not you matter or not, whether or not you have worthiness or not, whether or not you're adequate or not, or even, or you're lovable enough. The deal is you're going to have to take that belief, that meaning, and you're going to have to break it apart, okay, and produce something completely different. You're going to have to separate performance.

From the value you have as a human being. So now we've gotten this thing and we're going.

What we know is that when you experience uncertainty and there's a threat there to the biological system, not a risk to your intellectual understanding of trading, instinctual emotions are going to be triggered unless you have changed the instinctual pathway. That's what the fight flight path response of the amygdala is. And what happens is the thinking brain never sees it. It gets whacked. It's gone. It's all over. So what happens is what we. What we want to do is this. Is this. Everybody I know wants to do exactly what's in this particular graphic. You as the human being, the homo sapien, wants to look at all our primitive ancestors and say, stop following me. Quit. Stop. Yet what you do is you share the emotional brain, the mammalian brain, which each of those ancestors with each of them. So the deal is, as long as everything's copacetic and cool, you can think rationally. But the moment that there's threat on the table or big opportunity, what happens is that caveman.

Shows up and it takes over. Thinking brain. That's not going to work. And you're going to have to learn how do I stop that? And here is actually the anatomy, what I want you to look at. And maybe this may be. I know this may be more science than you like, but I'm going to tell you something.

You need to understand what is happening to you. On the bottom left, what you see is you see external sensorial information coming in, and it stops at the thalamus. The thalamus is kind of like a traffic cop at a busy intersection. And normal flow, it's doing this, that, and the other. But if an emergency vehicle comes along, he stops everything, unless the emergency system go through. What has just happened is that the thalamus has just hijacked your Brain. What it's done is it's shot in the emergency straight over the low road, the quick and dirty low road, over to the amygdala and has cut off communication to the neocortex, that thing on top, the sensory cortex. And then it just triggers the amygdala to do what it does, explode with emotion. And it's in the bloodstream. The thing is, is that the thinking brain is really slow. It takes a long time. It takes 0.25 seconds. When the cops, when the thalamus cop changes everything, says there's danger, an emergency vehicle, it shoots over the amygdala in.003 seconds. Do you see the problem? And out of the amygdala comes fight flight. So this is the. This is the problem that you're going to have to learn to deal with. Okay, now.

How do you experience this? Well, as a trader. Oh, does anybody have entry problems like pulling the trigger? You know, I want more confirmation. I want more confirmation. Or do sit there and get bored and jump into trades. Yeah, impulsive trading. Do you ever do impulse? You just sit there and go, I don't know why. I don't know why I ended up in a trade. I just, I. I just found myself there. The trade going against you. How about revenge trading? Getting out early because you're scared your profits can be taken from you. Refute refusing to take a loss until you blow up the account.

Problems with winning are not losing. The thing is, here's the deal, is that the interesting thing about the winning mindset is that you have no control over winning and losing. It's hard to go, but it doesn't. And if you're set on winning, you're gonna lose because you keep trying to win when you can't win. What you can do, though, is you can bring the mind into trading that performs well. But your understanding of winning as a way of showing yourself how cool you are, or losing, hating to lose, they're going to have to all change. So you've got that. And what ultimately happens here is that you're going to have to learn to do something. We're having a computer that doesn't want to change slides. Okay, hold on here. There we go.

The truth is this. You're going to have to learn to work with the emotional brain and the thinking brain together. Because Lao Ze said this many, many years ago. Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power. And it just so happens in trading, this is about self mastery. You will have to master everything that you have Been avoiding, actually turning to and mastering all the time. If you comprehend that all thinking is emotional state dependent. So until you learn to deal with emotions and actually are master enough to be able to produce the emotional programs that build a trading mind, an effective trading mind, you're just going to be a journey or through this thing called trading. And what you're going to find out this is a far more.

It's not difficult for people who have kind of mastered the thing. Trading is pretty easy. It's what you have to do is the assumptions that the brain, the biases the brain has, has to change and you have to become very aware of them. You have to learn how to work with them. That's really what the difficulty is. But the problem is this, I love this, is that if you take a look at people, do you see, do you see a reassuring lie? That movie is just tons of people, they want to hear how this is going to be. All you have to do is do all this stuff. The money just stuffed up. You're going to have a whole thing of gold at the end of the rainbow and you're going to make all this money. That's a reassuring lie. Yet over on the other side, an inconvenient truth. Nobody's lined up there, nobody wants to see beyond the lie, the deception that we keep doing. Because you are going to have to change the way your brain was built by evolution to engage uncertainty. That's no small task. And yet nobody wants to hear that. They want to hear the oh man, I can get rich quick, boy, I can size up. No, what happens is you're going to have to change the way your brain engages uncertainty. That is what happens. And ultimately what you look at is this.

We develop an inner map. It's called a perceptual map. And it is built by your beliefs. Okay? And most of us, to be honest with you, the reason you have so much problem in trading is you don't necessarily believe that you deserve or easy money or what happens is that you're scared that you might be found out to be lacking. So what happens? The external world, all that stuff, all those charts, all that stuff comes in, you get filtered through all your biases about success, you know, and being tough and all that stuff. Then you hit your beliefs that are about your mattering, about your worth, about your competency and about your lovableness. And what happens is that it triggers inner map when it goes across that hits that section called uncertainty. This is what has to be changed. Your beliefs are not true. They're just simply assumptions that have taken on the force of truth. And they're wired in neural circuitry and become invisible to you. Yet they shape the world that you see and act in. And they are revealed not by your careful eye, but by your performances and the health of your trading account. That, my friends, is what you're looking for. So.

At the core of this problem that you're having with trading is a brain that is built to control outcome, yet you have to give up control over outcome to find success as a trader. Do you see the paradox? Do you see the trouble here? You have a brain built to win. You have a situation where you cannot determine whether or not you're going to win or lose. And you have to be able to build a mind that can engage that. And friends, my promise to you is your brain is not going to do it by itself. I hope you have learned that and that's why you're here. A lot of people just simply want to run into that thing and they're going to think one day it's going to break through that wall and they're going to find nirvana and they're going to find the pot of gold and everything's going to be hunky dunky. Those are not the people that I care to work with. So we get this and go, hmm.

It starts really right here. Rebuilding the fear based brain into a probability based mindset. Wow, how weird is that? And it starts with acceptance that what you're doing is not working. If you haven't come to that, you need to go out there, improve for better or worse that.

Your brain can either do this or not do it by itself. But throwing money at it over time and not getting better results ought to tell you there's something wrong with the way you're going about this. So what I want to do is the very first skill that you're going to have to learn if you're going to be able to, to master the emotions of trading.

Is being able to control stress. You are looking at a Yerkes chart, this has been around since the 1890s. And you're looking at a stress response where at first you're coming up, you're coming up, and what happens is that it's actually increased. You know, it actually is helpful. That's called eustress, okay, where suddenly you can use that energy of stress as physiology and it gets your mind focused, ready, ready to go, and then it hits a peak and then all of a sudden it starts. That stress actually starts going against you, it starts eating all the glucose out of your brain so you can't think. And what happens is you end up in complete exhaustion and you do really dumb, stupid things. So what we have to do is we have to learn how in the world we're going to change that because this, again, this is something they knew a long time ago. Now we're going to take a look at stuff that is more modern. So the key is, is what I do, what I teach is that as you get around is this, is that if you grasp that the emotion breathing and muscle tension are part of the emotion, if you, if you change the way you're breathing to diaphragm breathing and change the muscle tension so that you're letting, and letting all the tension go, the emotion of fear or anger cannot maintain itself. This is the first skill, emotional regulation. So you do that and you go, okay, what I can do is I can actually, I can't make the emotion go away with emotional regulation, but what I can do is I can stop it from gaining a head of steam and blowing out my thinking mind. And that is a good start to knowing, to approaching trading success. So next.

Emotional regulation, as powerful as it is, is never enough. Emotional regulation will stop the wipeouts, but we need a tool that allows us to be able to get to the mind's door. Okay, and what that means is that the next tool that I teach is mindfulness. And in this illustration.

What you're looking at, the guy on the left is totally caught up in his thoughts, okay? He's identifying with them and they're consuming him. That would be self doubt. That would be beating yourself up and all that stuff. That's what that would look like on the right side, what you're looking at. He's developed an observer mindfulness. And what he recognizes is a powerful fact that you and your thoughts are not the same. And you can step back out of them and start really analyzing them and thinking about them and saying, where did this thought come from? And not get sucked into them, okay, this is a powerful skill. So you're realizing, wow, what you really are. You are just simply one potential organization of a self.

That happened while you weren't looking. That's what the brain does, is it organizes that potential into itself. You become identified with it. It's. No, that's me. No, it's not. You have fused that. But there, friends, there is so much more. And that's the second part. When you start developing mindfulness, what you discover is that you can become the Designer of the self that trades. What you realize is, oh, what you're saying, quantum mechanics. What you learn is reality exists as potential. The observer of that potential is what brings forth the form. And by changing the observer, you change the world you see? So you begin to see. If I start changing that observer, I can literally build a different world. Yes, and that's where. That's where it's so important because.

You become fused, you have so much more potential. As Martin Heidegger said, man is born as a thousand voices. He dies with only one. And what we want to do is we want to find empowered voices running around in your little head and start organizing them so that you bring a completely different traitor to the game than you have been. And if you take a look, the brain. If you perceive the brain as a community of rival emotional programs that are duking it out to get control of the self, okay, that's the kind of stuff which you realize, okay, that is happening and on an emotional level, it's all in neurons, and it's all got 30 watts of electricity. But when that brain produces mind.

Those. Those emotional programs are given voice. And suddenly you realize that your mind becomes a governing committee, okay, that manages the self. And what you're asking is, who controls the true. Who controls the trading committee? Well, most likely nobody Good. What happens is that this is not like the good guys win. This is. Which. Which part of the wolf do you feed? So the deal is this is that you end up with an. You have a lot of different voices. You have what is known as the internal dialogue. And because you've been taught that internal dialogue is really crazy talking, and I don't want to say there's a whole bunch of voices inside, I don't want to be crazy. Well, my view is this. If you don't recognize that there are a lot of competing factions in your mind, that you are going to have to step up and you're going to have to wake up and realize that there's a mutiny going on in your brain caused by threat. Okay, we're back to trading. And unless you get the right guys together, the right parts of the self together, then you're going to have. It's going to be really difficult to trade. So that's skill two. Skill three is actually with using mindfulness, actually opening up the doors of the mind and looking in and discovering that under the stress of uncertainty, there is a historical dialogue that you hear in your head about your success, about your failure, about possibilities, about. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. All this stuff. And it is built, it is built for the certainty of short term survival. Whether or not it's greed, seeing money or whether or not it's fearful of taking a thing. This is the fear based mind of the opportunity based mind that is basically all about like lust about, you know, making that money. There's that conversation in you that is going to go on and the whole deal is that you're going to have to do it. And what I want you to do is I call it the inner critic. Have you ever noticed that when you beat yourself up or you condemn yourself and all that stuff, what I want you to know is that the one doing the whipping, that is the inner critic. It is very critical, it is very judgmental or very tempting. It is a part of your human nature. It's not going to go away, but you can learn to master it and deal with it. On the other side, that part that is scared, that's what I call the orphan. That's the adaptive voice that has been organized as a way for you to have short term survival. Remember on the African savannas we chose to avoid threat rather than confront it as a survival decision. And that's in trading. You can't do that. So now, okay, here we go. What we're doing is we're laying out the mind very differently than you've probably known. So ultimately the primitive emotional brain will trigger to fight flight.

We have to build a new mindset. That primitive brain is going to be what you discover is your orphan. Nature is in charge and it's been listening to the inner critic. And you self condemn yourself. You talk about, oh my God, I'm gonna be making much money and you get absolutely just gaga all that. What you're realizing, that's the wrong mind. You need to build a new mind. And out of this your brain can be trained to respond to uncertainty with a mind rooted in discipline, courage, self soothing and impartiality. Those are the emotional programs that allow you.

To be able to engage uncertainty from a position of strength. Now one thing about it is I encourage people strongly to see the movie Inside out by Pixar Disney. What they've done is they hired a bunch of neurobiologists and they went in and they actually pictorially showed what it's like to be in a little girl's mind. That's the little girl. You can see the outline and what you hear. You're seeing anxiety on the left. You're seeing disgust with your little green, you're seeing joy in the Yellow dress and you're seeing anger with fire coming out of his head. These and also sadness on the ground. These are primary emotions that these are not all the ones I'm interested in, but these are emotional programs that are now easily identifiable in the brain and the mind of the human. And the deal is emotions are going to trigger and your job is to be able to choose which ones trigger. What I'm looking for with the people that I'm working with.

I am looking to be able to build access to the courage of a warrior under stress. I'm looking to be able to get access to the discipline, the ability to maintain order of a ruler. I am looking to be able to gain access to self compassion, to loving kindness, to self soothing, to be able to calm that orphan mind down so that you can actually trade. But until you take that orphan, be able to calm him down. What you're going to do is anytime uncertainty shows up and threat shows up or opportunity shows up, you're going to have an 800 pound gorilla on your hands and let you know how to manage it. Self soothing, self compassion is that ticket. These are not figments of your imagination. These are actually symbolic representations of emotional programs that lie your brain. They are special interest areas and that they can be trained to be able to show up under stress. It's very similar to what's happening in stroke therapies now is one brain area may be injured or dead and they actually train another brain area to take over a different function. That shows you how flexible the brain is and how the mind is. But these are the aspects of yourself that you're going to have to find, nurture, grow to build the mind that knows how to deal with the uncertainty. And I would call these internal strengths expressed as archetypes. Archetype is a word that Carl Jung used to look at certain aspects of the social, mammalian that we are that are needed for group survival. You need leadership, you need someone to protect, you need someone to care. You need some clear thinking. There's a number of things that you need for a group to survive. It started with our evolution on the African savannas and it's just as relevant today. So now.

These are the emotional programs that you're going to need to be able to produce a consistently profitable mind.

They're not unless you got lucky with the best parents in the world or you just won the genetics lottery, they do not come natural to you. I know that the ruler aspect of my being took a long time to bring forward out of the kind of the wilderness I had put it in and had it being present fully. So we know that, we know it's not going to be easy. That's not the problem. What we're looking for though is that successful trading mind is focused on performance. This guy right here, if he's thinking about the insanity of going down the side of a mountain, okay, he's probably going to produce failure. But what he's doing, he is not thinking about the mountain. What happened is he is very skillfully using all his skills to get the ride of a lifetime. He's in peak performance. He's not out in the future about whether or not he blows up or he finishes or does wins, done nothing. He is there in the moment performing. Understand this, the mind you bring into the moment of performance you can control. And that's the power, friends, that's the power is that we mistakenly believe from our evolution that we can control the mind that wins and makes things happen. Do it as long as you want in trading and find out that well, you may be right. But I promise you that I don't think so. I'd bet the bank against you. But what you can control is the mind that you bring into the moment of uncertainty, the performance mind. Because with that, that is the psychological edge of being able to deal with uncertainty and threat that drives your method edge. That friends, is the deal. And what happens, the fifth skill is what you do is you turn toward your fear to master it from the inside. No, no he man antics. No, what happens is that Plato once said I'm a peaceful warrior because I know the war is within me here. The thing is everyone is going to have their dragons to be ashamed of. The dragon gives it enormous strength. However, if you realize that it's only a dragon, it's not you, the job becomes I need to build the person I am into self mastery. And when that happens, what you do is you get this. You take a look at this team, look at this as a mind. What you're looking at is a captain, okay? And you're looking at various members of the crew that all have functions they're doing. Now they're in serious water and what happens, they're not thinking about flipping. They're not doing. They are following. They're doing their job. They're doing their job. They're not focused on oh shit, what's going to happen. They are focused on their job. And if they do that, the likelihood.

Is they do very well. Thank you. That's the deal with this training. So what does this look like this is the five steps that we've just gone through. The very first step is that emotional regulation. You got to have that or you're never going to get to the mind. Then you develop mindfulness to be able to open the door of the mind and start making sense of all this crazy stuff. Then what you do is you learn to find that internal dialogue between the inner critic and that orphan nature and begin to disrupt it. At stage four, what you're doing is you're beginning to develop the peak performance elements of the self, the empowered elements of the self that we've just talked about. And then in Skill five, you reorganize the trading mind to match up to the uncertainty of, like our friends driving the boat. That's what is very possible in this work. The deal is, is that you have to decide that.

That trading is worth you rebuilding elements of your brain that don't want to be rebuilt. And it takes a little effort, it takes some work, but it can be done. If you come to that moment. If you, if you decide, yeah, I want to become the change, I invite you to our next group course. The deal about it is that it teaches all the skills that we've just talked about. It's no longer defining the problem, it's actually saying, here's the, here's the skills you need to master this problem. And we have five meetings over a period of 10 weeks. It's a webinar floor mat. Meetings are recorded because we work through all sorts of time zones. And you've got, you've got recordings and you have a virtual classroom with unlimited 24. 7 access. Okay, now the next, the next one actually starts in January. And friends, we already have people who have signed up. Okay? So the deal is, is that if you sign up early, what happens is that you are prepared when you show up. I'm assuming that you have already been working on emotional regulation when you show up and can actually regulate an emotion as you're feeling, facing uncertainty, and people show up late. But the thing is, is that this would be a good time to start taking it now. Also, if you do that, I'm going to give you a free gift. That's my emotional regulation workshop that I sell for 200 bucks on my website. I'm going to give it to you free. Not really to entice you to get into this thing. What I want you to do is I want you to get started because this is not something where you're just going to pick some knowledge off the knowledge tree. And put it in your head and you're going to change everything. Changing organic substrate is not like that. You have to work at it. You have to build it. Now we also have. And if you. The schedule and for more information, there's the. There it is right there. There's the address. I also have an individual course that is for. It's incredibly comprehensive, it is incredibly personal and it gets to the meat. And you really, you really, you really meet your dragon. Okay. And you learn. You really work to master it.

It's a three to four month program where you're meeting individually with me for 10 times and you get this. You get basically a graduate level multimedia course full of a bunch of stuff. But the main thing is with people who do this course, what they've really come to is say, no, I want to work with the teacher. That's the decision they make. The deal is, I understand that the way I talk about the mind on uncertainty is very different. I'm coming from an emotional intelligence standpoint. I'm not talking about the subconscious. I'm talking about processes that within that you may not be in awareness. That's because they're down in the emotional brain. So I want to thank you for being here. And what I want to do is that we've got a few minutes. If you have questions, I'll be happy to answer them. And if you don't, Torres and I'll have a glass of wine earlier. So there you go. And I am wearing crazy glasses. So let's see here. Okay.

Let'S see here.

Will the sessions be recorded? Yeah, absolutely. Oh, this session? Yeah, they will be put up on the website sometime tomorrow. You know, we used to try to do it really early in the morning. That didn't really work out. But no, this session will be definitely on. On our website.

That's from Rick.

That's exactly why you cannot play with scared money. Scared money doesn't make money. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Okay, where is it? The blue. Hi, Randy. Can an experienced trader find themselves endlessly churning their trading account where they avoid destroying their account but can't make it, but can't make a meaningful profit off of it over a long period of time? Is the churning mindset different from the mindset of a trader that totally destroys their account and in short order? Or is it the distinction unimportant? No, it's important, Bill. I'll tell you, this is. I am. I worked, God, this is probably five years ago now. I worked with a guy who was working with the high figure six A six figure account. And what happened is that he would, he had been locked into this pattern for 10 years before I met him. Every time he went over into seven figures, he would lose back down into high six figures. He had been doing that for 10 years. Okay. Now is he making a living at this? Yeah, but he also, he realizes there's something wrong with his psychology, that he hits a million dollars in his trading account, he loses a couple hundred thousand down. And he's been doing that for how long? He's earning enough money for his family and blah, blah, blah. But he realizes there's something not right here. There's something going on, there's something between his two years. And fundamentally what it really came down to, Bill, is that he grew up in a blue collar family, labor union family, where the father did not like management, typically did not like managers who made like a million dollars. And he adamantly would slam his fist down on the dinner table and say, nobody's worth a million dollars. Well, you repeat that. Your dad repeats that to a young, impressionable mind. And he grows up and he becomes a trai. And he gets his trading account and he builds it up. He builds bills, bills, bills, bills, bills. Hits that million dollar moment and loses, lose, lose. And he'd been caught in the cycle of a declaration.

He got fed at a dinner table. Okay. That's what it's like, Bill. Yeah. You get caught and churning. That's what he had been doing for 10 years. He'd been churning. And the difference is that he finally said, uncle, I want to find out what's going on here. And basically he had a belief that was built, he inherited from his family.

Okay. In the context of the temperament genetics, what percent of the population might be in that group to naturally be better able to handle trading?

A person who.

Deeply centered.

A person whose identity does not come from his performances.

Or you can be high functioning Asperger's high functioning autistic and have a completely different organization emotional architecture. Okay?

But the major thing, some people are just gifted with a sense of centeredness. You know, I personally certainly it's not me. I had to learn that I had to work, do the work so that I came to be able to. I had to master a lot about myself. Okay. But those are very few and far between. Follow up. I have heard that one needs to build new synapses to control one's inner voices. Saying meditation and repeating a thought over and over again will help build those synapses. You know, something that's basically saying, I can use affirmation, positive affirmations to do that. And certainly what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to build neural network. Okay? You're going to have to alter the neural network that you already have in order to be able to build new beliefs about your ability to manage uncertainty.

I actually use. I believe the most important thing in the world is that a person finally connect to what I call their inherent worth.

Dolores and I have a friend who has made, over the last several years, made about $300 million. This is super Trader. Just unbelievable, all that stuff. And I had a keen interest in him because, you know, I'm looking when. When people do that, you just want to get a guy like me has to figure out how he did it. And he said, you know something, Randy? It's interesting is that there was a moment in my life where I lost three quarters of a million dollars when three quarters of a million dollars was a lot, a lot, a lot of money to me. And I knew that I had to tell my wife. So I came to her and I told her, and I thought she was going to leave me. And what she did, she held me and we cried together. And he said, what I got out of that was whether or not I win or if I lose, good, I'm loved. I'm good. What he did is suddenly his trading was no longer about performance. Now, did he build synapses? Yeah. Did he do hocus pocus? No. What he did, at a very deep core level, he divorced performance.

From winning and losing.

The thing is, he mattered whether or not he won or lost. He doesn't care anymore. And it's amazing. So what you're saying is, on the surface, it's just real flippant. Okay? It's like saying I've never known visualizations and positive affirmations to work under pressure. Now, I will say there are elements of both those that I use in my work, but it's got a lot more guts back into the emotional brain. I'm interested in getting the emotional brain to change the beliefs it has about its ability to perform in the world. Okay.

Ricardo, what is the difference in the developing traders course and ignite your spark course? I'm assuming the developing traders course. That's the group course. It's cheaper, okay? It's a lot cheaper. But what happens is you're in it with a group of people and you're doing it over a period of 10 weeks in a virtual classroom, okay? And you don't. And you don't have nearly as much access to me. The ignite. Yeah. You don't have individual concepts. Whereas the ignite, the spark, everybody, when it really comes down to it's not all the multi. You know, I keep telling it's a really cool multimedia course because I built it. I think it's really cool. But ultimately what people look at and say, well, I want to work individually. Randy, when am I going to find a teacher like you? And you know, the people who do that often look at it and say it's worth the money, you know, is that I get to, I actually get to work with the teacher who actually knows how to do this and I get to be with him for 10 times over a period of three or four months. And we're following a curriculum. Yeah. On zoom. So it's powerful. Okay. And like I said, I actually understand from my standpoint, I'd rather see people go to the group course because it's a lot less work for me. Okay, last question guys. This is Rachel. If the methodology is not good, would studying psychology help to find a better method? Yeah. Or is there an underlying issue beneath it? What happens is a lot of people take my course, particularly the individual course. Well, I say that the group course too. And somewhere along the line when they start getting their psychology together, they realize that their methodology did not have the edge that they, they had thought and they have to rebuild that methodology. That's common. Okay.

To be honest with you, what I am looking for is for a person to convince themselves that what they're doing is not working and they need to be able to build a psychology. And that's the people that I'm interested in. And whether or not you come through it and your methodology has an edge in it is proven. And you're just messing it up because you don't, you don't, you can't get your mindset right or whether or not you come in and you start, you start working the program, you start getting your head together and you start realizing that you have a problem because your, your methodology doesn't have the edge in it. They happen both ways, Rachel. Okay. The, the key though is that.

What you're going to have to do, unless you winners of the lottery, you're going to have to change the brain that you inherited from evolution to the brain that can work in a probability based environment. The brain from evolution is about the certainty of short term survival. And that is not going to work in trading. And don't believe me, look at your trading account. Look at your experience and start asking, you know something? What am I doing? Is what am I doing making sense? Do I actually need to find someone who actually knows what they're doing about this to really show me and shape at least a general direction of how to build a psychology of performance? That's my interest. Okay? So I want to thank you folks. It's been a lot of fun. I like the questions. And no matter what, I wish you well in your life, in particular tomorrow. I want you to take your look at yourself when you trade. I want you to notice the tension in your body. I want you to notice how you're breathing, and I want you to notice that this is exactly what Randy was talking about. I'm seeing an emotion already beginning to emerge. I didn't even know it's in motion. I just thought I was tense. And all of a sudden, you're realizing, oh, my God, I'm not stressed. I'm in fear. I'm in anger. I'm in lust. I want you to look at that and realize it was sitting right there in front of your face. So, friends, I wish you well. Or as. My favorite cowboy when I was growing up as a kid was Roy Rogers. And every time he beat the bad guys, he and his girlfriend Dale would ride off into the sunset singing, happy trails to you until we meet again.

Happy trails to you Till we meet again. Thank you.