Train the Brain to be a Patient, Disciplined Mind While Trading

Welcome, everyone. First thing, let's find out. You can hear me. Okay. You know, it's. It's tough to be. If someone will just write in, yes, I can hear you. And of course, if you can't hear me, put in no, right? But here, if you. If you would just put someone, put in a. Type in a yes to let me know that you can, in fact, hear me, I'd appreciate it. That means that I know that we.

There we go. Okay. First of all, I want to welcome everyone. And what we're looking at is going, you know something? What happens when you trade? You know, ultimately, we're talking about a brain and a mind that comes out of it that just somehow doesn't measure up to the needs of trading. We want to take a look at that day. We want to learn also how to train the brain. How do you produce a patient, disciplined mind when you begin to grasp it? What we have, what we come together with, is an emotionally reactive mind. We want to take a look at that. Now, just a little bit of housekeeping is. If you've been to any of my workshops, you realize that what I do is I hold questions toward the end, and at the same time, if you have a question, please type it in. Dolores is here, and we're taking note of that. And we would start from there. So with no further ado, let's go. Let's. Let's take a look at this. Okay? Have you ever felt like this guy, you just sit there and you go, you know something? Why is money flying out? Why do I bleed capital? Why do I have good days and then I'll give it back? Why do I have. Why. Why is it that I get overconfident and then just get. Get shot? You know, in the beginning, the task of learning to trade, it's all about a system that works. There is no thought about being part of the problem. It's all about finding the right system. Hmm. And it couldn't be me. I've got. I've got the stuff. I have the stuff. It's. Psychologically, man, I'm. I'm fine. There's none of that. There's. There's none of that psychological stuff for me. But after a while, usually two to five years, it begins to dawn on you that I seem to be part of the problem. Later, what you discover is that you're a major part of the problem. That's the deal, is that, you know, you go through this first area where you just think it's just not, you know, it's not me, it's the system. But then you come down to this moment where if you take a look at this and if you take that little, where you see the little guy with the arms spread out and it says change above him put uncertainty. Because ultimately what you're looking at is the moment the human being experiences uncertainty with risk. Ooh. You are programmed to experience that as danger. And then you start working with that little brain, you start activating the thalamus, you start activating the amygdala and you start activating the fight flight response. And the more that you try to like rely on logic and reason, the more you find yourself triggering these self defeating patterns. And this is the deal is that there's a hole in our understanding about brain and mind and about what you're asking the brain to do. And this is where we want to start. What we want to do is we want to say, you know.

This is about the three legged stool of trading and we assume that uncertainty can be managed by your trading system and platform. After all you're not the problem, right? We never think that the brain and the mind are contributing to the success or the non success. And you take a look at, you have to get that system, you really do have to have a platform that works or you're going to be a mess. You're going to have to have a methodology that allows you to manage risk. Otherwise you're just going to just evaporate your money. And that's where people stay. But there's that, there's that third leg sitting over there. You're trading psychology.

Your beliefs in action and what happens is literally traders focus on platform methodology while trading psychology, literally making decisions in the midst of uncertainty is ignored for a long time. That's the piece. And if you grasp this going, oh my gosh, yeah, I have dumped a lot of money into my platform, dumped a lot of money into my trading and a lot of energy. But how much energy have I put into the development.

Of my psychology for trading? That's the real question.

Mostly emotional state management is kind of like this little fur ball here, this, this guard here. You know, I am so sorry, if there's anybody British out there, I am so sorry. But the thing is, is what you look at that stiff upper lip and that is the kind of emotional state management that is taught and basically that's what everybody wants to bring. We pretend that emotion and thinking are separate from one another and that we can just tough it out and as long. But the problem is that Pesky trading account keeps busing us. We start seeing it and then we start seeing, oh my God, you know something, I have problems getting into trades, man, I start, man, I just freeze. I have problems when the trade goes against me. I just go bananas. I have problems when I finally get into black and I take my money off the table and I don't let it get to targets and you start going, you know something, this is fear. And toughing it up, making pushing yourself just isn't working. So we realize that trading account actually is telling us a lot. It's telling us that we can't push emotions out of the room, out of the way. And here's the bigger thing. People misunderstand their emotional nature and the way it is linked to thinking. And friends, therein lies the problem.

We don't understand what emotions are. First of all, they're not feelings. They're not even psychological. And I'm going to tell you something that I'm going to go back and tell you again a little later. To a neuroscientist, an emotion is a biological action potential. Get that? Listen that. A biological action potential that coordinates activity between the environment. That's what you would call the markets and the organism. That's what you would call the trader. And what happens though, is there biological action potentials that are coordinating this activity. And in the process, the emotion takes over psychology. It takes over psychology and it still does. The problem is that for far more value is placed on thinking than on how much your emotions impact your performances. There was a period of time Rene Descartes from the father of Rationalism came upon and he separated mind from emotion. And it made everybody feel so much more powerful not having to deal with these emotions. But the problem is, is that it disconnected two pieces that are built to be together. As a matter of fact.

You may have one head, my friends, but you have two brains. And we actually call them a left hemisphere. And that's all that logic, all that reason, all that analytical stuff. All that stuff, man, that just you want to stay in when trading. And then there's that right hemisphere. That's where your intuition and that's where your emotional nature is. This is also. There's also a conduit that actually connects these two halves together. It's called the corpus callosum. Making sure that the communication between these two spheres is fast and rapid so they can work in concert with one another. Okay, It's a partnership. This is a piece I can't tell you how important is and grasp it Is that right brain, full of emotion is an equal partner to the left brain with all that logic and reason and stuff like that. They act as a partnership. Now let's go back it again. Let's take a look at that brain. What I want you to notice my friends, is that the emotional brain, the right brain, is just as big as the left brain. All that logic, they're good sized together, yet you've only trained the left brain. And then you're expecting the emotional brain to perform well without ever trading it.

This is the downfall of practically every single trader that starts trading. They, they get into that left brain and they develop it and stuff like that and literally they end up trading with half a brain because they, they take a brain, an emotional brain that's undeveloped by you and it is built for short term survival, then you put it into the context of risk and uncertainty and it flips out. Of course it flips out. It's doing exactly what it was designed by nature to do. And yet you're sitting there going, I'm going to ignore it. I'm going to ignore half my brain.

Okay.

There'S even, there's a really great. If you want to do something for yourself, there is a woman by the name of Jill Bolt Taylor who wrote a book.

A Stroke of Insight. But it's not the book I'm really recommending. I'm actually asking you to look up her TED talk. It's one of the most, it's one of the most heavily watched TED talks ever. And understand that Jill Bolt Taylor was a neuroscientist at Harvard University. Top drawer, top drawer. And was studying strokes when she in fact had a stroke. And yeah, she was in her 30s and she actually was in a position of telling you about the stroke from the inside out. She was telling. And it just so happens her knocked out the left brain, the logic circuits and stuff like that. And what she ended up in is she ended up in a place where she, her perception was totally through her right brain, her emotional brain. She saw a completely different world.

And ultimately when she got, you know, when she went into recovery and they rehabbed her and stuff like that, she came to a moment where she said, you know something I'm not, I don't want to be a neuroscientist anymore. She became a sculptor. And what she said is, I don't want the left brain ever to have that much say so about the way I perceive again. And she woke up the hard way. What I'm asking you to do is Listen to your trading account. Yeah, we know that you've only trained the left brain and we need to do something about that. They're the same size friends. And here's, here's the kind of an evolutionary.

Stroke that allows us to go from hominoids to humanoids to where we're homo sapiens. And all of a sudden what you see is we're carrying our early ancestors emotional brain with us today. And this is. The emotional brain is not built for what you're asking it to do. You want it to stay patient and disciplined when exposed to uncertainty? Well, it's designed to do the exact opposite. It's designed when it experiences that threat from uncertainty, it's built and designed to trigger to instantaneous biological. Remember, these are action potentials that allow you to move into fight flight for short term survival gains.

That those early ancestors is sitting in that guy's brain at the computer, just like you, friends, just like you. And here we have, here we are taking it a closer look at it. So here's the deal. The brain you brought to trading is not the one that will bring success in trading. It's not that it's a bad brain. It's designed for very different purposes than what you're asking to do. And to be honest with you, it hasn't occurred to you that you need to redesign to develop the right brain along with all that fancy knowledge you have.

And it's lurking there in the background, that emotional brain, it's just lurking there waiting for there to be a change in status in the environment. The trade goes against you. You know, you're at entry point where things are going to change. An emotion automatically triggers and it's triggering under stress.

Okay? And you're, you're totally built to say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be in control, when in fact you're not. Think about what happens when a trade goes against you. Okay? Just think about it. What you're, you're sitting there and everything's fine. You know, you made your entry, I've got in, I'm in it now. I'm really in it. And all of a sudden that thing, that thing just turns against you.

Think about that and all of a sudden you find yourself, heart rate going, heart rate going on all this and oh my, oh my God, it's going against me. It's going against me. That's that caveman brain back there that just woke up out of nowhere. And suddenly you discover that the thinking brain is just washed away.

That's happening all the time, friends. The question is that's normal. That's what the brain was designed to do. What I'm asking you is do you want to develop the brain for something different than what it was designed to do? You. And if you're gonna be successful in trader, yes, you are. Because here's pretty much what the brain is designed to do, okay? This is every time that you engage uncertainty, you're going to experience.

Okay? The force of the brain is that the moment that you experience uncertainty, the brain feels vulnerable. And my promise to you is the brain does not want to feel vulnerable. It wants to be in control. It wants to be right.

And at vulnerability. What evolution has done through adaptation is it has hardwired a route straight from the interpretation, the appraisal of that incoming information of uncertainty and threat and wired it straight to the amygdala and fight flight. It takes nanoseconds,003 seconds for that to fire and for the and for the fight flight response from vulnerability to there. And this is what you've got lurking in the background of your mind every time you trade, every time you engage uncertainty, not just in trading, but this is about trading with risk on the line. This is what you're actually firing.

Isn't it just incredible? And let's take it one step deeper. Let's take it one step deeper. What happens when it fires? You're looking at a graphic right here.

That could easily be the most important graphic that you as a student or trader can ever look at and would teach you about. How you have to manage your psychology different. How you have to train your psychology different is first of all, information starts coming in to the sensory thalamus that's over there on the left hand, bottom side. And there's something called what we call a traffic cop, or we could call it also appraisal. And the traffic cop is making an appraisal about whether or not. Whether or not it's danger here or whether or not the information can be sent to the thinking brain, that's the sensory cortex or whether or not it needs immediate action and in that sensory thalamus. And understand it's more like a traffic cop. It's making this decision not on what you tell yourself to think. It's making that experience based literally on its experience with uncertainty. And a lot of that is inherited from all your ancestors, plus what you learn in your families and all that kind of good stuff. And most likely it's going to be taking the low road when you experience the Uncertainty with the risk in it. It's going to say, man, I better get, I better take care of this right now.003 seconds. It's at the amygdala, it's firing, it's revving up the adrenals and there you go, testosterone, the whole nine yards and cortisol and you're in fight flight. However, if you were able to convince that traffic cop to say, you know, there's not a danger here, I want to route it for 0.25 seconds into the thinking brain where we can have all this analytical and rational stuff. Okay, it's slow but accurate. The other one, the low road fight flight is quick and dirty. This is what you're triggering every time you freeze trying to, trying to get into a trade. Every time that, when that trade goes against you and you just, you feel that skip of the beat, the pulse, and all of a sudden you kind of panic. This is exactly what, that's the traffic cop friends. When you get into a position of aggression where you've lost some and you're going to make money back and you sit there and all of a sudden you start making things happen. What you've done is you've already triggered aggression, anger, and you're going down the low road and you end up really blowing up your account. This is where it's done, this is where it's happened. And until you can, until you can change the mind or the experience of that traffic cop, you're not going to produce the kind of successful thinking that is required of trading. You're going to be stuck in this thing where I keep thinking that I should be able to do this. I haven't really got a problem. What you have, what you have is you have a, you have a right brain that's undeveloped for trading purposes. So we see that and then you experience it. You know, finally this is all, this is all biology, okay? And your brain is absolutely threatened by uncertainty and you're going to experience it psychologically. And that's how you can say, well that will, that's fear of entry. That's over trading. That's where I thought I started having good times. And I just get revved up and I get lustful and I just really take off. That's all right brain stuff, man. That's an undisciplined right brain which practically every trader has because they don't develop it. Then you get the fear of loss, the revenge trading, the fear of missing out. All that self doubt comes in. Oh my God. Who said I overthought. And what you realize is this is all reactive emotional adaptation. It's happening.

Beneath your ability to think about it. It's happening instantaneously before thought or what you might call unconsciously. And this is going to happen. This is just simply the way the brain works. I mean it's not, there's nothing wrong with the brain and it's not going to change because you will it or because you've got some really cool affirmations and some visualizations. What you have to learn to do is to change.

How the brain responds to uncertainty. You have to create a brain that welcomes, engages uncertainty, moves away from its need to be in control of outcome when and refocus on the capacity to perform because you don't control outcome. That's the big trick.

So.

How do you change a fear based brain into a probably probability based mind? Okay, I want you to look at the way you've tried up until now.

And say, well, has it worked? Most people, they try to do it by force. I'm gonna grit it out. Or they do. Or they just do it by trying to deny emotions, pretending they're not there.

The key though.

By training the right brain to respond to uncertainty and risk differently.

That's the ticket, friends. That's what's going to have to happen. You're going to have to reprogram, rewire the brain.

It's not me saying this, it's just the reality of you bring a brain wired. For one thing, it needs to be rewired to be able to perform in a different capacity. It's not going to be done by force nor denial. This is just simply the missing link, friends. This is the missing link. The good news is that you can in fact redesign the brain. How do we start this? Well, the first thing is you got to acknowledge that it's necessary to manage your emotions during, I mean really manage them, not force them. And then even there, you've got to get beneath the emotion. What you discover is emotions.

And beliefs are linked together.

What you really discover is that an emotion has a number of components to it. And that the first thing that you might notice about an emotion erupting, which you might be, you would probably notice the emotional arousal. You would know that by tenseness in your muscle. You would notice by acceleration of your pulse. You would notice it by holding your breath. That's not you holding your breath. You need to be very aware of that. And most traders when they first start my programming aren't. You need to be very aware of what's going on in the body. Because remember, the emotion is biological. It's got a signature and it starts with that emotional arousal. And if you allow it to keep cranking up, there's a switch that goes off. And suddenly the feeling that you have is literally the chemistry, the emotion pulsing through the body and the brain. You're cooked at this moment. What happens there? Emotional motivation. You're going to either attack or avoid or approach if you're, if you've got yourself managed well. And then beneath that though, are the beliefs that are glued to the emotion about your capacity to manage uncertainty. This is where it's known as you trade your beliefs and your beliefs are killing you and you're trading. The good news could be bad depending on how you look at it. The trading account is going to absolutely keep this right in your face because ultimately you're projecting your beliefs about your ability to manage uncertainty and risk onto the screen of the markets. And what you're seeing in your trading account is how effective they are. So we're looking at this. They're linked. Hmm, well, well, if they're linked, man, maybe I need to be taking a look at this.

And what, here we are. What we've got is a fear based brain that you're trying to force into accepting the threat of uncertainty calmly. I mean, you're literally asking for the impossible. Unless you happen to have won the genetic lottery and were high functioning autistic or you just didn't get, you didn't get born. You got born with really high risk tolerance. Those are outliers, friends.

That doesn't happen often. You may read about them and you may see all that money they make, but they don't tell you what happened next year. You know the guy that ran up his stuff 1600%, you look at him next year and there he is, blown up. The key here is, hmm.

You can construct a brain. Yeah. Fortunately, there is this concept called neuroplasticity and it's part of the brain's makeup. You can change the brain.

That gives rise to the mind, that trades. It takes some work and it's not magic. Okay. That's the first thing we have to acknowledge that we're going to have. We have some, we have some emotional development to do if we want to be that top performer.

So step two, emotional regulation.

What we have to do is we have to be able to take our emotions and learn to calm them down so that they're no longer taking over our mind. Like in this example where you're looking at this guy. You're looking at. There he is. He's just all been out of shape, all that information coming in. He's just, you know, he's disorganized emotionally and going crazy. But what you see is what comes out of his brain are all these straight lines where, you know, he's flatlining it. Now. He somehow learned to manage those emotions so that they're not getting to point where they trigger and hijack the trading mind. That's the big deal. You know, emotional regulation.

Doesn'T get you success, but what it does, it gets you to the door of the mind. And you wouldn't get to the door of the mind if you don't learn how to regulate emotions. And again, what I want to do is emphasize what is an emotion. A lot of people, you know, God, you're not manly if you have emotions and if you can't control them. The truth is, is that that's all bs.

The whole key, if once you grasp that emotions are biological action potentials and their purpose is to coordinate action between the environment and the organism, you begin to see, oh, these things were in a minute. The moment there is a change in status out in the environment, there automatically, by definition, there's going to be an emotion arise. The only question is which one. You can have a big say about what emotions show up when you engage uncertainty if you're willing to do the work to get there. So we've gotten there and we go, okay, what are we going to do? Remember, emotions are biological and have a unique signature to them. Part of that signature is your breathing and your muscle tension style. Tomorrow, if you're trading tomorrow, I want you to sit and just watch yourself. Get a mirror and watch yourself. Notice how much tension you carry in your body. By the way, friends, that's not tension. That's emotional arousal you're looking at. And then notice how you breathe. And then I want you to alter that. I want you to release the tension, and I want you to intentionally breathe diaphragmatically and start noticing what happens to the emotion. It's called the relaxation response. You literally can be in the midst of the stress, and you can use breath and you can use muscle tension to disrupt that emotional growth, reestablish a relaxed mind. That's Herbert Vincent's work from the 1980s and 90s. And what we're saying is you need it. You need to train yourself. Because my promise to you is that if you're having problems with your emotions and trading, my promise to you is you're having problems with your breath and your muscle tension and your heart rate. When you're trading, they're one in the same. So we've gotten that. Say that we've. Okay, now what we've done is we've got that emotion managed. Do the Perler gates open up and everybody gets in free? No, but this is where you can open the door of the mind. You can begin to say, I need to now. Now that I'm calm enough and not being swept away by emotion, I need to be able to look inside the mind. Because, friends, this is where the beliefs, the assumption, and the biases that you don't know about reside, that hold your performances back. It's also where great strengths lie.

Just waiting to be developed. The problem is that you are identified with them so much that you don't see them yet. They keep running you over. It's kind of like a fish doesn't notice that he's in water until he's taken out of the water. Or conversely.

We don't notice that we're in air until we take ourselves out of our air and put ourselves in water. And all of a sudden we realize, whoa, that air. That's pretty good stuff. What we want to do is start noticing what we have not been noticing so that we can change. How do you do that? Well, I call it developing the observer. It's also known as mindfulness. And the thought and the awareness are not the same. What you discover in mindfulness as you learn how to step back out of thought and quit identifying with the thought as you start going, wow, there are a lot of thoughts running through my mind. What do you mean? They're not me? No, matter of fact, you're not having thoughts, friends.

Those thoughts are having you because of the undisciplined manner, the lack of awareness on your side. They're just plowing right through you. You're basically getting a download of history from your family and your culture, and then you're taking it to the training and you're finding out how effective the rules and beliefs about uncertainty are that you learned before you even knew you were learning. The limbic brain just is a learning machine. You just know how to develop. You have to know how to develop it. So we've got this tool, this mindfulness, and you begin to go, wow, I can step back out of thought. Yeah, yeah. And then what do you start seeing? Man, this is when it gets crazy. What you discover is that your mind is a lot more complicated than you thought it Was we could say this is the brain is a community of rival emotional programs that literally duke it out to control the self. To say this is the organization of self that we're going to engage the world with. If you want to see a really good depiction of it, very simple to understand is the movie Inside out by Pixar, Disney. That movie was basically they had, they brought in neuroscientists to advise them. And what you see is these emotional programs in this girl's brain taking over, duking it out. And you know, the ones that get control are basically what happens to the girl's behavior. That's exactly what happens now in the miracle between.

Brain producing these electrical behaviors called thought and the generation of mind.

Those thoughts, those electrical impulses are given voice.

In your mind. This is where it gets great. And all of a sudden you realize that if you looked at your mind is really a committee, a governing committee. And you're waking up with this observer and noticing oh my God, there's a mutiny going on. There's some really man, there's some bad dudes in my neighborhood that I need to learn how to deal with effectively and I need to develop other parts of this committee because they've got the right idea. They just need to be trained and they need to be put in. They need to be given responsibility. This is what happens. And all of a sudden you start going wow, yeah, neuroplasticity. This is really beginning to make sense. Yes, we begin to get that and then let's drop back. Using mindfulness, you discover the self limiting beliefs you and you discover the internal dialogue. And if you think that oh you mean that, you mean that there's, there's things in there talking. Yeah. And if you don't believe it, listen to your self doubt. Listen to yourself when you're sitting there and you have a fear of entry. Listen to the debate going on in your head. That's the inner critic friends telling you that you're inadequate. What if you're wrong? Blah blah blah. And an adapted self, that is fear, that fears making that mistake. That's what people absolutely get slammed by. You experience this self doubt and overconfidence. Listening to the talk, it's kind of like particularly in overconfidence, I love it is that, you know, I want to win, I've got to be doing something to win. And all of a sudden you start, they start looking for trades to take and they end up taking trades that aren't worthy, they're not in the rules. And then after all that, you realize that you've been duped by the inner critic. And then, and then the criticism starts, you know, what kind of idiot are you? And you see that fear base or the aggression base all the time that's happening in your mind, you're not going to positive think, you're out of it. You're going to have to master, you're going to have to learn how to master that internal dialogue. That's where the real magic's at. And so.

Here we go, we have this depiction of this inner critic, this mouth, this judge that just makes, continually makes edicts about your character flaws and all like this. And what happens is you're going to have to learn how to deal with it differently. You know, you can, you can create all sorts of positive thinking and all that kind of stuff that seems to work. It makes you feel good in the outer world. But have you noticed when you start trying to use those affirmations, those visualizations and all that positive self talk in trading the moment that you hit the stress.

Where uncertainty meets risk, real risk, all it falls apart. That's superficial stuff. We need to get deeper than that. We need to get at the, literally the level of the dialogue going on inside the very core of your brain. So there you go, you're sitting there and instead of pushing this destructive part of the self away, you're gonna turn toward it and you're gonna learn to master it. How do you do that? Step four. And by the way, these steps are literally the way both our, our group course and our individual course are structured. These are actually part of the curriculum. These, these steps, literally you're learning these steps as you go along. What you're doing is, then you're going, okay, I have to learn how to awaken what I would call the heroic elements of the self, the inner heroes. And you begin to begin and you begin to literally awaken and discover that in the same way.

That fear and aggression are so easy to access under stress, and really you just can carry you away in the same way that discipline is there, the discipline of ruler, the courage of a warrior is there, the self soothing of a caregiver there. And the impartiality, clear thinking of a sage are also present as emotional programs in that wonderful mind of yours, actually in that brain of yours. The problem is nobody has ever taught you how to take those talents.

And use them under stress.

It's been so easy to go to the fight, flight under stress than to train.

The brain differently to create a completely different mind, literally you can train the brain to move from a fear based brain when exposed to uncertainty, to a brain that is patient to a brain that is disciplined when exposed to uncertainty. That's the training of the emotional brain. That's that right brain training that needs to be complemented with all that, with all that super fantastic knowledge that you've developed about training.

So we've gotten this, and the key is this is that in the programs that I teach, instead of visualization and affirmations, you actually use real experience. You actually go, you know something, I no longer had to pretend it happened. I actually can go back into my memory and I can plug into this thing and I can feel.

That emotional program kicking in, that archetypal form, kicking in, developing the emotion, developing the mind that I bring to the management of uncertainty. Friends, this is the difference maker. What happens is you're no longer using something that fails under stress. You're using something that you've actually seen work under stress. And what we're doing is we're retraining it so that you have access to it and it becomes a skill rather than something that luckily happened for you. So we're doing this and go, wow, this is pretty interesting. Well.

Step five, this is what I call really intentionality.

You begin to let go of trying to control outcome which you never had control over. And you know, if you are an alpha or a perfectionist, who in corporate or in business you were able to control outcome, God bless you. And what I'll say is, is that a lot of people, particularly alpha type folks, think, you know, I can come in, I can learn the rules of trading and I'm just going to make it happen. Those guys blow up accounts and they don't understand why the very things that help them succeed in one domain, say business or corporate, literally blow them up. In the domain of trading, nothing wrong with that Alpha mine in that business world, everything wrong with it in the tr. In the trading world. It has to move from literally from where I'm this warrior and I can take over everything to where you're very patient. It's the difference between being a hunter that stalks and chases prey and a hunter that ambushes prey. Completely different animals. Think about the, think about the, the American cougar, the lion and the, the North America and South and parts of South America, well actually down into Mexico. And the African lion, you take a look at them and both are apex predators. The difference is that the African lion has large prides that literally attack herds and in the attacking they get hurt. A lot. They get their jaws busted, they get gored, there's a lot of death. And so you need to be constantly. So they have a lot of loss. So you have to constantly be replenishing the pride.

Success. But if you took that same success in that given environment, you took the African lion to the forests of North America, guess what? It starved. But take a look at the American cougar. The American cougar, what does he do? He climbs a tree, hangs out on the limb. If you were looking at a hunting cougar, you would look at him and go, looks like he's asleep to me. He's a slack. He's slack on the job. No, he's patiently waiting.

For the setup to arrive. He's waiting for the deer to set up, and then he pounces. And more than that, it's interesting, is that the cougar actually kills the deer by snapping its neck. And the deer literally just drops. There's not a fight.

If he doesn't break the neck and the deer gets away, the cougar doesn't chase. It just simply goes back up the tree, goes back to the next trade. It's going to show up. I know where the path is. There's plenty of traffic on this, on this pathway. And what you see is he minimizes losses.

So what I want you to look at in this example is that this is really about performance. You can't control the outcome. You can't make things happen, but you can patiently wait to see what the markets will give you. And this state of mind, this patient discipline state of mind can be built, can be built, okay? This is the psychological edge. You never did control outcome. That's the survival brain talking. Okay? One that is just absolutely not good for managing probability, which is what you need. But you can control the mind you bring to the management of uncertainty. That's the probability mind. You can build it. Remember, we've got that neural plasticity that is showing that, yeah, it's highly effective. It can be done. It's just. Do you want to do it? Do you want to train the brain and have your emotional brain as a partner, you know, not the forgotten cousin, but literally a partner with your thinking brain and put them together so that you have an effective mind for training. That's the key. That's the key. So.

The key is, if you take a look at this surfer, do you think he controls the wave? Take a look at that. No.

You know, a wave of that size can just absolutely take. Take him out and just. He could be wiped out. However, what happens is that with intentional discipline, courage, self soothing impartiality, what he learns how to do is he learns how to use the energy of that wave to get a really great ride. But what he recognizes is that he doesn't control the outcome, he controls the mind that he brings to that performance. He's in. That's the key, friends. That's the ticket. And.

This is the psychological edge that you can develop. And for some reason traders just never grasp it. Until they ran out of money or ran out of time. Then they see the error their ways, but it's too late. What I'm asking you to do, if you've been trading two to five years, for God's sake wake up, take a look and say, huh? Is my emotional brain developing, developed in the same skill sets that complement my left brain that does all this wonderful thinking. That's the ticket. And until you, until you build both of them up, you really haven't got it.

So you can learn to train the brain.

It's not just the key to the trading mind that gives you the psychological edge that drives your method edge, it's also the key to life. Okay? You move from fear into aggression to a patient, disciplined mind by design. Remember, nature gave you.

The aggression, the fear, even the approach. You know, when you see something that you really want. The key is what we want is to control.

The mind that arises out of the brain. That's you can do. You're not going to do it by ignoring it, you're going to do it by turning toward it and recognizing. I need to face the fear. I need to face that the brain that I brought, the mind that I brought is just simply not the one that's going to work.

The good news, it can be trained. It can be trained. And speaking of that.

We can help you do that. There's a couple things here and I would love for you to check this out. We have group course and it just.

We'Re in it right now, but we will be having one in the summer. When that comes, I want you to really go to our website and when you go there, get the free stuff, get the free book, it's a free ebook that goes over a good bit of this stuff and allows you to take a glimpse, read all the articles, there's hundreds of them, watch the videos, there's several hundred of them and just you know, really get into this thing and take a look. Then when you finally come to the moment, those of you who come to that moment of realizing oh my God. This really is. I've been trying to force my brain to do something that it's pretty much incapable of doing. And the blowback is showing up in my trading account. And what I recognize now is I can train it. The group course is a great start. The free stuff, start there or the individual course. The individual course is really built for people who are dead serious and what they want is they want to have individual mentorship.

Fundamentally, it is highly comprehensive. It is very personal. And it comes with 10 consults with me on Skype. Wherever you are in the world, we're getting together and we're working through this program. And in the work of the program, it is literally developing the tools to be able to alter the way the brain engages uncertainty. You know, nature gave you a brain and a mind that is really quick to hit uncertainty vulnerability and then fight flight. What we can design.

For people who really want to feel and experience success in trading is we can design the vulnerability that uncertainty is going to happen. The vulnerability is going to happen. The question though is what emotions show up to deal with the vulnerability. This is where we train discipline as ruler, self soothing.

As caregiver, warrior as courage and impartiality, clear thinking as sage. And what we've discovered is with those four emotional programs as a cocktail, it produces a mind that manages uncertainty really well compared to the mind that you brought to trading friends. It's, it's a training is what it is. And I encourage you to take a look at these things and say, you know something? Do I really, you know, when do I grow up and recognize that I'm going to have to invest in the development of my emotional brain as much as I am in my, in my left brain. Together you produce the trading mind that you bring. Anyway, so here's the deal. If you have questions, we've got a few minutes left, please write them in and I will, I will take several and we, we will just go from there. Okay. So I really appreciate you coming. And.

We have trade. It happened before entering position or during the trade.

Yeah, the key.

Let me explain the way the limbic brain works. The limbic brain is amoral. It doesn't have a language. And what its mission is, is to adapt you to whatever environment and whatever circumstances you're facing.

And it's going to get in there. And we call it limbic learning. Once it solves the problem successfully for short term survival, okay, it will lock in synaptically that solution and it will lock it in and what we call a limbic learning, it's not a belief at that level of the brain. It's just a learning that took place and it locks in so it can become reactive and it just pops up. The moment that you see, you see anything that remotely looks like the circumstance that generated the need for the learning. And that's why exactly what happens when you're, when you're.

Okay, there's a follow up one. Be right back on that. But the key is what you're doing.

Is you're going, okay. As I develop a psychology, suddenly that limbic learning takes on an emotional nature and suddenly there's an emotion there with arousal, with the feeling states, with the meanings, with motivations. Okay, that's what's happening. And the next part of this thing is.

So we have to develop purely mechanical approach. That doesn't seem to work either. I, I know people who use logarithms, they use that stuff. And it really depends. It really comes back to the mind you bring to the moment is that the people who do mechanical programs, what happened is they, when they're, when they're doing their software, they're also downloading their observer, their ability to manage uncertainty into that thing.

Ultimately you find out very quickly that people who have pure mechanical systems don't do very well. And you find people who bring, and bring the human element to it, but well trained and they take the time and effort to develop their emotional brain. Those are the guys who do well. Pretty simple.

Your training is golden. Awesome work. Well, thank you. Thank you. I'm assuming that you have.

You have experience.

How does diaphragmatic breathing work, Randy? How do you use it with muscle tension to release stress? That's a really good question. I'm glad you asked. What happens is that when an emotion erupts, if there's a change in status in the environment, if you're approaching an entry moment and there's going to be a change in status, you're going to have to do something. The emotion is biological. It will have a signature that includes breathing. For fight flight. What the body is going to do is it's going to cut off air to the brain. It doesn't need a brain. It needs oxygen and blood in the big muscles for action. And what you will see is you would see that you as an organism are no longer using the full lobes of the lungs. You would only be using the top third. It's an efficiency thing. At the same time as that's happening, the body is also preparing for fight flight. That's the muscle tension that you feel.

And this is something that it's not really Herbert Benson that did this, actually Hindu yoga's actually did it. And Benson was studying them because they were saying they could, they could control things that Western science at that time said, no, you can't control that. And he put them into the lab and found out yes, they could. And ultimately, once he stepped away, all the spirituality and the religion and the culture, what he came down to was diaphragmatic breathing. Because in diaphragmatic breathing, that is pulling air down into the belly to the lower parts of the lobes of the lungs and then getting that full breath expanding in the chest and what that does. It just so happens that that breathing style is associated with, with states of calm and relaxation. And it's been associated that way for about six and a half million years. So it's a pretty solid connection. So literally you can artificially, you know, not naturally, you can artificially go to diaphragmatic breathing when you're fearful. And what you can do is you can disrupt the fear that is attempting to cause you to breathe. Only with the top 30 of your lungs. You know, it's getting, it's getting, it's getting ready for you to run. The same thing with muscle tension is that as you're, as you're revving up for a threat, you're, you know, you get real tense and stuff like that. You're ready, you're ready to fight or flee. At the same time. The relaxed states of mind have very, you know, you're loose, you're loose as a goose, you know, and if you artificially say, I'm going to, I'm going to relax my tense muscles again, what you're doing is you're disrupting the emotion from moving from arousal to feeling, okay? And that's a big deal because arousal, the body's getting ready for action. Feeling is literally the chemistry of that emotion in the body, altering the chemistry, the adrenaline that just gives you all that energy, the testosterone that gives you that fight. And you're seeing, okay, I can actually calm that down so that it doesn't trigger. That's how that works. And it just so happens that aggression and fear are not good mental state. They do not produce good mental states for trading more relaxed states. Not deeply relaxed, but relaxed states, where there is concern but not fear, are the kinds of states that are associated with the diaphragmatic breathing. The disruption with muscle relaxation. I would like to know a little bit more about the system you are following during the course. The System. I'm not sure if I understand what you're asking. I teach either in the.

Okay, what happens to the teacher process? And it starts with emotional regulate. Well, it actually starts with you beginning to grasp that your body and your brain are just so far ahead of you that you need to catch up with just how amazing it is. But once you grasp that, particularly this whole notion of the brain being a community of rival programs is, you start going, well, how do I learn to manage that, not change it right yet? And that's done the first section of my work, it's always emotional regulation. And we're teaching you not emotional regulation like in a yoga studio. You know, if you can. If you go into a yoga studio, you have this very calm environment where you're doing your diaphragmatic breathing and doing your asanas, you know, toning down your body. The problem is, is that you learn to do it in a calm situation. We need to learn to regulate the emotion under the conditions of trading. Otherwise, it's not a learning. So what you discover, there's a lot of repetition training in the early stages to get control of that. And then once you go through, and it's not like you're going to become an expert, then you go to mindfulness. And I use a lot of guided meditations and a lot of video to be able to demonstrate this stuff where what you're doing is you're learning how to develop the observing part of yourself, and you begin to really recognize, oh, my God, there is a difference between the awareness I am and the thoughts that run through mine. And most people have such an undeveloped observer within themselves that they do, they think, they believe, they're so fused, the observer is so fused thought, that they think that I am my thoughts. And we begin to separate that we say, no, you have this faculty called observation, and you need to begin to use it if you're going to change permanently. And then you go, okay, now I've got this mindfulness. So now the next thing is, now we've got the tool that we need. We can regulate, but now we've got this tool, mindfulness, that allows us to look into the mind. And what we're looking for, and this is what I train, is we're specifically looking at for what I call the historical dialogue. And you would know that as the inner critic. And I actually call it, instead of adaptive voice, I actually call it your orphan nature. That's my Jungian connection there. And what you're discovering is that that orphan nature is your limbic brain having adapted you to engage uncertainty, okay, and the way it did that. And then you're looking at this inner critic, and this inner critic is the one that's telling you that you're not worth a darn, you're never going to make it. Who made you think this? You're just a loser. Blah, blah, blah, blah. All that stuff you do when, when you're, you're tearing yourself down. And a lot of people say, well, Guy, it's supposed to help me. No, it doesn't. I've never heard anybody. That shouting and screaming at themselves helped them to become a better trader. They need to calm themselves down and they need to engage that part of themselves with compassion. That's the antidote to fear. And what you discover is there's enormous needs for you develop the courage to face fear, to face that inner critic voice and to be able to recognize that that's going to be there all the time. But you're developing that capacity. And then what you're doing is you're also saying, okay, I see that's been running. And most people go when they first wake up to this, going, oh my God. I've been living out of my internal dialogue, my historical internal dialogue my entire life. No wonder I'm having a problem trading. It's, it's like a wake up, like, wow. And then at the same time we go, okay, that's the bad news. But the next, the next, the next class, the next chapter is about how do we go about developing emotional programs that give rise to the probability of the intentional mind. And I have their, their intellectual property. The way I go about take I, by taking memory and really reorganizing memory to be able to get at things that did in fact happen to you. And you reorganize memory so you have access to them. It's a big deal. It's really interesting work. And from there you start going, okay, now that I have these empowered elements of myself, I still have to turn to the uncertainty. I still have to turn to the challenges.

But the difference is you're not using the old historical organization itself. You're bringing forward the one that you're now establishing and one that is literally not built. I have to win. It's built to perform. And you're engaging the uncertainty, the internal struggle.

From a different mindset. This time it's powerful. That's what I call the intentional mind. And then at the very end, we start going, well, we have to start teaching vigilance because this, you have never made it you've never arrived. What you've done is you have learned a process that gets your mind into a probability management state. You learn how to do that. And when you realize I need to this is not normal, this is not natural for the brain. It wants to go back to survival instincts. It wants to go back to the short term survival instincts. And you have to stay vigilant. You also have to, yeah, you also have to check your ego at the door because it's easy when you start winning, you go, look at me, look at me, look at me. All you've done is perform.

Okay, so that's the process that I teach. And then we also. You do a psychological trading plan that you blend into your method plan. Typically, how long overhaul does the individual course last? About three to four months.

I think three months is too short and I'm very much far the four month period because once you get into that course, you start.

First of all, you're doing things in the individual course that you will ultimately in the later parts of the courses. You're literally going to be wearing a heart rate monitor strap. And, and what you're going to be doing is you're actually going to be able to see heart rate. I use a couple apps for this. And you're going to be able to literally pinpoint where the range for where you establish a range that you know from a heart rate standpoint, this is the peak performance physiology that you need. And it take, you know, it takes time to be able to get the data because you're, you're establishing heart rate at rest, the optimum state and other states. And that, that boy, you just are so far away from, from learning how to breathe. It's powerful and I find that it, it most people are comfortable with four months. Okay. I, and that allows, I know that allows the kind of training that the brain needs to be able to make changes. Okay, that's it. Friends, I want to thank you for being here. I have enjoyed myself enormously. I hope you have found this helpful. And if you're in a place where you're realizing that you know something, I'm going to take what Randy's saying to heart. I'm beginning to recognize that there's a lot more to developing myself as a trader than initially I thought.

And it just so happens that I look at that photograph of that picture of the left grain and the right brain and he's right, they're the same size. Why on earth have I been trying to trade with half a brain?

I can promise you no good reason. There's a chance to open up and to right that wrong and to develop the mind that can manage probability. Friends, good luck to all of you and I wish you well, and may God bless. Goodbye.