Ken, a trader, couldn't stop losing money because childhood beliefs about punishment and scarcity ran his decisions. The fix: map what triggers your emotions, interrupt the physical reaction, then rewire the deeper beliefs that make you chase certainty instead of thinking in probabilities.
We're at the third installment of this article, video, and what we've done. We have taken a look at a trader at first who has no idea why he's blowing up. He just finds himself in the midst of blowing up and going, I don't understand it. I come back to my senses and everything's okay. What just happened. We videotape him, and what we do is we start discovering is that what he thinks is instantaneous ambush. What in fact has happened is a whole series of events that if he had only seen the precursors to, he would have been able to stop, but he hadn't known before. So we train him, and we train him to the point where he's able to interrupt this process, this process of arousal, the emotion, to where he's able to take the gasoline of oxygen from his breath and the tension in his body to where he can now interrupt the emotion beginning to emerge, rev up in his system. He does that, he calms it back down. And he has interrupted arousal. And it never becomes a feeling that arouses the revving up. The feeling is the. Is the chemistry of the emotion pulsing through a system. So he's made a big, huge difference. The motivation of that emotion has not taken him away. It has not taken him into hesitation, freezing, running, attacking. He's in pretty good shape, right? No.
What he's done is he has calmed the physical system of his body down. He has calmed the embodiment of emotion down through his body. What's left? And the hard part of trading, the hard part of really building the mind for trading is to recognize that not only is arousal, feeling, and motivation part of an emotion, so is meaning, so is the belief that's attached to the emotion. In this particular case, Ken real guy.
When he was growing up, he grew up in a very authoritarian family with a military father who, when Ken made a mistake, there was very harsh retribution for that mistake.
Ken began to really dread making a mistake. He began to dread when his father said, come here, I want to talk to you, and was taken by himself and really dressed down.
That's the limbic system simply building a system of going, how do I avoid situations like this? Later, much later in his trading career, after a successful career elsewhere, he comes into trading. He gets into the uncertainty of the moment and understand in his previous career, he had been able to control outcome. Here, he can't. He can't control outcome. He can control himself. That's never been part of the emotional system. When there's a possibility of a mistake.
Okay, Just think about entry points, think about managing a trade, think about your targets, think about your exit. Think about all the crazy stuff that happens when trades start going against you. He's triggered to this old, very limbic pattern that was very successful of avoiding the mistake. Why not distract? Why not not even get into the trade? If you get in the trade, why not jump out of the trade?
Ultimately, he drills down. He drills down from not knowing to drilling down to getting past the emotion, the physicality. He drills down meaning. And what he discovers is that at the very core of it, he has a sense of powerlessness and a sense of inadequacy that permeates his trading. He wants to be right. He wants to control being right. Because when he was wrong, he lost power and bad things happen. And now in trading with the uncertainty there, it was triggering all the time. And he didn't have the resources at that time, did anything about it. But let's make sure that we understand that not everything's a childhood problem. This is just simply an adaptation a brain went through to allow the organism kin, in this case, to survive and move into a breeding population. That's the biology of it. There's another way of looking at it. You can also understand that a person is born into a very loving family that through circumstance, say like a farming family on marginal land where they never know if they're going to make it or not. They never know if the rains are going to come. They always feel as though something is against them. They always don't. They never think, oh my God, the promised land is here. No, it's oh my God, what's going to happen next? Scarcity, thinking. Though very loving, they grow up in a history of scarcity. That's an easy thing to see also how it gets into trading. And is that when you get into trading and you have scarcity, thinking from, oh God, something could go wrong, you better take your profits now. Don't take a risk you could lose. You can easily see the hesitation of getting into a trade. You can also see the need to get out of a trade when you see a little bit in the black. Okay, so now what you're looking at is you've gone from the emotion triggering and not understanding the emotion to to being able to say, oh, this is an emotion, I can see it on my body.
To where you've been able to interrupt the emotion, you've been able to control the physicalness of the emotion. And now you drill down to the meaning, to the belief.
Just like Ken, who was projecting his belief about powerlessness and the need to control outcome and a sense of inadequacy where he, he couldn't make a mistake. He was projecting that belief onto the markets. And what do you think he found?
Disaster here. Through work, through heavy emotional lifting, he's able to transform that part of himself so that he can begin to move into a probability thinking mindset rather than a certainty of outcome mindset.
That's the trick, friends.
It's not out there. The Holy Grail is not out there. In a new system, a new signal, a new indicator. It's within you and it's changing the orientation that you adapted to a long time ago in your formative period, one way or the other, into a mindset that embraces uncertainty and probability.
So you overcome the biology of wanting to be certain and the psychology of fear of making a mistake. That's how you do it, friends. That's the whole process. And you can see it happening in this third part of this series where you go from really truly not knowing what's happening, to being able to interrupt the ebology of what's happening, to beginning to see that the whole course of action is about changing the mindset, the belief system that you're bringing to trading and projecting onto the markets. And in that case, Ken did become a successful trader. He began to produce internal validation of self rather than external. And that was the ticket. It's there for anybody who's willing to do the work.
Of self development.
