The Missing Link: Mastering the Emotional Storms that Wreck Your Profits

Have you ever noticed that you keep making the same mistake over and over again? You know better. You know you have problems in that area, no matter where it is, in the process of trading, at entry, at getting into the black, all that stuff. But the key is, do you notice that no matter what your best efforts, you keep making the same mistakes over and over again. And, friend, this is the biggest problem in trading, is that you're trying to solve problems that you don't understand. Okay, you think, I'm going to just use willpower. There has to be in me. I have to do that. I'm going to just stuff it, all that stuff, and you end up getting to the moment of stress where you've got capital at risk. Boom, you do it over and over again, friends. By not understanding that problem, you're pretty much condemning yourself to keep repeating it and repeating it because you have to solve the problem that you know. You're trying to solve a problem that you don't know. And I want to help you. Listen to this. This is the missing link. It's mastering the emotional storms that wreck your profits. And ultimately, you're not playing necessarily with a psychological problem you developed in childhood and stuff like that. No, you're dealing with the brain that you inherited from a long, long, long time ago. Even before we came down from trees and sat upon the African savannas, even before that, before we had not developed into mammalians. 600 million years worth of evolution is guiding us right into the moment we developed. We became this really Homo sapiens. It was really cool. But ultimately, what we are is an emotional, social, mammalian. That's what we are. And the key is we like to pretend that our flesh and our mind are separate from one another. They're not. And that evolutionary bias for survival keeps kicking in when you're risking capital, which, by the way, your emotional brain sees as your life. Okay, the moment that it's threatened, the safety is gone, its status is being taken away, or that you're powerless. It's gonna go bonkers on you. That's what it's built to do. It's built to fire, fight, flight.

This is where it is. We are emotional beings first who rationalize. We are not rational beings who have some emotional problems. No, we start out as emotional creatures. And the problem is when you're seeing this, when you're doing the same thing over and over again and you're trying hard, it's not for a lack of trying. It's really not understanding the problem and recognizing that what we've got here. You are tripping an emotional pattern that was formed in our caveman days and reinforced in our developmental moments of becoming the human beings we are. But the thing is, this is literally. This is survival brain versus probability brain, and this is the problem that has to be solved. So we get it. We have a clash between your caveman brain and its dictates of survival in the moment, controlling outcome. Okay, not losing. Because, understand, losing to the caveman brain means you're somebody's meal. Winning means you prevail. You always want to win, don't you? And you definitely don't want to lose. Think about that. And particularly when we're doing the same thing over and over again, it's almost invariably about the need to win or not lose. I don't want to take that loss. I hate losing. Well, it just so happens caveman, yeah, he does not like to lose. He doesn't like to use his life. The key, though, to become a consistently profitable trader, you're going to have to become an incredibly good loser. You're going to have to say, I'm okay with losing. It happens. You know, kind of like breath happens. So that's the thing right there, is you're trying to solve the problem as if it were psychological. I'm telling you that it is biological flesh that manifests, takes over mind. And you're looking at a brain that adapted for survival in the moment, and you're asking it to do something that it considers its worst nightmare. That's the problem you have to solve the clash between the caveman brain for survival and the thinking brain that you need for trading that thinks in probability.

It just so happens that that survival brain that you brought sees vulnerability, sees confusion, uncertainty as a threat to its being.

And what you're doing is you're triggering those programs every time you trade, every time you risk capital with an uncertain future, and you haven't gone in and really wheedled down to the deep beliefs about winning and losing. Okay, Surviving versus probability management. You're triggering that whole power not just from six and a half million years ago, but literally 600 million years in one form or another as we moved into this thing. Remember, we have a reptilian brain back here, brainstem. We have an emotional brain, the social mammalian brain, as the emotional brain that we work with, and we have this thinking brain that makes us so wildly different than anything else. But the survival brain and the emotional brain have more to do with your performances than anything else. Thinking is blown out of the water if it Gets in the way.

And the problem with trading, or the good news of trading, particularly regarding self mastery, is you could get away with denying this and pretending it didn't happen. Lying to yourself. And the brain will lie to you, okay? It really will.

You can do that forever because you're not having the immediacy. And trading, it's the cause and effect or boom, like instant karma. Meanwhile, in regular life, you've got karma of lifetime. You can just put it off, put it off, get the can down the road. But in trading, you can't. It catches up with you. And therein lies the problem. You actually have to deal with it.

What's going to happen if you want to become really, truly successful in trading? You're going to have to rebuild the brain that you inherited from evolution and make it a very unnatural one. And make it something that brain, so that when it engages uncertainty, it doesn't flinch. It's okay with it because that emotional brain, the survival brain, now trusts the thinking brain to do its business. And how does it start? First is you come to a new understanding of the problem. You begin to understand we're emotional beings. You quit treating yourself like you're rational. You're not. You rationalize. You create alibis, stories, fictions to cover whatever the emotional brain's already decided. That's the first thing. The second thing, you're going to have to learn to regulate your emotions. In my work, it starts with breathing and making sure that the tension is released so that you can really see the breathing and the tension in the body are part of the emotion. Remember, they're not psychological, they're biological. And by breathing.

And by reducing the tension in your body, you can control the intensity of the emotion. Powerful first step. Not enough, but essential first step. Second, you have to produce a sense of mindfulness so that you as a witnessing organism are no longer in the business of saying, you know something? I just fusing. I'm just fusing to these thoughts as if they were mine. Because they're not yours. They're not yours. You don't have thoughts. They're having you. They're creating your experience.

Bad deal in trading because it's all wired around fear or aggression. Okay, Response to threat, uncertainty. That's the second thing. And the next thing that you're going to have to do is you're going to have to start tuning in to this internal commentary that's going on inside. And you can discover.

There'S some mean voices in there and they want you defeated. They keep talking into it and what happens with no defense with staying ignorant of how the mind works, you just simply allow this to continue to continue and stay stuck in these self limiting patterns that fire and you do it over and over again. Then what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to find aspects of your being. I call them voices in the mind. But there are also different names from different traditions. You're going to have to find them. These are emotional programs and you're going to have to train, train them to pull forward when you experience uncertainty. The big ones that have to show up is the discipline of a ruler, the courage of a warrior, the self compassion of a caregiver, and the impartiality of a sage. Those are the essential emotional programs that are wired into you that you're going to have to learn to pull forward and act from intentionally. Instead of a survival brain, you want an intentional brain, an intentional mind that no, you can't control the outcome like caveman wants, but you can control the mind you bring into the moment. Performance friends, that's the missing link. You can learn how to do this. Follow up on this video, go to the website, Start really recognizing that you can become the captain of your own destiny. It's going to take some work because you have a brain that's really set in its ways and you're going to have to on the outside, kind of go in and start retraining it into the beliefs that you hold about your ability to manage uncertainty. Every day that trading account is telling you what the beliefs are. Listen and come visit us. Okay? I thank you very much. I hope you have a great life.