Winning by Being in the Present Moment

Have you ever noticed that you just keep running into a brick wall? You're on this road to success, a road to winning. You know how to trade, but you keep hitting it and it's like it's out of nowhere. You don't know where it comes from. Well, today I want to talk to you about by winning, by being in the moment. Okay, why is that so important? Because it's very difficult for your emotional brain to do that. Your emotional brain is built to be looking into the future, the short term future. It's looking for patterns that are dangerous. We were a preyed animal back in our prehistoric days, and it's there. And it came to visit us in the form of that ancestral mind. Every time that you take a trade, every time you're in a trade, every time you face uncertainty, and all of a sudden that brain, that ancestral brain from the caveman days, it projects and sees, it perceives. And what it's looking for is trouble. It's biased to look for trouble. Get it? Now it's kind of like this. The great boxer Mike Tyson once said, everybody has a plan until they get hit in the face. The same thing that happens to traders. You keep running into the same brick wall. You know how to trade, but the problem is you're sitting there and guess what? You hit the same problem over and over time and it never changes. You've been hit in the face, hitting that brick wall, and suddenly everything flies out. You don't know how to trade anymore and you just go into basically emotional hijacking out of the emotional brain. Suddenly it's short term survival. That's what it's all about. And my question.

Is, what's the brick wall that you keep running into?

To answer this question a little better, first of all, you have to understand what the thinking brain thinks about. It's thinking about planning and producing a great future. It's thinking about, I am rational, I can think through process. I dream all this stuff. I see what's possible in the long term. Meanwhile, your emotional brain, the one that you brought from your ancestral caveman days, has a different agenda. It's thinking about your survival right now. So survival of the organism, not this great human being that you are now, but survival of the organism. And what do you think happens when it faces uncertainty? Well, you probably guessed it, I hope, is that it's triggered to vulnerability. Because uncertainty to the caveman was like, I predict death, I predict bad things. That vulnerability produces confusion. Confusion just overrides everything. Everything's hijacked and Everything shot down to the amygdala into the fight flight process. That's what happens. That's the huge difference. One is thinking of the future. The one is surviving in this moment right now. So you see the evolutionary psychology basis of what we bring into trading it, it's not like you can avoid it. You can't ignore the emotions. You can't stuff them down. You know why? Because of this, is that actually an emotion is a response to any change that happens in the environment, in the markets. So anytime there's changes, there's automatically emotional responses. They're automatic, they're outside of thinking, and they're already in the bloodstream as chemistry. Before the thought gets to the brain. Who do you think wins that game? Yeah. So you're looking at it and going, whoa, how do we get these guys to start talking about it? Their very first thing. If you were to bring the emotional brain and thinking brain together into a reunion and discover I really need a partnership. I can't ignore the emotional brain's presence. I mean, it's been there since the African savannas, and it's with me in caveman days and it's with me today. The moment that I hit confusion, the moment that I hit uncertainty, it kicks in. The only question is, can you cool it down? Can you calm it down? Okay.

The question is, how do you cool it down? In my work, I teach emotional regulation. That's your breathing, that's the muscle tension, that's your heart rate. Because what you discover is an emotion, actually a biological action potential that governs coordinates action between the organism, that's you, the trader, and the markets. That's the environment. That's what its job is. Anytime there's a perturbation, anytime there's a change, emotions show up. And what happens is that literally out of that comes your thinking mind. So you've got to bridge this gap. You got to bridge what the thinking brain can do. And it's pretty, pretty wimpy once you get it into a tussle with the emotional brain. The emotional brain is going to win every time unless you learn how to work with it. With breathing and tension being part of an emotional signature, you can say, you know something? When I feel attention, when I start noticing my breathing is irregular, or holding my breath and panning, I can go to diaphragmatic breathing. It just so happens that diaphragmatic breathing is associated with what is known as rest, digest the parasympathetic nervous system. It calms it down. The emotion literally is calmed down by the change in your breathing, the emotion is calmed down by releasing tension in the body. The body's no longer preparing for fight or flight. It's preparing to slow down, calm down, rest, and suddenly you disrupt the emotion from building. But understand this, you still have the belief of that emotion still in play when you engage uncertainty. Yeah. What does that mean? Well, if you take a look at your trading account, you take a look at the telp, that is the beliefs that you have about your ability to manage uncertainty manifesting right in front of your face. If your trading account is healthy, you're going to start noticing that, wow, yeah, I have a belief about my ability to manage uncertainty if it's not healthy. What you're looking at is I've been trying to control outcome. I've been trying to control things in my entire life that I've been able to do pretty good. Then I got to trading and the markets are so vast there is no control. And it gets the brain bonkers. That's what you're looking at. But when you find those beliefs, once you calm yourself down and emotional regulation is not going to solve the problem, emotional regulation is going to take you to the door of the mind. Then by training in mindfulness, you learn how to open the door of the mind. Begin to look in and what you discover is why you've been having so many problems. You start discovering the beliefs that just kind of like downloaded into you without your awareness taken over, taking up shop, taking over who you call yourself. But at the same time, what you discover is that you and your beliefs are, are not the same. They're malleable, they can be worked with. And that's where you begin to really change and say, I can alter the way that I engage uncertainty. It's a big thing. You actually start building emotional brains, confidence and thinking brain to be able to be of use, to help it control itself in the midst of uncertainty. Just done by the volitional skills of breathing, relaxation. But then you start being able to calm down and start selecting those aspects of yourself, of your human potential that you want to show up to manage the uncertainty. This is when beliefs change. Instead of like taking the brain that shape was shaped by your family of origin and by history, what you're doing is you're reshaping the brain to respond differently to uncertainty.

You believe that you can manage the uncertainty now, whereas back then you couldn't. You start chipping it away, proving to the emotional brain that with help together, thinking brain and emotional brain can create new emotional patterns that interact with uncertainty. Friends, that's where it's at. That's where winning.

Changes. Winning is not about controlling the outcome. Winning is about your performance. It's maintaining your performance during. During the midst of trading. Okay. You don't know if it's going to win or lose. But you do know you can control how you respond to the uncertainty. That's when the cooling down through emotional regulation and the mindfulness of looking into the mind and then beginning to revamp the beliefs that drive your perception and action. That is the winning mindset needed for trading. Yeah. And the truth is it can be taught. And what you discover is that winning really becomes about long term performance.

Okay. That's a new thinking deal. But the emotional brain will buy into it if you work with it, are respectful of it instead of trying to just cram it down and just make it go away. Sit on the sidelines and not mess with you while you trade. You don't trade without the emotional program. You're bringing all that baggage. And now it's time for you to change the very beliefs that cause you to perceive what you perceive and for you to take action based on that perception. This is where winning's at. Friends. Come and learn. Come and learn.

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