A YouTube monologue (Kardec Trader) about how instinctive 'winning' self-image—shaped by survival, power, and status—works against successful trading. The speaker argues traders must shift from a short-term survival/winning mindset to a performance-by-design mindset focused on probability management, discipline, patience, and impartiality; offers resources (article, webinar) for learning the change tools.
Chapters
Welcome. You know in this journey into becoming an effective trader, strange things happen. And one of the strangest is to discover the way you think about success is in fact.
Stopping you from producing success in trading.
Sounds weird doesn't it? Your survival instincts, the ones that we have been encoded into our DNA, work against us when we move from the certainty of survival to the probability management required in trading.
The very nature of trading is against literally what you were designed to be. And ultimately what you discover very quickly is the body. The brain is very interested in self preservation in the short term. If you've ever experienced that you know more and more data, more confirmation and the trade passes you. If you've ever been in a trade and just lost your stuff, you've experienced the powerlessness. If you've ever experienced getting out early, taking the profits early, you've experienced this self preservation principle. It wants to win survival.
I want you to hear that friends, because ultimately in psychology there's a term for this, it's called self image. Self image is that part of you that the brain builds and it's all about being successful, being a winner, surviving. And it has three components. One, self preservation, that's this staying alive in the moment. The second is power, your ability to deal with the world around you. And the third, status. That status is being able to influence people around you to produce cooperation for the competition in the worlds very powerful stuff. That's our clan nature, that's our tribe nature. And that evolved from our earliest days in the African savannas to the caves to where we are right now. That emotion laden area is still there and it makes 95% or more of the decisions that you make. Or as Gladwell said in the blink so fast before conscious thought, emotions have already been there, have taken over before thought ever arrives and all it's really making is an explanation of what the emotions decided. So what you're seeing is okay, this stuff stacked against me, I want to win and yet it's short term and I get myself in situations where.
I'm taking moves that literally go against my survival brain and it absolutely hijacks me. So I'm having to do something different, I have to look at this and you go well what is this self image business anyway? The self image that we bring and say I want to be a winner. Well the first place is I want to win, I want to make money and then I hate losing.
Then willpower, I'm going to make this happen, I'm going to force my will upon the markets and then I Want to be right, the mind ever matter. I'm going to think positive thoughts and I'm going to create this world. Then also want to control. I want to control the outcome. I have to be in control. That way I can win and then hard work. All those constitute the winning attitude that most people bring into trading. Yet there's a flaw in this logic. The flaw is that you're not in control of outcome. You're not in control of anything except the mind that you bring into trading. So what we're doing is we have winning as a form of trying to be in control.
And that allows us to maintain and pursue this self image of being a winner that's hardwired into us for hundreds of thousands of generations. And yet when we move it from survival and then we move it into probability management, we discover, oh my gosh, wait, you know, all this survival stuff, all this winning stuff doesn't work in trading. It's all about probability. I'm not in control. I don't know if I'm going to really win or not. No matter how hard I work, no matter how knowledgeable I am. The truth is the markets can decide something different. So what we discover is that thinking that you need to win is a good way to lose in trading. However, if we begin to say, you know, I need to readapt what survival instincts gave me to produce probability management, I need to move, I need to move this notion of winning to this notion of performance. No, I can't change, I can't make things happen, I can't control outcome. But what I can do.
Is I can control the mind that I bring into the moment of performance.
Wow. Suddenly, instead of having instinctual parts of the brain operate particularly like survival instinct with fight flight, suddenly you can begin to see well to do probability management, discipline, courage, patience and impartiality become the emotional base that produces the mind that interprets the markets completely different. And suddenly what you discover is that the performance mind based on probability management is actually going to give your methodology the edge that you see on paper that it has. Suddenly mind and method are working together to produce edge friends. That's the way it's done. And ultimately.
Your body, your brain and most likely your psychology does not want to change self image. However, if you're going to win at trading, if you're going to become success in trading, you're going to have to change some self concept from winning to performance by design.
Otherwise what you're going to find is you're going to be left behind. In an extinction. That's why so many people burn out of trading within three years, is they keep trying to force their will. They try to have enough knowledge, they try to do everything right. And it doesn't matter in trading.
What matters is performing well with an edge. When you see that, all of a sudden you realize, okay, I can either design.
My self image anew for this world of trading, or I can maintain the current one I have about winning.
And face extinction. It's easy. So ultimately, what I ask of you, what I invite you to do, is check out how to do this. You can learn at our website, you can learn in the article that's attached to this video, and you can also come to the webinar that we'll be holding later this month about this very topic. Ultimately, there have to be design tools that change the software that runs your brain, okay? Not a bunch of affirmations, not a bunch of visualizations. It has to get down at the very nature of what you can control.
That's what we're looking for, friends. You can learn this and you can become the potential that you see in trading. It's going to require some work, though. It's going to require some effort. And the real key is do you want to be designer of that mind that engages uncertainty, or do you want to keep wishing and hoping and keeping up the old self image? I vote for designing the mind that engages uncertainty. Thank you very much for your time.
