The Secret to Becoming a Consistently Profitable Trader

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Welcome, everyone. Welcome to this particular webinar. It's drawn some interest and what I want to do right off the bat is let's find out if you can hear me. If some kind people would just simply enter the question box, would type a. Why I would really appreciate it if you can hear me so that I know that I'm not talking out into the ethers. Good. Thank you very, very much. Okay. The rest of the ground rules are pretty simple, is that I produce a lecture and at the end of that lecture, I hold time for us to talk and for you to ask questions. And I just simply find this kind of work. If I get interrupted in the middle, I lose my train of thought and stuff like that. So this is what we're going to do. Okay. Now you can put in questions, though, that I would prefer. I would appreciate that because usually there's a big lag between when you finish the presentation, when somebody actually types in something. So when you come across something that you're interested in, go ahead and write it in the question so we can address it. Fair enough. Good. Well, let's go, guys. We're looking at what is the secret to becoming consistently profitable traders and what my promise to you is this is. The secret is hidden in plain sight. The reason that it's so secret is that we as a biological organism do not want to see the truth. We want another belief, another way of how we can be successful. But the truth is trading just simply looks like it's easy. And at the same time, what happens is then you actually do it. You actually put live money on the line. And no matter how positive your thinking is, what you discover is positive thinking really doesn't shape the future. You can get creamed just as easy. You know, the thing is, is most people I know that come and end up visiting with me is. And work hard, they're tough, they want to hunker down and they want to push through this because they see the money, they see people making a lot of money, some people, a few people, and they know what is it they know.

That I don't know that if I knew, would turn this whole thing around. Okay, now the key here is this. You've gone too far. The key is, let's really begin to ask the question, what actually stands in your way to being able to develop your skills? Obviously, most of the people I work with have already invested deeply into trading knowledge, and that's essential. At the same time, there are Plenty of knowledge, really strong, knowledgeable traders out there who can talk the talk, but they can't walk the walk when the money's real. And the question is, what is it? What is it that actually does that? Why can't you do that? And the truth is pretty simple. There comes a moment, and usually, to be honest with you, I find it's between two and five years that a trader has to come to acknowledge that it is they themselves that stand in their way. They're not willing to do the kind of work. They don't mind working hard. They know how to do that, but they don't know how to do the emotional work. They don't know how to rebuild the mind for trading, and they resist it.

And this thing called you, what on earth is it?

When we get to mindfulness, we'll talk a little bit more about that. But the deal is we're zeroing in on this and we're finding the secret. And what we're saying is that it has something to do with you. If you haven't figured that out yet, then you need to go ahead, keep trading, and keep under the idea, under the notion that you're going to push through this and one day you're going to push through and become successful. What I find is a lot of people get traumatized. They push through, push through. Same stuff happens again and again and again. And they don't see that there's an emotional pattern there. They think they can push through that pattern, but they can't. The emotion is far stronger than the thinking that allows them to even begin to look at it.

Okay, now the deal is this.

Winning and trading.

Is very different than what you thought it would be. All that hard work, that positive thinking that really pushing down the emotions and having a plan and saying, you know, I've got the plan down. I know this. Everything's fine. That's thinking brain. Okay? That's thinking brain and thinking brain, not under the gun. What happens, though? You try hard to try hard, and you just get further and further away from trading. You have good spells and it comes back. It goes on and on like that. And you're going to. What is so different about trading that makes it difficult? First of all.

Most people think of success more like this. I'm conquering. And most of us come from highly competitive backgrounds. It's very typical for me to work with a person who grew up in a competitive family, loving all that kind of stuff. But it was highly competitive. I mean, it's about winning and not losing. And, and ultimately they take that learning and they bring it out into the world and it works really well. Like in corporate, it works really well in business, it works really well in sales. Then they come to trading and that winning, that needing to win, controlling outcome, making things happen, predicting the future. What happens is that we get so focused on that that we don't recognize that it's no longer working in trading. Trading has a very, very different way of producing success than the everyday world that you've been used to. You may have produced great success in whatever world you're from, but in trading, you need to start saying, you know.

Why am I still lagging back down here? I know I can talk the talk, but ultimately it comes down to this, is that my view is that your trading account is the only friend you've got. What it's doing, whether or not you like the news or not, it's telling you exactly what your beliefs are that you're projecting onto the markets. And if those beliefs are effective at pulling more money out of the market than you give back, that's the deal. It has nothing to do with never giving up, forcing your will, determination, and that never lose drive to success. That's worked elsewhere. So the thing is, now we're really going, whoa, you mean the way that we've learned to be in control, to be able to make things happen, to be a winner, doesn't work in trading? That's exactly. Okay, that's exactly what we're talking about. You bring those. And it may be that you're tangential to that kind of thinking, but there's a lot of competition. People grow up in competitive places. I grew up in a very competitive situation where, you know, I played sports, I did this, you know, all that stuff. I was taught to be competitive. And yet at the same time, in trading, what you discover, no matter how tough you are, no matter what, no matter how willing and hard you're willing to work, is that you're not in control. You're not in control of the outcome. And this becomes what most people find out, that's the disaster. They come in, they think they're, they think they can control. Let's put it this way, each morning when you get up and you're thinking about trading, what are you saying?

The vast majority of you are going to be saying, let's make some money today. I'm going to make money. And it's interesting is that you can't control whether or not you win or lose. And yet you're saying, I'm going to make some money today. And yet this history is that you haven't been doing it very well. And you go, whoa. So you're already setting yourself up because in the background inside that mind, years inside that, underneath that thinking brain, that emotional brain is going, oh, my God, this thinking brain is going to get me in trouble again. It's going to threaten me, and I better be prepared. So this is the big jump. Thinking that you're going to win, thinking that you're going to make some money today.

That attitude, that focus is going to be a disaster in trading. Friends, you know, is that, will I only have to make 100 more dollars to meet my goal for today? My question is, don't worry about the hundred dollars. What about the state of mind that you've got right now? I even know really good traders who actually one was a teacher of trading, that what he did is he produced a goal where he produced consistent profitability over a period of three months. Good deal. Okay, and what happened though, is he. He quit trading in as he was leading to the end of the month because he didn't want the chance to lose. He had to be a winner because he's going to put it on all his social media and stuff like that. And then what happened? He got so scared that it took him another week or two to start trading again because then he didn't want to risk the success he had already had. Success became an albatross around him. You had to break through that. So.

You got that disaster. And everybody, everybody has experienced it. But the key is really this, is that.

At the bottom of it, the truth is this, is that the brain that you brought to trading with all the ancestral linkage to our ancestors, the cavemen, to where we became Homo sapiens and all that stuff, that brain has been designed in such a way to avoid threat or if you're hungry, to be able to attack things. That's what it's built to do. And how do you think that's going to work in trading? So we've got it. We've got this idea that we should be able to do this. But the truth is your brain is carved by evolution to control outcomes no matter what, even if it was an illusion, deception. Okay, Understand, humans deceive themselves all the time. Humans, you know, listen to two traitors talk about the one that got away. Oh, if I did.

They'Re not talking about, you know, did I execute well? Did I do exactly what I was supposed to do? And did it land? No. Your brain wants to control outcome. It wants to predict the future, and the one thing it does not want to do is lose, no matter what. That's your emotional brain. That's your caveman brain. It just so happens that it is far more dominant when threat is there. And when you trade, there is threat. You are risking capital to your caveman brain friends. That's risky. That's a biological threat right there. So we've gotten that, and we go, okay.

The deal is this. In trading, at least the way I teach the psychology of trading.

Winning and losing, just what side of probability are you on? If you win, there's no reason to get up, get excited. All you did within a probability framework is you landed on the right side of probability really, relative to you. If you lose, all that you really have done from a trading perspective is land on the wrong side of probability relative to you. Now, this caveman right here, when he's looking at that, what he has to do, he has to win to survive. He has to believe that he's going to get through this. If he doesn't, what happens is something goes wrong. And understand this caveman character right here is just. Just beneath your thinking brain. The emotional brain has been there for mil. It's a mammalian brain. It's been there for millions and millions of years. And your thinking brain has been there for maybe about 50 to 75,000 years. Now, who do you think has better inroads and who controls what? Yeah, that's really what we're talking about. So we're getting here. We've got this caveman that we have this undiagnosed blind to. You can't see that caveman inside you trading, but that caveman is alive and well, well alive and on alert inside your brain and your mind. And what happens is that that caveman, if you were to take it, you know, you want to make up for prior losses. Oh, my God. That. That's. That's normal, isn't it? You know, who. Who in here is not revenge trade. Who in here says, I'm going to get that back? I'm going to get that back, or I'm going to get that back. I'm going to show you you've already been hijacked. That a caveman brain hates to lose. And if something attacks it, like take your money as an attack to them, you want it to feel more pain. You want to get that money back. Because that money.

Your life to cavemen, that's what's going on. So of course you're going to fight for your life. Oh God. And can you imagine this scene right here? Remember the last saber toothed Tiger died about 12,000 years ago. We had plenty of experience with these critters. And you're looking at, you're looking at a situation. Man's got a spear. That tiger is roughly 14, 13, 1400 pounds and he's got two six inch incisor teeth. And that man has a spear. Good luck. Can you see right there, that there that his biological existence is being threatened right there. Now you might think, well, what this is exactly what's happening is you're going to. You hate losing because that means you become somebody's meal. So what happens is that and you've come a competitive culture and so you want to win, you're going to fight. Yeah.

And the probability based mindset that this human being right there has no clue about keeping losses small is the way that you become a successful trader. This caveman doesn't see small losses, he sees big losses, he sees loss of life. And so you're really in a battle with your evolutionary psychology, much less what you learned in your family of origin and your culture now.

So you also have a brain that was built to be a negative assessment machine. It's going to produce all sorts of negative prediction about the future. Think about last time you were trying to figure out if you were going to get in or not on the unds. I don't know. More confirmation. I don't know. Yeah, you're trying. You have negative prediction. Even though the things meeting criterion for getting into a trade, you want more confirmation. Because what's happened is all of a sudden, all of a sudden you're no longer this negative assessment machine of a brain of yours has become overactive and it's taken over thinking. And just to let you know, is that thinking is considered from a neurological standpoint, from neurobiological standpoint, it's considered to be a behavior, it's considered to be an output. Okay.

Thinking, what we call cognition is tied to the emotional brain. The emotional brain basically is the part of you that decides whether or not it can handle the risk, handle the challenge, or whether or not it needs to go into fight flight.

Only. So the whole thing is that the emotion is the locomotive driving your trading. The thinking that is so touted is sitting back there in the caboose just kind of observing things and making up stories about where this adventure is going. And the driver of that locomotive, the engineer, that's your beliefs about your ability to manage uncertainty and what your trading account is doing. It's letting you know.

What your beliefs are about that. And have you ever had fomo? Scarcity thinking? It's like, oh my God, it's going to be taken. It's going to get taken from me. It's going to take me. Oh my God, I've just left so much money on the table. I have to. I have to go and get. Get it back. I have to get it back. Yeah, you're. You're just. You're social, mammalian now. You're not a human being, okay? Your emotions have hijacked you. Your. Your caveman is doing your trading for you. And by the way, scarcity thinking is a very. It's. It's what.

It's what keeps people locked into dead end jobs into jobs that they're not satisfied by. They don't. But they think, oh my God, if I left, what if I fail, I could lose my house, my wife will leave me. I have all.

Okay, all that stuff. That's scarcity thinking. And we're taught that play it safe, you could lose. Well, I promise you, you're going to lose. The question is, what does losing mean to you? We'll be getting into that in just a little while. But what does meaning mean to you? What does thinking, what does thinking about losing mean to you? Winning and losing. Ponder that. Because the truth is that contains the secret of your continued performance or success in trading. So.

Now then, after you miss. Then after you miss something, you have that urgency day to kick in. What I want you to recognize and jump into trades that not even in your plan or anything. What I want you to recognize, friends, this is all happening on an emotional level. And you don't even. Your thinking brain doesn't really have a clue that there is this dominant emotional brain directing traffic. And the thinking brain is just being so easily hijacked. And you sitting there thinking, oh man, I can think through this. I've got a plan. I know how to do this stuff. I'm just going to follow my plan. But what you're not recognizing is that's all thinking stuff. That's a behavior that's output. What we're looking for is what is the emotional reaction to when you engage risking capital? Because I can promise you, your caveman brain cannot tell the difference between money and power. Money does not exist to your caveman brain.

Power does. The power to survive another day, the power to be safe, the power to have prestige.

All that stuff. And what happens is that when that power is threatened, loss of capital, it Goes bonkers on you. And until you solve this problem, you stay in scarcity. So the bottom line is this. The brain that you brought to trading is not going to be the one that produces the mind that can produce success in trading.

You don't have to believe me. Just notice how many years you've been trading. Notice. Are you one who blown up capital? A lot of it. Are you the one who just kind of keeps that break even and can't get further on? Are you the one that's streaky, that goes up and down, up and down, but ultimately gives back more than you get in? You're listening to your caveman brain. You're listening to instinctive survival skills at play taking over mind. Because your brain cannot tell the difference between capital.

And power. That power means controlling outcome, predicting the future.

Being safe, and having prestige. That would say, boy, I'm a very successful trader. Like for instance, I have a friend who. Well, Dolores and I actually have a friend who has made somewhere between 2, 200 and $300 million over the last several years. Okay, now tell me he doesn't have prestige. Oh, in the markets. Yeah, he's an. He's an options trader and he teaches people. And there's always this. Always this thing. Yeah, well, yeah, that. That's Mitch. Whoa. And the truth is, Mitch, just really cool guy who has figured this out. But the thing is, we have a certainty based brain that our ancestors gave to us. We've got it. But what happens is we need a probability based mind. And you're not going to use magical thinking, you're not going to use visualization, you're not going to use affirmations or any other thing to be able to get at that. Very basic beliefs about your ability to manage uncertainty just by trying to program the subconscious. You're going to have to do something more than that. You're going to have to be able to grow something anew. And that's what is so exciting to me about this work. But what I want you to look at, this is what to your caveman brain, this is what risk looks like. That bear would have been a European eight to nine foot brown bear. And look at the weapons. These guys, these guys are trying to protect their. Their clan. And it's a life and death thing. If you're taking a look at a loss, you know that trade's going against you. Okay. And it's really going against you. It's heading toward your stop. It hits your stop. Don't you think he would fight with every last ounce of your life to defend that. Yeah, that's exactly what's going on in your trading. The thing is, is you do not know how to separate the emotional brain, much less calm it down and cool it down and build a very different kind of leadership within, within that brain. And that's what we're going to be looking at now.

The.

Your head. No, you're right. You're right, you're absolutely. So where do you start?

The first thing is understand your notions about winning and losing and how whether or not you're winning or losing is about your being. It's going to have to stop. It's not about you winning and losing is about probability. You're being.

I hope your fundamental ground of being is not built on probability. I hope there's much deeper rooted sense of you. But the thing is you're going to have to learn about emotion and cognition in the relationship. And my promise to you is emotions are not what you think they are. They're not what you think they are. They're not. We're not. You're not having emotions, they're having you. The only time that you're not having emotions is when you're dead. And one of the best explanations of emotions that I've ever seen ever was a movie from about 10 years ago, a cartoon from inside out by Pixar Disney. And what you're looking at is right here. You're actually looking on the left. You're looking at sadness. The guy, the really weird looking guys with the eyes is anxiety. The bright cheery looking one is joy. The green one is disdain and the red one is anger. Those are primary emotional programs. And the deal is emotional programs are not psychological. They're not really associated with thinking. They take over thinking. Okay. But the deal is they are all about being a biological action potential that coordinates action between the organism that would be you, the trader and the environment that would be the markets. Anytime something happens in the markets, by definition an emotion is going to trigger that emotion is there to for your short term survival. Okay. Fighting like hell so you don't die. You know, when you're, when you're revenge trading that is anger protecting the organism. The not getting into trades because oh my God, it could lose. That's your anxiety.

Just taking over thinking. And also the one in the middle, joy. Don't trade with joy, friends. That is a horrible, that's a very horrible emotional state because what you're going to do is you're going to be making all sorts of problems. Sadness, oh My God, I'm already grieving. What's going to happen? And envy, you know, boy, don't you know that's not going to work? I've got to keep up with things. I got to make money. I got to make money to prove that I. That I matter. Yeah. So all of a sudden, you're seeing these emotional programs or special interest groups in, like, a community that I call the brain. And all of them are competing with one another to control the construction of what you call the self, what you would call you. And it just so happens that from evolutionary psychology to your family of origin, through your culture and circumstances, it's all come together to produce this specimen you call you, this current organization of the self. And what you're doing now is you're finding out that that organization of a self.

Doesn'T work in trading. But remember this. All it is is a particular organization of potential. It is not the totality of who you are. My work is about recognizing there's a whole lot more and that there are tools, skill sets that we can use to start latching onto that and pulling it forward and building a very different mind that engages the uncertainty. Has caveman orphan calmed down now?

Emotions happen instinctively before thinking, okay? And, you know, out of that, what you happen is the emotion has already started flooding chemistry into your body. Before you ever start thinking about what you're going to do. Do you see the problem here? The problem, like, if you have problems getting into a trade, the problem doesn't happen when you're there trying to get in. The problem happened a good bit before when you started going, I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared. Oh, my God, what's going to happen? What's going to happen? Then all of a sudden, you start looking for excuses not to get in the trade. Short term, that's very successful. Long term, it's very frustrating because guess what?

A lot of really good setups pass you by, and you don't make the money you need. So we're looking at this and going, wow, what happened? And here's the deal. This graphic is a really good illustration of the relationship between the thinking brain, the one that you like to think you are, and your emotional brain. The emotional brain sits around. A lot of times that caveman brain sits around just hanging out. It's not, you know, it doesn't see danger on the horizon. It's not being threatened, you know, anything like that. So it's sitting back there and out of that, out of that pause, you know, this really bright geeky guy thinks he's in control of his future, of his trading, of his life. And then what happens is that something happens. By definition, emotions show up. If it's threatening.

Well, it's, it's lightning fast. And before the thinking brain knows it, it's been overridden and caveman has jumped and thrown the thinking brain out of the way and is at the wheels. That's not what you want. And when that happens, it's very clear. Is that on the right, what you're looking at is that happens. And all of a sudden the thinking brain is blown out of the water and the amygdala takes over and starts firing that fight flight. So ultimately the very first step in all this stuff is that if you take a look at on the left side, you're actually looking where the person is regulating the emotion and keeping it low. I say so that he's more calm, relaxed, ready, focused, and he's able to approach.

And he does not feel threatened at that particular point. That is something that can be taught. Okay, now, now we see that. And what I also how this really works is that we use a five piece process where the very first thing is you try to start really understanding about your emotional nature. Staying ignorant of your emotional nature is just.

It'S just counterproductive. It's, I would say stupid. But if you want to continue being stupid, it's okay now. But what you're doing, let's say in this particular case, what you're looking at is a very primitive, primitive survival instinct to eat that sundae. Because what happens in eating that sundae, what happens is you get a nice, you get a really nice great feeling when it gets there and the chocolate's there and it has oxytocin in it and, and you know, other chemicals in that ice cream just kind of calm you down and soothe you the same way that some of really potent drugs can calm you down. Your brain's a pharmacy, friends. And what happens is the thinking brain is now trying to control a powerful association with a substance that produces a nice feeling. Okay, this is the same thing in trading. If you're an impulse trader, you know, you see all that stuff happening out there and all of a sudden I got to go get it, I got to get it right now. That's temptation. And what happens is that you haven't been, you have been hijacked by your caveman brain. How this can handle though, if you can handle it, is Bellows breathing. If you were to sit there and your diaphragm's at the very bottom of your lungs. And if you were, if you start, just notice the way you're breathing right now. My guess, usually when I'm looking at people, they have very shallow breathing or they have stopped breathing, particularly if they have a tenseness. Now, since I have been talking to you, I have been holding my back straight. I have been using my diaphragm to pull down air.

Into my belly, otherwise known as the lower lobes of the lungs. Then I fill the high. The top of the lobes of the lungs. What I'm doing is I'm getting about 66% more oxygen in my lungs into my brain than you are. What does that mean? Your oxygen star. And you're not going to be able to maintain yourself. You're set up for hijacking. That's what it really means. So the whole key is, is that we have to unlearn the way we've learned to breathe. And we have to learn either a diaphragmatic or a bellows breathing that I teach and I practice throughout the day.

People ask me how much do you really check in about 30 times a day is I come from a family of origin that was really crazy. They were both parents were alcoholic, mental illness there. And there was always hypervigilance about something happening. And so I carry tension with me and I hold my breath a lot. And I know that it's residual tension from really serious stuff. And I know that I have to pay attention to it. I can't let myself drift off. I need to bring myself back centered again so that I'm diaphragmatically breathing. That allows me to protect a particular kind of mind that's not available.

When you're.

When you're not breathing properly breathing. Everything starts with breath, my friends, everything. And then just because you're able to calm the emotion down through breathing. And the reason you can do that is breath and muscle tension are actually part of an emotion. Remember I said it was a biological action potential. And the breath and the tension in the body are all getting you revved up, ready for action. But once you do that, is that going to solve the problem? Absolutely not. What it's going to do, it's going to allow you to stay, maintain a certain centeredness, calmness. But then we need to develop mindfulness. We need to be able to develop mindfulness.

So that we can catch ourselves before urgency strikes and takes away critical thinking skills. In that mindfulness, what you really basically discover is this person that you call you, you know me. These are my thoughts. No, they're not. What happens is that you and your thinking are not the same. The beliefs that you hold are not you. Their beliefs that you hold and being proven in trading ineffective.

So you start what? Yeah, you, your brain, while you're growing up, based on genetic predisposition, are organizing how you interact with the world. The dance you have with the world and when it finds a solution, and that could be running from bullies, it could be being a bully, could be anything like that. Being very smart, being a savior, being blah blah, blah, blah, blah. It locks it in.

And all of a sudden you actually think that's you. Well, fortunately, a lot of people trust me enough and say, wow, I could not believe this.

I have been able to change the nature of me. Yeah, you can change if you don't mind some, some heavy emotional lifting so that you can become a very different, higher functioning self than the one you brought to the game. That's what mindfulness will do for you and what it also does. Mindfulness opens the door of the mind so you can start noticing and recognizing all the forces at play. Very powerful forces at play in the mind. I like to call the mind a. It's really more like a trading committee. And what you're looking at here, for instance, is you're looking at three emotional programs. And it just so happens this is inside a little girl's brain. And the little girl is not happy because her family's moved her from Minnesota to Silicon Valley and she's not happy. And what you're looking at right here is you're looking at three of the emotional sadness. Oh for. There's anxiety. Well, all of them actually. You're looking at joy beginning to be, you know, she's being, she's being upsert, usurped. All of a sudden, anger's there. You can see anger just seething there. And you're looking at all that going on and beginning to see that this girl's about to be hijacked. Friends, this is really happening. It's on an electrical basis. You've got 25 watts of power going in your brain. It's on a chemical basis and it's on a thought basis. It's all powerful. It's the most amazing thing in the world. And the key is, what you discover very clearly is all thinking is emotional state dependent, is that the whole key is to learn how to pull certain groups of emotions together in a kind of an emotional cocktail that allows you to produce a kind of Perception and thinking that is very amendable to amendable is that amenable to probability.

That means that you're going to have to get unglued from the current organization that you fell into, locked into.

And are now imprisoned by. And it starts with that observation. You're going, okay, I think I'm beginning to get this. And out of that you're also, you realize the brain really is a community of rival emotional programs, just like you've been seeing with inside out, that duke it out for control of the little girl's brain. Here, what you're looking at is imagine this right here is your mind. It's a governing committee that arises from the brain. And what you're looking at right here is you're looking at two spheres of influence. Two different parts of the self in competition with one another. One's trying to take control and they're having a showdown. Everybody's looking saying, who? What's going to happen here? The key is this mind right here. You didn't really have a choice about. You fell into it and everything happened. And before you were 12 years old, it was locked in, okay, but then when you become an adult, 25, 30 years of age, you can start saying, wait a minute, what if I wanted to go in and reorganize the governing committee? What if I wanted to take power away from something, from me being scared all the time and learning to soothe myself, calm myself, maintain myself and discipline myself and have the courage to look at myself deeply.

You're cooking here because when this happens.

You know you need it, okay? Because.

You should follow your rules, but you can't. That lets you know that this governing committee concept that I'm talking about is not balanced. Right? There's more like a mutiny going on. It's like a self destructiveness that you get to a particular moment and it doesn't want you to go further. I mean, I've had people that traded at a particular level and one guy, he traded at a high six figure account and every time he would go under seven figures, he had lose back down. And that cycle had been going on for 10 years. And he finally said, you know, I've had enough of this. And he and I got together and ultimately it was actually something he learned in his family. He came from a blue collar family and you know, his father adamantly believed that nobody was worth a million dollars. And sure enough, what happened is this traitor got to the million dollar area and every time he crossed over there, that rule, you're not worth a Million dollars goes back down and he'd lose down. He'd been playing around a million dollars for a very long time. This is how powerful emotional beliefs are. Bang, just like that. And what you'll discover is, is when you say, you know, I'm my worst enemy. No, what I'm asking in mindfulness and beginning to understand the mind is that you have a highly destructive element of the self called the inner critic. And.

It truly.

It tempts you, it criticizes you, it judges you, it does all this stuff. There's also other forces within the cell that are much more powerful, that when invoked, they can actually build a very stable, very patient, very disciplined, very courageous mind. But the thing is.

Noticing it after the fact just isn't going to work. That inner critic, for the Alpha who's jumping into trades and things like that.

He needs to recognize that it's actually destructive. It's not. He's going to need to learn a new way of leadership. For the person who is scarcity and just as scared the money's going to be taken away again, it comes down to, oh my God, what if it's taken away from me? That's not you, that's the committee having a mutiny. And you're going to have to wake up and recognize that no, all these voices within the self doesn't mean you're crazy. But it does mean you're crazy if you ignore them because they have, they are powerful. They are very powerful. And then.

Special kudos to the Alphas in here. They're the ones who have had a business and have done incredibly well. They've been incorporated, they have just, they have done everything and they know winning formula and they just look at it and say, I'm going to make money. And actually what happens is the secret that you have to learn is you have to heal the self limiting beliefs. An Alpha wants to make money to prove he's powerful, to prove that he matters. And that's what it's all about. You know, if I win, I have prestige, I have power, I have money. Remember that association between cavemen, power and money. And unfortunately what happens is that he makes things happen. Yet in trading, you don't make things happen. You see what the markets are going to give you. The Alpha's trying to prove himself. And yet the thing is, if you let winning and losing be the proof of who you are, then you're going to have a really hard time in trading.

Winning in money.

Can mean mattering for them. You realize that, oh, he's trying to matter. But he's actually using, he's trying to force his will upon the markets, which can't be done. And what he's discovering is he's tied his identity to his winning and all of a sudden he blows up. That's the way it works. The leadership has to change. And what I teach is how to discover the heroic elements with living within the self and learning how to access them. So that when you engage in certainty, you're not doing it from the historical organization that you fell into, no matter how good that used to be in another world. But you're doing it from a constructed self that knows how to work with probability and uncertainty and no longer associates.

Winning or losing with being. Winning and losing are about probability. The self, your worth as a human being is something else. Always. What you're going to be doing is always going to be about your mattering. Trying to prove you matter, trying to prove or disprove your worth, proving that you're adequate or proving that you're lovable. That's the whole thing. Those are the four self limiting beliefs that you're going to have to solve and most of you will have tried to skirt it. The secret is you're gonna have to go right through it. But you need to learn the skills of being able to do that. So now we're going, oh, these hidden strengths. And I like to use the.

Journey the Lord of the Rings. It's one of the most brilliant works of looking at what archetypes are. Archetypes were something that Carl Jung invented to talk about certain traits that were through all culture. And these traits were Ruler. Okay. Ganondorf. Not Ganondorf. Ergon. Magician. That would be Gandorf.

Warrior. Those are the ghost that is down there. And you start realizing in sage, you start realizing that you have to be able to have these qualities there. And they're part of your human genome. Of course they're there. But the thing is, what you have to learn is you have to learn how to.

Summon forward the discipline of ruler, the courage of warrior, the self. Boy, excuse me, self soothing of a caregiver and the impartiality to clear thinking of a sage. These exist within you. And if you learn emotional state management and learn how to summon these aspects of your, your humanness, you can change the mind that engages uncertainty. That, my friends, is possible. I see it all the time.

And.

Anytime.

The challenge of engaging uncertainty is not going to ever change that life is going to challenge you. Trading just condenses it so it's right in your face all the time. But I want you to take a look at this painting here. George Washington is crossing the Delaware on Christmas morning. They're about. And if you notice, these guys are not regular looking army soldiers, okay? These are ragtag group of people, people that he has put together along with Lafayette into a fighting machine. They are about to surprise attack the Prussians, the best soldiers in the world at that time. The reason the men are willing to do that is because of the leadership. The ruler, George Washington is that leadership. And you are going to have to find that leadership. One that allows growth, one that allows going. You know something? The truth is I. I can no longer abide by fearing to lose, fearing to fail. Your brain can only learn from failure. It does not learn from success. And what you have is you have a great learning that has to get done. So the thing is, is that if as long as you perceive losing as bad rather than the opening the door to learning, then you're hooked in a world that's not going to produce success. We're asking you to start realizing, wow, what mind are you bringing into this moment? Okay? That's the whole key. And as you start building that, you start with a different canvas. You start, you start saying, you know something? I, over time can change the very way, the very nature of my being. I can find, I can find that part of myself, that vibrant part of myself, and it can come home, it can be present and I can build a kingdom, a very different kingdom than the one that I inherited from history. I can do that. It's very powerful. Friends, the tools are here. And the key is what you need to understand beyond any shadow of a doubt is you do not control outcome, no matter how much it seems you do. But even though you can't control outcome, which is you know what winning is all about, you got to win and you don't control outcome. That's tragic flaw. But what you can control is the mind that you bring to the challenge of performance. Friends, this is a psychological edge that you need to win. And it is a secret.

Okay? I'm amazed by people when they first meet me. They don't know this stuff, but it's hidden in plain sight.

Where I found this was when I really became truly interested in the neural biology of consciousness and how the human brain organized experience. It's called autopoiesis. And began to recognize, oh my gosh, there are ways we can do it, but we can't. The tools that I see being used are not the tools that I use. Anymore. And what I found is that if you have a desire, you in fact, can build this mind that engages uncertainty with disciplined impartiality. If that's what you're looking for, we'd like to talk to you. And if you're just finding out about me and stuff like that, go to our website, get the free ebook, go to my YouTube channel, read all the articles on the website, just really cruise and start going, what is this guy talking about? What is this neurobiology? What is this emotional intelligence? It's the future, friends. If you go through all that and you think you know something.

I get it. I can read all the books and stuff like that. But knowledge by itself is not going to make a difference. What you have to do is you have to get that knowledge into experience, into new habits, into new ways of being in the world with new beliefs. And for that, my invitation to you is to our group course. That group course, our next One is in August 31st. Okay. And most people sign up a month or two in advance because they want to get the first lesson. The first lesson is emotional regulation. You have a lot of training to do because I'm expecting you to have done that training before you meet for the first time August 31st. There's five sessions. Okay. And we meet as a group. We go over basically the process that I use for you to reconstruct the mind that engages uncertainty. That's what we do. And if you sign up before August 24th, what I'm going to do is I will give you an emotional regulation workshop that on our website sells $199. I'm not. The reason I'm giving it to you is because I want you to start early. I get it. A lot of people recognize that. Randy, you're talking in a way that I've never heard before. I really need to listen to you, but I don't know. I want you to get in and learn this stuff because the emotional regulation section is really important. And also, if you. If you're one of those people who really like a mentor to work with you, look at our individual course. Read about it now. Also, all this stuff is@tradersstateofmind.com I welcome you. And the other thing is this is. We have also grown our. Our outreach to where we're moving outside of traders. If you're listening to this and going, randy, this is really interesting stuff, but I have friends that aren't traders. And what I would encourage you to do is to go to randyhowell.com R A N, D, E, H O W E L L. Could you type that in the thing and just start taking a look? It is, it is. This work we've talked about applied to self development outside of trading, it's taken all the trader lingo out of it and has it more of a standard stuff now. I want to thank you.

I want to thank you for being here. And what I also want is that if you we have about five minutes. If you have some questions I would like to be able to answer. How large are the groups? Good question. We do not allow more than 30. The one we're in right now I believe has 11. Okay. And it's a summer and it's always a smaller one. But we do not allow more than 30 because what happens is that.

People, people aren't treated right. When you get that, when you get beyond 30 and we've had them as much as 50 or 70 and we made a lot of money but I'm not sure how well we taught. Okay, now.

What is the best thing I can do at this point when I realized to myself was just taken over.

At that moment.

You have to start learning and basically starting to approach it. The very first thing to do is breathe. And what you do is. And when you get taken over and just you're wiped out, you're going to find yourself holding your breath and breathing very lightly. Tense, tense, tense, all sorts of great. And the very first thing is you go back to diaphragmatic breathing. You calm yourself down, otherwise you're not going to get anywhere. Okay. And after that there's lots of stuff, but that's where it starts. And if you take a look at it and say oh, don't darn it, that's happened again. I would ask you to say, hmm, look at this failure. This failure is actually an opportunity to learn. What am I going to do with this opportunity? Now if you're keeping doing the same stupid thing over and over and over again, obviously you're not interested in learning, you're interested in magical thinking. But that's the first thing is you breathe, you calm down and you forgive yourself for making a mistake.

Here's some terrorists.

I can read it. How can we rename word loss? Losing, Trade taking a loss so it can be less harmful to psychology because it's not about losing but about maintaining a healthy trading account. Well, you and I will have very different opinions of this is losing. What has to change is your understanding the ontology of losing.

For me, losing is part of trading. I don't necessarily. I don't see it as bad. I just see it as working the game of probability. Does losing mean that there's something wrong with me? That's the whole point. Losing simply means you landed on the wrong side of probability and Taurus. The thing you ask is this, is this a method mistake which I can do something about? Is this a psychological mistake which you can also learn, or is this just simply probability? I wouldn't change a thing. What you're looking at there is a good loss. Losses can be good. Every great trader is a fantastic loser. Let me give you an example. I have a. David may be here. David Dubay is a really fine trader. He, he went through the pits. He went to Abundant Market, a market maker. He runs a group. He trades other people's money. So he's actually a small little hedge fund. And.

He also trades sometimes intuitively. And he's in this group and he says, this is an intuitive group. This is an intuitive trade. A lot of people can't go into this trade, but people who are designated to be able to go into this one, let's go. They get into it and David gets into it. And he has a way of evaluating whether or not that's got the steam that his intuition was telling him. And he found out it didn't. He just got out with a small loss, didn't think a thing of it. Next day he comes there, he's talking to these other guys. He, Randy, I mean, David, that was the greatest trade of the month. You really missed it. And David said, no, I didn't. No, he didn't. I did exactly. What I'm supposed to do is that it showed me that I needed to take a small loss because it wasn't showing that it was going to work. If I had stayed in there, I would have been gambling like you. So the thing is, what we're talking about is changing your understanding of losing. Losing is just simply landing on the wrong side of probability relative to you. If it's psychological, you can do something about that. But we're not going to, you know, I'm not going to soft pedal losing. No, it's losing, but it means to me landing on the wrong side of probability. It doesn't mean anything to me about who I am as a being, human being. That's the deal. The loss allows you to open up and say, what is this teaching me? That's what I encourage. Okay.

Okay. Is elevated heart rate a good indicator predictor of emotional brain taking over? Absolutely.

In my more advanced work is we actually have a heart rate monitor sitting on top of your heart, an app that actually lays out a grid of four zones for your heart rate to be in. And what happens is that, for instance, if your heart rate happened to be 60 at rest, that heart rate is too low to trade from because you're not going to be able to concentrate. However, most people find that if their heart rate at rest is around 60, their heart rate, their peak performance heart rate is around 65 to 70, 72, 73. They know as long as they're in that zone, their mind's right. However, when it starts kicking up to, like high 70s, they realize that, oh, my God, heart rate, what heart rate is, it's an indicator of emotional arousal. And what you're looking at is the heart speeding up and it's sending adrenaline everywhere in the body. So, yeah, it's a great indicator. Your breath, muscle tension and your heart rate are very physical things you can use to see that it's happening. Let's see.

Can you put a link? I think that's it. And look at that. Perfect timing. So, friends, I want to thank you for our time together. My hope is that you learned and I hope particularly when you evaluate your losses, what I'm asking you to do is say, you know something. What is Randy saying that I can learn from and does he really have the tools that can help me? What I want you to do is critically look at the website, critically look at much more of these and find out, come to an answer and really decide whether or not you're putting, willing to put in the real work, the real emotional work of producing the mind that can trade. I thank you so much for your time. Be well.