The Self Limiting Beliefs that Keep Crashing Your Trading Psychology

Welcome everyone. My name is Randy Howell with Trader State of Mind and I am delighted that you're here. First things first though, let's find out if you can hear me. If some folks will just simply type in a Y into the chat box and just let us know that yes, we're heard. Yes, there you go. Thank you, John. And for those folks who got knocked off just, you know, 15, 20 minutes ago, we apologize. We were having some technical issues that we don't really understand what happened but we switched computers and here we are and we're thankful. So anyway, a couple things just to kind. It's just housekeeping rules is that for people who haven't been and watched my presentations, I hold questions toward the end. That doesn't mean you can't ask questions as we move. Just type them in and then we'll have some questions to start. Okay. So I encourage that. And anyway, other than that I think we're ready to go. So let's do this. We're looking at the self limiting beliefs that keep crashing your trading. What do they look like for you? Because ultimately a lot of times people don't even know that they have self limiting beliefs in the background of their awareness of that's cutting through performance and plowing down their ability to produce consistent profitability. Matter of fact, today I'm working with a guy who's very logical. He's an engineer and he wants to stay technical on me. Yet what he's doing is when you look at his trading you will see that every time he starts making money he gets excited and then starts disobeying his rules and he crashes and he ends up giving that money back. And he has a cycle of doing this. He doesn't want to show me that. What he wants to show me this is what I did. This is what I did and I said no. What I'm interested in is what triggers the event into this spiraling. Okay. Ultimately it will be having to do with self limiting beliefs that are lying beneath conscious threshold. And that's what you really have to get at in trading psychology. Because really as a trader you have stepped into very foreign country. And what you're about to learn is that you know something, what I don't know about what it's required to produce success in trading is in fight fact going to bite me. And that when you step into the world trading you're going to at some moment learn that you're going to have to really start rebuilding your psychology to match the needs of the uncertainty of trading Friends, that's the preamble. And let's just say, hmm, in the beginning, everything was good. And it was one of those things where you could just simply, you know something? I finally got it. When I'm in simulation, I can almost print money and it's kind of like, hey, man, why can't I just make trading work like it should? And we all see that. We, we do, most of us do quite well in simulation when the money's not real, okay, when you can hit the reset button and life goes on and capital hasn't evaporated from your account. But when that happens, all of a sudden what you discover is all that cognitive knowledge, IQ knowledge that you've developed from all those trainers, all this, this and this and this, getting all those free things from when you're at seminars and stuff like that and realizing, you know something, this is same old, same old. The thing is, you know, ultimately what's going on here, and that's what we want to look at because ultimately it's about the development of emotional intelligence that really matters. For success in trading those emotions, you're going to have to learn literally how to design emotions so that when you encounter uncertainty, which is this bread and butter of trading, that you do not trigger to instinctive, reactive patterns that have been going on for the last six and a half million years. That's the deal, okay? And most of us keep pushing, but ultimately you're asking your brain to willingly step into its worst nightmare. That's trading versus the ability to control outcome and other endeavors in your life. So that's where we're at. So what we're doing here is we're saying.

Once you get knowledge down to where it's working, where you're competent in knowledge, the weakest link in your trading system is going to be you. It's the one that keeps crashing. It's the one that has you jumping into trades that you have no business in. It's the one that when it starts getting into your, you know, your hard stop, you start saying, I'm gonna give it a little room. I don't have any reason. But you know something? I just think. I just feel. I just believe that it's going to come back and you jump into that and you're gambling friends. What causes a perfectly sane human being, by the way, which you're not, to become this crazy person? Trading or that link may be when you're, when you, when you finally have gotten into the trade, the order fill, and all of a sudden, oh, my God, I'm stuck in the trade and it starts bouncing around. I mean, it starts really. It starts really reaching all that stuff. And it finally gets to the black. And then you go, what do you do? Do you jump out.

Or do you let it ride to the target? Most people jump out. It's part of the journey of trading into designing the mind that can handle. Handle that. Talking is like fish stories, friends, is that you can talk to your blue. And a lot of traders do that. They talk the game of trading, but they don't play the game of trading in a professional way. That's what we're going to be looking at. What's actually beneath that? And so here's the deal.

The road to trading failure is paved with good intentions. I don't know any trader who has ever talked to me that wasn't trying hard. It's kind of like a long time ago. Back in the 60s, my favorite football team was the Dallas Cowboys and Tom Landry was its head coach. And one day his quarterback is doing the very best he can and just getting beaten up really bad, just not moving the team and stuff like that. So he call, he calls over the backup and says, can you go in there and make things right? And the quarterback said, I can try.

And Landry just said, go sit down on the bench. The guy out there right now is trying to. So you begin to see that there is an invisible wall that you keep running into and you don't understand why you can't work your way through the problem. But the problem is no matter how many explanations you produce, the proof is sitting there in your P and L statement, something's wrong. And what I want you to do is start really beginning to recognize something. It's this is that when you believe something, a lot of that belief is built around lie. Your brain, my friend, will lie to you. Because I promise you, your performance beliefs, the ones that count, are being reflected in your P and L, not in the stories you tell yourself.

Not in the stories you tell yourself. This is where you have to become a detective and recognize instead of fearing that trading account, that's the only facet that is trying to tell you the truth. If you're willing to listen about the drive, the emotions about the beliefs that are driving the way you're performing. Because ultimately anybody can trade, anybody can do that until you're put to the test. And then when put the test, you really discover something and you're going to. But why do I always get into these things and explodes on me? It Just happens automatically. I'm not even there. Well, I'm going to tell you right here. You're looking at a symbol that everybody knows. This symbol.

Don'T touch a hot stove eye. Everybody knows that. Actually that's an old limbic learning that you had.

Long before you could think is you touch something, it was hard, hot, and you learned, don't touch that. That's a limbic learning. These are before beliefs. Literally what that limbic learning is doing is coordinating action between you and your environment so that you don't lose. Okay, and, or die. That understand. That's actually what losing is to the limbic brain is death. The brain created all these experiences as it engaged ambiguity of uncertainty. And all it was trying to do was build a way to keep you alive. That's what it's doing. It's doing it on a subconscious level. This is not something you're thinking about. It's something that you know 95% of what you think and do and act and stuff like that has nothing to do with the thinking brain. It has everything to do with, with the limbic learning behind your performances. That's why the trading account is so important. And the truth is, is that a lot of times we just don't want to acknowledge it. But the thing is, is that's where the limbic learnings are. And what I want to do is I want to show you how this works. If you take a look on that left, where you have the beliefs, okay, and all of a sudden you look out at the experience and, and you decide based on your beliefs what the truth is. There is no truth out there, but there is a brain that create through its beliefs, creates the certainty of a belief. And what it shows is that, okay, in this limbic learning, I've learned how to negotiate by trial and error the environment. And then it wires it into pattern. And then on the left, what you're looking at is you're looking at emotional stimuli coming in, emotional data coming into the sensory. Yeah, this is on the right. And you're seeing it come into the sensory thalamus. That sensory thalamus. The best way you could look at that is it's kind of like an air traffic controller. You know that air traffic controller has a bunch of airplanes in the sky. And some are important, some are not. But if there's something that's really hot, something that's really an emergency, what's going to happen is that air traffic controller is, is going to say that one is on the, on the fast route. The short route, the low route, and all of a sudden all action takes place. Okay, Instead of the rest of the airplanes being okay, we'll just let the thinking brain get a hold of it. No, what we're going to do the instinctive reactive thing now, that low road, and there's that air traffic controller deciding that, oh, that's dangerous, that's a threat. We have to act now. And this is happening all the time, the time in your trading from risking capital to being in the trade. And it, it just working against you to like all that stuff of taking a loss, taking a win. And all of a sudden when that low road triggers in nanoseconds, friends.

Okay, that information is the amygdala triggering the fight flight response. And you're instinctively reactive to the moment you've stayed out of the trade, you jumped into the trade, you've gone nuts when that thing was just floating around, altering in its range and you started moving your stops. All that stuff you're in fight flight, however, it takes 0.25 seconds, many seconds in order for that same information to get to the thinking brain. That's the problem, friends, it takes that long. Then what happens is both the amygdala and the sensory cortex tune into the hippocampus. It's where memory is stored. And that memory has been created based on threat. And so it pulls it up and can you see how you have been set up? You did not bring the right brain, friend. And the reason you didn't bring the right brain. This illustration will show you. We like to think we're this really modern, geeky kind of guy driving the brain and all that kind of stuff while we trade. That's the neocortex at the thinking brain, unfortunately, is that all thinking is emotionally based. So you do not. You're not a rational being who has emotions. You are an emotional being who rationalizes. And every once in a while, when under stress, you activate that caveman character in the backseat and he takes over driving and functioning. And boy, I'm going to tell you something. That's when the limbic learnings just jump. And afterwards you may rationalize, but the truth is, you might admit it. You know, I don't know what the heck happened to me. Randy, this is a common thing that I hear. I don't know what happened to me. All I know is that I was going along just fine. I got excited, and before I knew it, I was just doing crazy things. And I know better than this. What you've just experiences is limbic beliefs, learnings in action, and blowing away the thinking brain, that's what you've got here.

Now, what actually just happened.

On the left side, all that blue area, what you discovered, that's when the brain is getting the information. Air traffic controller is saying, oh, everything's cool, everything's fine. I'll send that information to the thinking brain, and it'll concentrate on it, and it'll give us the right decisions, okay? However, if that aircraft controller says, danger, danger, danger, what happens is the higher cortex is just absolutely disabled. It's hijacked, it doesn't exist. And the amygdala takes over and fight flight happens. And sometime later, after the emotional avalanche and all your money's gone is what you do is that thinking brain comes back online and you go, what just happened? What just happened? And if you had this experience, have you been sitting there and just sitting there, minding your business, picking up some coins, stuff like that? You're never expecting it. And before you know it, Bamboo, okay? It can happen in a number of places. Think about it. Think about where your problem areas, the patterns that keep happening over and over and over again. This guy that I was working with this morning, really smart guy, okay? And he's actually a profitable trader. This is not the problem. We're looking at getting him to where he's consistently profitable, producing a sustainable income. We're not. We're not talking about getting him to two or three or four weeks of profitability. We're talking about moving it beyond that. But ultimately, what happens with him is that he has an enormous desire to succeed. He wants to win. And that winning, when he takes a win, when he actually wins something.

It gets accelerated. He starts getting, whoa, look at this. And I call it euphoria. You. You might call it overconfidence. And he starts making decisions. He opens himself up to making decisions not from his thinking brain, but from his emotional brain. Take this trade. Take this trade. And before you know it, after that success.

It destabilizes the trading mind. And he starts using that destabilized mind to look at criteria for trading or how to manage a trade. And what he did is he had 2% parameters of risk, risk management on the table, and before you knew it, he was up to 10% and he lost. Okay? So he really compounded the problem because he didn't want to take the loss.

Do you see how this happens? He gets steamrolled. And this is what happens when you run into the instinctive emotional brain and the emotional beliefs that drive it, and this is basically what it looks like, okay? You're sitting there and you're going, wow. Well, what do you think is going to happen right there? You're looking at a guy anticipating either winning or losing. Okay? Winning means that he prevails and he gets past this 4,500pound cat. If he loses, he becomes that cat's food. Now, what do you think's motivated, what do you think's motivating here? That's what's in our DNA, okay? It's not just the culture that says, I want to win, I want to win. No, it's much more than that. You have to win to prevail. If you lose, you're dead. Okay? That's the instinctive primitive brain that you brought to trading. Now it may have been really good in other circumstances, but all of a sudden you're risking, you're creating a simulation or where you're risking capital, something really precious to you, like your life to an uncertain outcome. And this is certainly, this image right here is certainly uncertain, okay? And you're going, out of that, out of that stress, out of that situation, there comes the instinctive emotional beliefs blowing past the thinking things. One of my biggest jokes about some forms of belief change is that, okay, here's the belief that you have right here. Is that really, really working for you? Would this belief work better for you? So you're going to just start believing this? No, that's not the way it works. You know, the limbic system is not going to give up a belief that it's wired into circuitry just because your thinking brain thinks it's a really good idea. You have to approach it very differently. But this is the thing that you need to really grasp right here, is that this man's facing winning or losing. And here graphically, what happens when you're talking about winning or losing, even one is saying, I'm triggering, I'm triggering to aggression. I'm going to fight that tiger. Now, one guy with the club's not, I don't know if I'd take on a 650 pound animal, the other one's running. But, you know, maybe that's a good idea. At the same time is one of the things that you learn when encountering really wild animals like bears, cougars and things like that is you don't run from them because then you trigger the stalk, the chase instinct. So you need to really go, wow, you know something? My instincts, my survival instincts are killing me in trading friends. This is your ancient emotional brain talking. And Your need is going to be able to have to change it. Here's what I want you to look at in terms of winning.

Here you have a 30 ton woolly mammoth. You have a group of people, clansmen, who know how to hunt this animal, okay? And at the same time.

They'Re probably going to win. But at the same time, even if they win, there's going to be some losses. People die trying to take down an animal like this, okay? So what I want you to see is that particularly for the alphas, the risk takers, this is the derivative of it, is that you have to win. You cannot fail against this animal. Your whole clan is waiting for you because you'll have a bunch of other people waiting. They've got the butcher stuff. They, they've got, they're going to take every ounce of that animal and they're going to do something with it, except with a large intestine, okay? The thing is though, winning, prevailing can charge us up because you have to get charged up to attack aggressively an animal like this, I want you to see that brain is still in operation. And if you have ever attacked the markets, okay, stalked them, you know, you sat down, okay, I'm, I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to make something happen. At that moment, you're attacking.

Okay? At that moment you're attacking. Alphas do really well in businesses and in corporate world and they bring the same winning attitudes over to trading and they blow up accounts, yet at the same time they've got the winner instinct in them and you're looking at where it comes from. It's powerful and you're going to have to override that. And in overriding it, you, you as the human being, you have been given, you have been given.

The chance of a lifetime, the chance of eternity. In that, what happens is you hold the capacity to take the emotional brain and the thinking brain to bring them into partnership with one another. This is what has to be relearned if you're to become a successful trainer. Seb, hold on. What are you saying? Trainer instead of trainer? Okay. Sometimes my wife has to correct me, even though when it's, it's not really warranted, but that's the way it works around here. So what you've got, you've got a really big deal. You have, as a human being, you have something that others in the animal kingdom don't have. The, you actually have the capacity of becoming the kind of person that can unite these. You can start to learn to manage the instincts that we came with. And you can start learning to manage the thinking brain so that it partners with the, with the emotional brain. And friends, that's where we're going here. And it's really about the way you respond to change and uncertainty is through emotion. And this right here, what, what you're seeing is a diaphragm of the emotional brain. You'll see the thalamus, that's that little fat thing in the middle. You see that amygdala, that's two almond little shaped things at the end of these spokes. And you see the hippocampus, okay? And what hippocampus doing is doing the primitive way of looking at it and going, you know something, I can, I can take memory and I can pull it into situations where I've had experience. I can pull them together and produce emotional responses to the environment around me. Okay? And unfortunately, the way that it's worked over the last God knows how many generations, it's not going to work for you. In trading, this is what has to really be looked at.

So what we're really getting at.

What we are really interested in, are the beliefs that drive your performances in the face of uncertainty. It's these original limbic learnings. They have become subconscious to you. It doesn't mean they're not there. It doesn't mean that they can't become implicit to you, which means conscious rather than to stay implicit. Me, I'm sorry, it's subconscious. They have to become explicit and you have to be able to start saying, how do I change them? But what ultimately you have to do in trading is to become, to become comfortable with uncertainty. Your brain's not designed to do that. So ultimately your brain is designed to want to control outcome.

Not to be wrong. It wants to win and to be able to predict outcome. That's what it wants to do. When it can't do that, it feels vulnerable. And then uncertainty shows up. And uncertainty is hotwired to the amygdala in Fight Flight. That's the circuitry that you're going to have to learn to disconnect and rewire. Okay? It's all being shown to you in your trading account. And this is where we go, well, okay, well what you're saying, Randy, is that I have self limiting beliefs that I might not even know about, that somehow I'm hitting.

And I don't want to see, or they're just simply not accessible to me right now. That is stopping me from developing the potential I have as a Trader. Yeah, that's what we're talking about. Of course, you might not have ever seen them. You know, the thing is, is that I don't have a belief that I need air. It wouldn't occur to me. I just breathe air. But at the same time, if I were in a vacuum with no air at all, I would soon find out quickly that I really needed air. That belief about what the body needs would become front and center. But until that moment, I just breathe air. It's not a consideration, it's just like. It's just like, so familiar that I don't even notice it.

So.

What is it really has to be mastered. Okay. And here.

What'S actually been sabotaging your trader? You. These beliefs that you have identified with. Okay. Have been hidden from you. You so identified that you wouldn't even know they were there. What we want to do is we want to unmask them. We want to see what the beliefs are. The critical beliefs are that it sabotages your trading. Okay, we're going to unmask them. The first one.

To prove myself, I must make money. I must win. I have to be a winner. This is a crazy belief.

Thinking that you have control of winning and trading is like thinking that you can fly without wings. The key is there are very successful traders who win 40% of their trades. And they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have to keep their loser small. They're not going to hit the. They're not going to hit that hot. Stop. They're going to say, this is not working. It's no longer in my plan. I'm just not going to wait to get stopped out. I see that it's not working. My hypothesis was wrong. I'm out of here. He's not thinking about winning. He's thinking about being a highly effective trader. But what I want you to see is that many traders, particularly Alphas, they hold the belief that they must win and make things happen to matter as a human being. The flaw, of course, is you're trying to control something you can't control winning or losing in trading. And you think about it on the flip side, losing, you also don't have control over whether or not you lose or not. And you're going to lose a lot as a trader, and yet you have a primitive brain is dead set against losing because that means dead. Okay, so there you go. What's next?

I don't. I don't deserve to make easy money. And here you see money chasing someone, okay? And I can't tell you, I went to work with a guy a couple years ago that was trading with a high six figure account, pretty good sized trader. And every time he moved over into the seven figure arena, he would start losing back down into the high six figures again. This had been going on for 10 years. So we knew there was something about that seven figure mark that literally had somehow wheedled into his brain. Ultimately, when it came down to it, what was happening in the family of his origin, the law, the rule, the family rule was that nobody was worth a million dollars.

Bingo. And all of a sudden I don't deserve to make seven figures because guess what, you know, that's what I learned. And it was unexamined. It was an implicit belief. I didn't know it was there. And when he finally got it to be explicit, conscious he was able to work on it. And I'm glad that say that he went on to say, yeah, he's working seven figures now and that was several years ago. So I have no idea what he's doing now. But I want you to see is how many of you, when you start blowing things up, you have good days, good weeks, good months, then all of a sudden you give it back and then more. There's a very strong chance that the operational belief behind the scenes is I don't deserve to be making this money. I have to work hard to be successful. And you know, punching a few keys is not, it's not working hard. And you can see this dilemma and that is, and you're going, but I don't. Randy, that can't be. Look at your family, look what was said, look what you've come to learn about. Do you deserve to make this easy money.

A big one, huge one? I'm not good enough. Have you ever heard that internal commentary inside the head telling you it's not good enough, you're not going to make it. What kind of idiot are you for thinking you could have done this in trading? Every, every trader I've met as they journey to, in their involvement has that. But the thing is you, it may not be good enough. It can be that you're not adequate, that you're not smart enough to do all this or that you're never going to make it, they're just not good enough. And what happens is you fight that belief. You don't want to acknowledge, you want to do all this positive thinking stuff and you got these affirmations, I'm a successful trader. And you got the visualizations of all the success and all the stuff. And yet what happens is there's that voice that keeps popping up, because the voice of destruction living within you is something that I call the inner critic. Little things like that are not going to work. It's always looking for an opportune time to judge and to criticize and to tempt you. So I'm not good enough. What's next? This is one of my favorite.

Scarcity. A lot of people might call this fomo, but I call it scarcity. What I have will be taken from me. Okay, this, what happens is I'm going to give you an example of how fomo, how scarcity works. I worked with a trader, very successful now, but was successful when I met her, who's a proprietary trader. And basically her firm came to her and said, okay, the problem is this. We really like you, but you need to. You're leaving way too much money on the table, and if you can't solve that problem, then we're gonna have to let you go. And so she ended up finding me. We started working together. And her history is she grew up, she has pure Scandinavian blood, and she's part of the immigration that came through Minnesota and Wisconsin. They had 40 acres on homesteading, and her family had that setup. And she's growing up in this thing, and at 40 acres, it's not really enough to make it, and it's marginal. Are you going to make it this year? Is the bank going to take you home? You never had the good clothes. And what she would do is she would watch her, her father sit at the kitchen table, his office, and decide what bill to pay and agonize over it. And she grows up with that scarcity. Oh, my gosh, it could be taken from me. And you can understand why she's leaving too much money on the table because she got to profitability. And then she would take. She would take the risk off, take the money, and then it would. It would hit targets. She was scared that it was going to be taken from her. Okay, scarcity. And most people who work for somebody and who will not say, oh, man, it's just, I'm not going to do that. I don't like my job. I will complain about it, but the truth is, is that, you know, I could fail if I go out on my own. Okay, Scarcity, friends, powerlessness. You know, a lot of times you ever been in a trade.

And it just starts going crazy on you. It's just bouncing around. It's just fighting you. It's underwater. And, you know, the thing is it's getting closer and closer to your hard stop. And, you know, you're just fighting it. You're fighting it and going, oh, my God. It's overwhelming. It's overwhelming me. And you just kind of give up powerlessness. Yeah. So that's the, that's the, that's the beliefs. Now, my. The point is this.

These beliefs come from your evolutionary psychology. They didn't just pop up in your family of origin. You just didn't learn them through adaptation with your mind. A chunk of that's there, don't get me wrong. But the potential comes out of our evolutionary past and is exaggerated by the mental shaping that we go through and as the brain adapts us to the world that it's going to be living in. And again, I want you to look at this. You know, these guys are out for lunch. This is not going to the chick fil a.

Outside line to get. Get a salad, okay? This is hunting down, literally hunting down and killing. You know, you eat what you kill and unfortunately it can kill you. That's the whole basis. And they're reinforced. And all of a sudden, under stress, they pop up. You may have them tamped down during most of the time, but under stress they pop up and there they are absolutely mutilating your trading. Now, this is, this is important.

Those beliefs are not true, but they've taken on the power of certainty. And what I want you to understand is this is beliefs are assumptions, biases that have been encoded into the truth. And the truth actually is an emotional state, okay, where the chemistry of that emotion.

Causes you to have a sense of certainty.

It's chemistry. As Stephen Colbert says, it's truthiness. You know, it feels true, therefore it must be true. The key is, is that in trading, you have one arbiter of what's true or not. It's whether or not you have effective beliefs that engage the uncertainty of the markets. That's the only arbiter. All the other stuff is talk and bad talk, too. And as long as you're allowing certainty to influence you in creating a new truth about your effectiveness as a trader.

You'Re going to be in trouble. Friends. So we're looking at this and going, wow, this is getting tough. Hold on one second. I need to do a cough and you don't need to hear me, so I am going to silence this for a second.

Okay, My TV break is over now. Let's go from there. Once the brain decides a belief is true.

This, this illustration from Etcher is really how it works. What Happened is the brain starts writing the code, okay, into the brain to create the mind that starts keep re rewriting that code until it changes. This is how we get stuck in self limiting patterns and beliefs. But what I want you to hear is you do not see and then believe, friends. You believe and then you see. This is what has to be disrupted. You have to recognize man, my brain will lie to me. Absolutely. It's flesh.

Okay? And it's built for something very different than you want it to do. It's built for short term survival and it will attached to any story that matches up with success and not losing. Even if it's lucky incidents, it will come to believe that that's what. Oh yeah, now this is my lucky charm. No, it's not. It's just, it's just, it's just belief. And you've built a, you've built a story that allows you hopefully to calm down, but hopefully not into gambling. Now the question is, how do you start working with all this stuff? How do you start saying, you know something? If you look at the Hulk there and look at him as your, your response to threat, that's the primitive amygdala, that's the primitive emotional brain reacting to stress. The empath there is calming him down. So in calming down your instinctive survival behavior toward uncertainty because it's a threat, the first step is breath.

Breath is actually part of an emotion, as is muscle tension. And if you understand that going okay, well how is that possible, Randy? It's possible because the way you breathe influences the intensity of an emotion. Like for instance in the relaxation response by Herbert Benson. What he's doing is he's pairing diaphragmatic or bellows breathing with stressful events that stress usually hit anxiety or anger. But unfortunately what he was, well, fortunately what he was training is under that circumstance, you're going to be doing diaphragmatic breathing and the anger or the fear is not going to be able to take root. That's how powerful breath can be. Then relaxing the tension in the muscles. What you've done is you've just hit the brakes on emotional arousal. And friends, that's something if tomorrow start trading, get a mirror, get a video feed on yourself and watch the emotions on your face. Watch the tension in your eyes, your forehead, your scalp, your jaws, your tongue, your neck, your arms. And then also watch the way you're breathing. You're going to be holding your breath. A good way to accelerate, a good way to accelerate the fight flight response. You're going to Be breathing rapidly with the top of your lungs. A good way to cut off oxygen to your brain. To move it to the big muscles ready for fight. Flight. The first step right here is to interrupt the anger. Breathe. And obviously, in our classes, this is one of the very first core things that I teach is you have to learn to breathe unnaturally compared to the way that you've learned to breathe. Or you never will be able to get the door of the mind where the real, real fun begins. Because that's where all these hidden beliefs are. The next thing in my process is I teach learning to observe. And this is really called you and your thoughts are not the same. You and your beliefs are not the same. But the observer that you are is so identified with those thoughts that they become you. Your job is like on the right, where you step back out of all those thoughts. And you stop identifying with thoughts and beliefs as who you are. They're just simply one potential organization of a self that you currently are. You can become a very different future self.

Okay? Because ultimately.

Hold on.

Ultimately.

I'm with quantum mechanics, boys. I believe that the reality exists as potential. And the observer of that potential is what brings forth its shape.

Hold on one second.

Okay, friends, thank you for bearing with me. And here is when you begin to observe, what you do is you begin to become the observer of the inner commentary.

What you're going to find is a lot of judgment, criticism and temptation from something that I call the inner critic. It's more like a prosecuting attorney. It's the one that judges you.

It's the one that criticizes you.

That's the thing, is that you're listening to it, but this time you're not identifying with it. This makes all the difference in the world. With your ability to develop the right mind to bring to trading. Rather than the historical mind that you did bring to trading. And, friends.

This is a big deal. This is a big deal. And a lot of my work is built on that. However.

What we want to do is more than disrupt this inner critic. This negative appraisal of everything you do as a human being. Not just your performances, but what you want to do. We want to redevelop the potential that you are as a human being. So that it's best suited for probability thinking rather than survival, certainty thinking. That's what your ancient brain is bringing. And what we want is this. We want this other kind of thinking. We want the potential mind. We want the mind that can handle probability.

And fortunately, what happens is you have empowering Emotional programs that I often call archetypes that are available for you to, to be able to cultivate, to bring forward their emotional programs that developed with us as social mammalians when we were hunter gatherers, there had to be a leader, and usually that was the person who was tallest. Because they could see further, they become leaders. At the same time, they also needed to be able to have good advice about what to do. Those became the sages. They needed nurturers, they needed self soothing to take care of the children coming up and growing up into the clan. They also needed warriors. They needed to be able to protect their group, their clan, their tribe, because there was lots of forces out there. So this became something that was embedded into our being. So they're there. They are literally on your genome. Your job is to develop the discipline of a ruler, the courage of a warrior, the self soothing of a caregiver. Big time, please, big, big. Without the self soothing, the self compassion of the caregiver, you're not going to change your implicit beliefs. And then also you also have to develop again. That warrior is going to protect you. It's the one that stands to the saber tooth tiger. So you're going to chisel a new self from where you are now. And I hope you don't look like that, but sometimes we do. Now with that, with training.

You learn how to summon these aspects of the self into the foreground of your mind when stress occurs. And probably to me, one of the best examples of the archetypes is in this particular group of the Lord of the Rings, where you're really beginning to see.

Frodo really is the consummate warrior. He realizes the war is within him. All these other people are doing things, but he's the only one that has the kind of internal strength to look evil in the eye and to destroy it. Then you have Gandorf over there and he's the wise one. Very necessary. You have a ruler in the making, you have nurturers in the makings, you have warriors.

All this lives in the community of your mind.

I actually can see of your mind as a governing committee, okay, where the emotional programs have been given voice. And initially when that ruler begins to wake up, he realizes, oh my God, I have a mutiny going on my hand. I have disorder and I need to start ordering in, getting this mind in gear so that it can act as a team to move forward into the future. That's what we're looking for. And when you do that, miracles happen. So you begin to override the brain's instinctual response to uncertainty and risk. You break the chain of those patterns of response, the ones that you discovered and go, why do I keep doing this stuff? These are the kind of tools that you're going to have to have. You're gonna, you're gonna have to be able to manage the emotion. You're gonna have to be able to get it to beliefs that generate this. It all boils down to the belief about your capacity to manage the uncertainty, the challenges of living that you as an organism encounter. And in trading in a very short time frame, double dose. But out of that, what you're looking to do is to create a future self, a potential self that is very different. And there's self mastery. You really begin to self master the instinctual mind and begin to blend it with the training, with the thinking mind to produce a new being. That's really what we do. Now how do you go about doing this? How do you really become the change? Because you're not going to find it in a book. I have people who have watched every over 200 of them, every video that I have on YouTube, every article I've written. They've read my books numerous times and they say, well, Randy, I still, you know, where's the knowledge I need to change?

The knowledge is that you have to become the change. It's just not good enough to know about archetypes and emotional programs. You have to learn to master them.

You have to master them. You have to be tested and you have to be completely comfortable with the testing. Now how do you do that? Well, we, we encourage you to start looking at our group course. It just so happens the one that's about to start soon is already, it's already closed. We have a limit on the number that can be there so that we can basically take care of our group and make sure they get good, good attention. And. But we would be starting one later and I'm guessing in September. And a lot of people, a lot of people sign up two and three months in advance because they want to get a head start on the course so that when they. And this course is really fast, it's fast paced and if you're not ready for it, it'll run over you. And that's why a lot of people have decided I need to start this course early. I don't know how far I'm going to get into it, but I'm going to start this course so that I can be studying before it starts. Because when it starts, my promise to you, it starts At a gal. And people who just sign up that day, they go, oh my God, I'm so far behind. And it's hard. It is start early. The deal is it's in a virtual classroom. It's got five group meetings with me. It's, it's a gotowebinar just like this. And you receive copies of all the recordings and all the essential skills, the guided meditation, the articles, all that stuff are there for you to be able to work with in the virtual classroom. It's been a powerful, powerful way for people to really wake up to what's necessary and for them to begin the process of change that's going to have to happen for them to become successful traders. Okay, now, and if you, if you sign up early, okay, we're going to give you a gift that if you want to go buy it, it's $199 on our, on our website or you can get it for free for signing up early. Not because I want to induce you to sign up early so we can get your money, though that's not a bad deal. What we're doing is we want you to start early so that you will be prepared for this course. Because I, we used to get a lot of people that simply were not prepared for the intensity of this course. And we started going, what can we do to get these people to sign up early so they're ready for this course? Because we're, you know, we, we are looking for people motivated to work and change. We're not interested in people who want to find the secret sauce. We're interested people who say, I need to become the change. I can't change the fact that, that I can't control outcome. I can't change the fact that I want to win. I can't change the fact that my body is going to want to control outcome and predict it and predict what's going to happen. But what I can do is I can learn how to work with it and to calm things down and to establish a new mind. So that's, that would be the thing. And the schedule and more information go to that place. And the other thing.

We do offer an individual course and it's for highly, this is for highly motivated people and who can afford to spend $4,000. Okay. It's highly comprehensive, it is highly personal.

It'S powerful course. And the thing is that if you're serious about it and before you would consider it, you need to literally, when you, when you contact us, Dolores is going to be asking, you've read this, have you read this? You need to be doing this reading. We don't want people to show up thinking that they're going to have an hour ready howl and they're going to talk and reality is going to change and all that stuff. No, we want people well prepared, understanding, and they can ask better questions and they can utilize that hour much more effectively and find out whether or not they want to work with me or whether or not they think questions, what I'm teaching can work for them.

Yeah, you need to go to the website and read about the individual course and the group course. Okay. And so the key is, is that I invite you into September. I know why, it's June. Well, I'm sorry. What happens is that our, our spring and our summer course filled up very rapidly and we don't want to have more than 30 people in the course. Okay. So the deal is, is that we're, we're looking at September and we hope that you will look and we will hope that you will take advantage. Take advantage of like yeah, I need to start early and this because you're going to be running into a lot of neurobiology. Okay. That's one thing some people say. Well, Randy, you're, you're. It's pretty thick reading. Yes, it is. I'm not looking for people who are not motivated to change. I'm looking for people who are people looking for what is causing them to not be able to accomplish what they want to accomplish. It so happens that neurobiology has a lot of powerful, powerful, powerful ways of understanding your flesh and your mind and emotion cognition that you need. Now, I want to thank you, I really do. I, I get a kick out of outreach and touching people and trying to open people's eyes to what they're walking into when they start trading because people just don't get it and they start going in. I'm working hard, I'm smart. Why isn't this, why is this not working? So if you have questions, write them in.

Oh, here's long one, John. Okay. This is from John. Randy, would it be possible to hear more about your one on one coaching sessions? I'm less interested in the group courses and more about sessions you're having with some of the guys you mentioned earlier. I'm a bit cognizant about the pricing and would like to begin allocating some of my income for this purpose. Otherwise my dumb ass self, not that I didn't use it, those are, that's John's words, will surely gamble it all away Again in the Forex markets and end up stuck in the same loophole of blowing up my accounts.

Every month. I've lost here and end up in the same loophole blowing up every month. P.S. be nice to your wife. Bless our better halves for tolerating our caveman behavior. True, true, true. I have to get back to work now. Oh, somebody else. Okay. The main thing about working with me on an individual basis is that. Yeah, first of all, read. Read the individual course stuff, John. And the second part is this is that basically the big deal is when people decide to work with the individual, they want to work with me personally. Okay. And in the end, in the group course, you don't get that. And it's 10 sessions over a period of three to four, four and a half months. Okay. And generally that's. We're together for an hour, 75 minutes. Okay. And what we do is we go through a process. It's highly structured. It's like going into a graduate school course with a curriculum. We start at breathing. We go to mindfulness. We go to the internal dialogue. We start finding out how to create the empowered mind, finding these archetypes or these emotional programs. And then we learn to. To test you in the crucible of trading so that it's real. It's very powerful. It's very. It's very personal because we. We get to the teeth of what's causing the problem. That's what I'll say on that. Rosario. Rosario.

No money involved. Oh, the blue. Okay, about the first. About the first belief to prove myself, I need to make money. Notice that this kind of emotional hijacking happened also when trading in demo. Whoa. Okay. Account where one knows there is no money involved. So I try to read my inner critic. Not so much about money, but about very much more about the win survived versus lost dead cavemen. If not, I can't explain myself. The same behavior on the demo. The same behavior on demo account can Entering. What I'll say is there are some folks who basically they. They. They flip out. They have the same reactions and demo as they do in. In real and live trading where there's actually money at risk. And I often ask people to start working with minis are micros in order to be able to just lower their risk. I know they're more expensive, but the thing is you're trying to train the brain for trading. What I'll say is that in your case what happens is we would start. We would start with you and demo and get at the problems there. And once we solve them or came to a place where, okay, we can manage this. We would move to the live stuff where. And we would start small because we don't want to. We don't want to basically overexert the brain to what it can't handle. I'm a real believe in stress inoculation so that we build up, build up, build up, build up. But it's what you've got is common. Okay, so, okay, here's William. Can entering trades that a trader shouldn't have been, shouldn't have entered and caused damage to the account be the same as the actions an addict. Of course it can. An addict can know better, but still continue with behavior that's destructive to the account. Yeah, basically, if you look at the excitement factor of jumping into trades and if you take a look at the anticipation of a snort of cocaine, you got the same animal. The excitement is called dopamine. And what happens is what cocaine does in the synapses, it actually generates more accessibility to dopamine. So what you will see in a lot of the basically in trading a behavior is being used to generate the. Generate the brain states rather than external agents, say like cocaine or marijuana or whatever that would generate the internal states within that. And you're looking at the reward system. And dopamine is the ultimate. And the reward system, it gives you a rush of like, man, I feel so good. Like when you take a win is, you know, you'll find the one things I do is I teach that winning is. Is dangerous if you. If you allow it to start letting you get overconfident and euphoric and feeling good. It's dangerous in the same way that an endorphin can be there to make you feel calm and relaxed and go, this is really cool. That's when you're too relaxed to trade. But the thing is, is most trading, it's really about trying to get the dopamine fix. But you're right, they're very similar. Same. Same circuitry is being involved. Blue, Sarah. Hello, Sana. I'm sorry. Hello, Randy. The skills within traders state of mind, will they help me in other aspects of my life than trading? Well, Sana, I'll tell you this. Is that what we have doing at this particular moment? I have just finished a book about basically the general audience of self development. Because what we find with most of the traders, they discover other parts of their life are improving dramatically to the point where I realize that working with traders is one very small domain compared to the audience of self development. So we're actually building a website, building the book, building all the, all the peripheral stuff that it takes to be able to enter a market and stuff like that. And so yes, it will have most, a lot of the work. Right now I'm working with a guy that started out in trading, but what we're actually doing right now is he has finally found the courage to really face his grief of something really bad that happened many years ago. And this is a guy that climbs mountains, he does triathlons, he does all these manly things that pushes people limit and say, I'm powerful, powerful. And what happens is that.

He'S finally learning to have the interior courage to face his deepest fears. And it had nothing to do with trading. Trading exposed it. Okay. But ultimately he had to work at a much deeper level than trading. So, yeah, it will profoundly impact your other domains of your life. I hope so because that's, that's.

That'S what I want. That's what I want to do with my life. Okay.

The recording will be up tomorrow on the website and you may get a message at like 4 o' clock in the morning that it's there. I promise you it's not. Okay, because it will get, it will get rendered tonight. And I will put it up on YouTube tomorrow when, when I have time. Okay. It'll be, it'll be on the. You, you'll find it on my website or find it on YouTube. Okay. So it'll be there. Anyway. I have enjoyed myself immensely. I thoroughly enjoy the questions, the way you put questions. I wish I could convince other groups to do this. This just makes it really easy. You had great questions and I. My hope for you all is that you get past this hurdle and are able to build a mind that can trade in probabilities. If I can help you do that, I'm here. That's what I want to do. Okay. But until, until that time, I wish you well. And as my, my hero when I was a child. When he signed off, Roy Rogers and Del Evans sung the song. Happy trails to you and I wish you. Until we meet again. Happy trails to you until we meet again. Thank you.