What Holds You Back

There comes a moment in a trader's evolution when they've tried everything else and they've looked around, they've tried to get the best methodology, the best teachers, the best system. And finally they begin to stare into the mirror and they look at themselves and go, oh my God, I'm the problem. The problem's not out there. Everybody knows that trading is about probability and uncertainty and managing that risk. But it's different knowledge. When you actually put to the test, that's real capital that you're putting to the test. Until you're primitive caveman brain, that's not capital. He doesn't know what capital is. What that is is life and death. If you take a loss to that caveman brain, oh my God, you have to fight for your life or you're going to be consumed. So you begin to see that the mind that I brought to trading is not going to be the mind that produces success in trading. And that doesn't mean it's not a good mind. It may have been incredibly successful in another domain, but coming to trading, it's completely different.

The needs of the trading mind are vastly different than the survival mind. You can't dominate, okay? You can't will yourself into winning. It's kind of like this. It's the difference between an African lion and the way they hunt and a North American cougar. The African lion stalks, chases, and by the way, takes heavy losses of capital bodies. But they have a breeding program that brings that forward. They take those losses. They can do it. They're very successful apex predator on the African savannah. They're built for that. However, if you took that same highly successful lion and put him into the forests of North America, it starve. Yet the American cougar is built for those forests. It doesn't hunt by stalking, by chasing it, ambushes it, climbs a tree 15, 20ft up, sits out on a limb and waits patiently for the setup. That setup is a deer that has define patterns and what it's going to do. It's going to sit there patiently and wait, and then it goes straight down on it. The deer never sees it. Hopefully the neck is broken and the deer doesn't get up. However, if it gets up and chases and runs, the cougar doesn't chase. It takes it as a loss, a small one. Trust that the pattern, the habits are going to remain the same. The setups goes back up, the tree, gets on the limb, waits patiently. Two very successful apex predators. Most of us want to be there. The lion. The problem is if you want to be a trader, you're going to have to let that go. You're going to have to recognize that the conditions of success in trading are vastly different than the conditions of most of other life. We bring that successful mind from other domains into trading and it collapses. And what really has to happen here is you have to come to the moment of where you're willing to face that fear instead of like blaming others, finding something, something's wrong. No, the only thing that's wrong isn't here. And it's not like you're wrong, like a flaw. No. You have been adapted by your brain for success in a different way. And now you're going to have to readapt it. But to do that.

You'Re going to have to look at what every survival instinct in you is going to have you avoid. It's going to have you look at what you fear. Instead of avoiding it, you're going to master it. Yeah. What's really, really weird about trading, nobody would have ever thought that trading all about making money and stuff like that is actually one of the most powerful self mastery paths you could have ever chosen. Because you truly have to master your instinctual emotional nature and take it into a different place to be able to find success in trading. Where once you wanted to control outcome, winning, you recognize that you have no control over outcome. In the same way that you hated to lose. You now recognize that you have to become an incredibly good loser.

To keep those losses small. Become a winner. And you recognize that your predictions.

They'Re hypotheses. That's all they are. But we begin to get ownership of them and then we don't want to let them go because that's survival instinct. But what we realize is that once you realize that hypothesis is not right, if you stay in that trade, you're gambling. You may get lucky. But understand this, the difference between a trader and a gambler is pretty simple. The gambler, the house has the odds and works those odds. The trader has the odds. Okay. Do you see the difference? Most of us bring a mind that is going to gamble because you can't control the emotions. Ultimately what you're going to have to do in trading, you're always going to hit the uncertainty. It's always going to produce vulnerability. That vulnerability to the brain is going to produce confusion and that's where you go wacky. That's where the hijackings occur. However, that's a learned response now. It's deeply embedded in your instinctual reaction to uncertainty. But you can train that instead of triggering to that uncertainty, triggering to that vulnerability and confusion and fear or aggression, you can condition yourself to respond to uncertainty. The risks of uncertainty from a place of discipline, of courage, of self soothing and impartiality. Friends, that's the probability based mind that you need for success in trading. That is what has to be trained. To be able to engage the uncertainty and not trigger all that instinctual fear. Yeah, when you face that, you realize, I have been avoiding my fear, I've been avoiding what I have to master.

And I stay stuck. Because what you're looking for in trading, you're looking for the repeating pattern where you do something over and over and over and over again. You keep pushing through, pushing through, trying, trying harder, harder, and yet the pattern persists. That is an implicit belief. You might call that unconscious, subconscious. What is being revealed is a belief about your ability to engage uncertainty and to be able to work with it as being revealed to you. And it has a pattern that is already locked in, that it responds to. That's an emotional pattern learned. Now your job is to go and find that. That's the courageousness that you have to have. Not only to go and find it, you have to master it. You have to turn to that fear and master it with not courage, not aggression. The antidote to fear, my friends, is compassion. And knowing that your value as a human being is not defined by winning and losing, it is defined one in biology by your being a social, mammalian. But if you have a spirituality to you, what you do is you find out that inherent worth is built in that spirituality. Either way, you're finding a place that somehow you got robbed, you got separated from this inherent worth and all of a sudden you started to prove yourself. And when you started trying to prove yourself, you gave odds to the trading gods. Yeah. So what we're doing here is you're going to learn to respond to uncertainty very differently. And you're going to do it with understanding that that approaching is going to be done through compassion and recognizing that your human self, that animal that you are, looks at uncertainty.

As death. And what you're going to do is you're going to reroute the response to where.

No, it's not about death. It's about taking a loss, a small one, or letting it ride. It has nothing to do with me. It's not about my worth. It's about probability of winning and losing. That's it. You stay good. That's the trick. That's the self mastery that you have to do to be able to make that mind of yours work in trading? It's not book knowledge, friends. It's self knowledge. This is where the personal development of the brain to produce the mind.

It's all on you. And if you don't do it, trading gods don't care. You may hide out for a while, but your trading account will bust you. So you have to decide, do I really want to become a trader? Because ultimately it takes what it takes.

Cut the BS out and recognize whatever it takes. Am I willing to do whatever it takes to build a mine? If you do, come look us up. Start really exploring this work of ours. Take care.