Winning by Developing the Essential Skill of Losing

Broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen only mode. Welcome everyone. Before we get anywhere, let's just make sure that we, we're talking with one another. If you can hear me, please go into your chat box or your question box and just simply type a Y. Okay. And the joke is, of course, if you can't type a. No. So anyway, I just. Question. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Doug. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay. The own. What? Why? You know, I, you know, it's some good questions and I'll say this is that the reason I like to know is because I hate to launch and be spending 15, 20, 30 minutes talking into thin air and nobody's listening to me than people actually wanted. So that's why, anyway, I want to welcome you and there are a few things that I do that may be a little different is this is going to be a presentation and we are going to hold the questions till the end of the end of the presentation and we'll have about 10 minutes or so to be able to answer. However, as we go along and you have questions.

Oh, hey, Cassandra, how are you doing? It was Mai versus Hawaii. Yes. Okay. Yeah. The key here is I get diverted. When I get diverted, sometimes it's hard for me to get back on my path. And so therefore what I do is I like to do the presentation with follow up questions. But please, please, please, as you have questions, as we go along, go ahead and answer them and go ahead and ask them so that we'll have them there, type them in so that we'll have a few questions to get started and have that little, you know, uncomfortable period of me asking for questions and then you having to find some time and find a question and type something in and all that kind of stuff. So the deal is now we're ready to go.

It's so hard to believe that how do you go about winning in trading? There are a lot of people in this audience who have done very well. They have won the game. They have. Whether or not it's in question, corporate, whether or not it's in business, they have a winning formula that they use. And then they got into, got into trading and something blew up. And almost every one of these people really wants to win. Okay. And they're good at having done that. Whether or not it's athletics, whether or not it's business, whatever. And the deal is, what is it? What is it? Because you know, ultimately is you're going to fail your way to success in trading. And yet what happens is we just don't like losing. Why is this big deal is this is, man, we want to be winners. Who wants to be a loser? You know, I remember when I was in elementary school and middle school is that I loved baseball, and I was really good at it. And what happens is I often ended up being one of the captains that would choose people to be on their team, okay? And all these people who were terrible baseball players would beg, beg, beg for me to end up calling on them and stuff like that. But at the same time, I wanted to win, so I didn't choose them. I chose really good hitters, good people I could really trust. And it was right there at the very genetic foundation. Kid sitting there, and he wants to win. He doesn't want to be altruistic. He doesn't want to take Eddie, the guy who had a limp, who couldn't do very much. That I did, in fact, get on my team a number of times. The thing is, you get there, you want to win, and it's how you see yourself. And, man, the one thing you don't want to do is lose. Most people I talk to in trading hate losing. It just goes against my nature. And that's where the default programming is. There is a very good chance that we're going to be exploring about how in the world did your hate of losing end up showing up in trading and just absolutely just clobbering the potential you have as a trader. So we want to take a look at that. Yet it comes down to it is hating to lose and wanting to win. I gotta win. I've gotta win. It's gonna get you in trouble. And again, it's that success formula that has been developed over decades in other businesses and other professions that gets you there, because winning looks like you truly controlling outcome. At the very core of our being, of our caveman being, we want to control outcome. In evolutionary talk, you would say that we want to control environment. We don't want to be the one that give up our lives for somebody else. We want to be the one that can take life. Because when we have the power like that, we're controlling the outcome of our lives. That's really good for an animal, but it's not good for the world that we live in now. So we get it. What we go is, okay, the success formula works well in other areas of your life. But what's getting me in trouble here? What on earth is getting me in trouble here? Because what happens is that Hetty glues. I love this photograph, is that, you know, the thing is what it does, it shows you. People get angry.

And often underneath that anger is fear.

Because here's the deal. And revenge trading is fed by that trade going against you. And all of a sudden, what happens is that that trade going against you is not just about money. Remember, your caveman ancestors had no clue what money was. If you gave them a stack of bills, they wouldn't know what to do with it, but they knew what to do with life.

Money became a symbolic representation of the power to survive. And what happens is in revenge trading, not wanting to lose and that trade going against you, and particularly after you've taken a couple losses, what happens is that it feels like the old saber tooth tiger is bearing down on you with its teeth, and you're going to have to fight for your life. That's revenge trading. What you just had was ancient survival instincts taking over the brain, creating the mind that's engaging uncertainty. And the deal is, is at that particular moment, you can intellectually know that you need to be a good loser to be a winner. But until you come to the moment of solving that riddle about, okay, my genetics that I've inherited for millions of years, that produced the success of our species, wanting to win, wanting to survive.

Is totally against you now that you're trading and you're working with probability. You know, caveman may have had the illusion of control, but the thing is, is he couldn't accept probability because the probability was that he's going to die. So what happened is he created this.

Mass that allowed him to go through anything with the belief he was going to win, and he did, did not want to lose. So we're getting there, and we're getting it is that that not even wanting to lose comes genetically out of it. So here's the deal, though. What we're going to do is take a look at it and go, you know something? That hating to lose really does come from two places, and in particular, it comes from the competitive society in which I'm embedded. And I used to think it was the United States, but what I've discovered, it's the entire world. It's highly competitive. And we grow up. We needed to win. We needed to win. I was talking to a guy today, he lives in Calgary, Canada, and he grew up.

In rural Kansas. And what happens is, wasn't very many people there. And the only thing there was to shine around. There was hockey, was a few other things. And what happened is you had to win. You had to win to be good. And the deal is he had to win. And if he didn't win, there was profound trouble. Suddenly his view of his ability to hold status, to be respected in where he was growing up, totally fell apart. And that is instinctual. Friends, he had to win. And then what happened with them is his parents really didn't schmooze up to the coaches. So sometimes this guy was not picked on the team because the parents didn't schmooze enough and he would have to pay in the B leagues. Well, he didn't want that. He didn't like that. Losing. He wanted to be the best. Okay? Now that's growing up in a competitive society, okay? And taking on the idea is you gotta win. In the place that I played football in high school, there was a sign on our dressing room, and that sign said, winners never lose and losers never win. Can you see how embedded it is into our culture? And again, not just American, Canadian, Mexican, Australian, Japanese, Chinese, British, the whole. The whole lot of us. And yet at the same time, we want to be number one. And yet at the same time is that.

That isn't necessarily the way it's going to work. But at the core of this.

I want you to take a look at this painting. This could have been 40, 50,000 years ago. A blink in the eye of evolutionary time is that big bears hunted us. They also liked the same kind of places we did. They liked the same caves. They liked all that stuff. And those bears are big now. Those were just regular critters in the environment that our ancestors lived in. So what do you think's going to happen when you're programmed, when an animal like that starts going against you, when it starts running at you and stuff like that? What do you think is going to happen? Man, you're going to have to. You can have to fight for your life. And what I ask of you, how many of you, when the trade's gone against you and you've taken some losses and you're seeing, oh, my God, the loss is building. Who in here has not felt like his life was being threatened? I can't. I can't lose. I just can't do. I can't allow that. Yeah. And that just amplifies the loss. And yet this right here.

This right here, remember, it wasn't too many years ago, even in the United States, that grizzly bears that can get up to 1200 pounds and are fearless and do not fear humans at all. They were all over the west, all over the West. Now you have to go to place like Yellowstone and Stuff like that, be able to see one. They were exterminated. We did that because they were a threat to our existence. Now that's the same threat that you're bringing, that you're bringing into you. The trading from your mind, the same one, and then takes a look at it is that that trade goes against you. I want you to see these two different paths. The ones from evolution of where, where we had to fight for a life, I mean for survival on a weekly basis. And also growing up in a highly competitive culture where great emphasis is placed on winning and boy, losing was a way to not get picked on the team, to be kind of pushed away because you just weren't good enough to play that good enough. That's also became a value judgment of you. And we all wanted to be seen as winners and yet they were losers. And yet in trading, you have no control over winning and losing. Okay? No matter how big you are, no matter how tough you are, the trading gods just really don't care. So what we get, every time that you experience that trade going against you, you're triggering these ancient.

Instinctual survival traits. But you're also triggering the history of growing up in a competitive culture, perhaps even in a competitive family. Okay, so we've gotten that. And again, we're in that competitive society. The other day I'm driving and I stopped behind a guy at the traffic light and I'm looking at his, looking at his vanity plates and it says, got to be number one.

Okay? Now I have no doubt that if you're in a sales organization and you have that warrior instinct, you're going out and you're highly competitive and you're getting revved up and you're going harder and harder and harder and you're going to break through the wall, you're going to break through the rejection, you're going to make that sell.

That kind. That kind of mine blows up in trading. So now.

We'Ve gotten this mine and people come into trading, they've been probably pretty successful in other areas. They come into trading and what they wanted, they, they want to duplicate the same kind of mine that they use for success in another area into trading. Then they think the formula works. And then guess what? They get there. And the problem is very serious. That success formula doesn't work in trading. Yeah, winning doesn't mean controlling outcome. Winning doesn't mean prestige. Winning doesn't mean mattering. Winning doesn't mean deserving.

Winning in trading only means that you landed on the right side of probability relative to You. Oh, and besides that.

Losing only means that you landed on the wrong side of probability relative to you, okay? Suddenly the game has changed. And by the way, this is a tip for those people.

When you have a loss, a failure, what I want you to do is ask three questions. Three. Actually, four. The first one is, is this a method mistake? Did I not use my methodology correctly? That's correctable. Okay? Is it a psychological mistake? Is it something about the way you approach? Did you get too lustful? Did you get scared? Did you get angry, whatever that. You can go in, you can say, you know, I can work with that, and I can learn how to regulate that. And I can build a mind using Randy, of course, to be able to go out and do that. Or the big question is, was this just probability?

Okay.

And if that's the thing, is, then you ask the question, would I take this trade again?

Yeah, that's when you start going, okay, yeah, I lost, but it was probability. Would I take this trade again? Yeah, it was a good. It was a good trade. It met. It met the rules of my entry. So we're getting at this. We're going, okay. Boy, there is a little difference. It is a little difference. And remember, in trading, you're losing money to the caveman seeing through your eyes because you haven't got your emotions regulated. You're not losing money. He has to know what money is. No, what you're doing is losing your life.

At the same time, though, the mind that the trader has to develop as it engages uncertainty is that, guess what, you just landed on the wrong side of probability relative view. And it says nothing about you as a human being, your value as a human being. The problem is that in our competitive societies, we have linked our performances with our being. And what we really are going to have to do one way or the other is we're going to have to unlink them. So that performance.

Is something that you get really competent at with an understanding that it's a probability and uncertainty. And at the same time, what you have developed is what I call your inherent worth of where you're able to access that part of you that has value beyond your performance. Okay, performances can be improved. But if you have a belief that I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy enough, I don't really matter unless I make a bunch of money, the trading gods are going to have you number. So now we're looking at it and going, there is something powerful here, is that we're going to have to look a little Deeper inside of ourselves and start really saying, you know something. I can't be shallow and say, I'm winning money and I'm good. Great. Now what happens is, win or lose, you're okay. Dolores and I have a good friend and Cassandra would know this guy who over the last several years has, gosh, I quit counting, has made somewhere between 200 and $300 million big, big guy, okay, in the worlds of trading. And I became keenly interested in him because, you know, I'm going, this guy's doing something that very few people can do. What is he doing? And ultimately he said, randy. And you know, when you meet him, he's, he's a nice guy. He's not like these wonks that have made it with high functioning autistic and stuff like that. No, this guy's a great guy. And then I was talking to him, I said, well, Mitch, what? What is it, Mitch? What is it you did? He said, well, it cost me about three quarters of a million dollars. And what I discovered is that I lost it. And I had to tell my wife and I created all sorts of really horrible stories about what was going to happen there. You know, I thought, you're going to leave me and all this kind of stuff. But I finally got up enough courage to tell her what had happened. And it was really stupid set of mistakes he had made. And what happens is he told her and they held each other and they cried together. And what happened with this traitor is what he found out is that no matter what, win or lose.

He mattered. He was going to be okay, he was going to be loved. After that, he was able to disconnect the conversation about mattering winning as a way of producing value as a human being from his performances as a trader, okay? Completely different. And then all of a sudden there's just this giant wave of success that has come his way. But understand is that he separates himself as a human being from his performances. A loss is only a loss, okay? It doesn't affect the human you are. So now we're getting this and you're going, wow, wow, wow. I'm beginning to acknowledge this stuff. And here's the key problem, guys, and folks, is that.

Throw away all the psychology that we develop that doesn't work with uncertainty and just go back to our evolutionary psychology. Only that brain that you're bringing that is wired for short term survival, control of outcome in the short term is not going to work in trading, okay? Success in trading is grounded in the management of uncertainty where winning and losing begin to take on completely different meanings than the way that our brains have wrapped around them. They say nothing about us as a human being. And that's what's going to have to happen.

And the deal is, your performances are the one thing that you can control.

And you can develop a mind that generates a superior performance. And if you do that, friends.

The edge that you have through your methodology is going to extract more capital out of the markets.

Than you give back. So, bottom line, the problem, okay, not just from evolution, but also that we grew up in these competitive families and that we want to win. Or we have a story about scarcity. Oh my God, I'm scared it's going to be taken from me. And then what happens is then you go into the thing, oh my God, if I risk, I could lose. And if I lose, oh dear, I then have to deal with the shame of not being good enough, of not being mattering, of not being worthy, of not being adequate. Okay? That's the deal. And that shame is so difficult to turn to and to master. We have done everything we can. We build all sorts of convenient alibis, convenient lies that take us away from dealing with the darkness that lives within us, that triggers when we take a loss. And yet that is where you learn to lose. Good. Okay, so we got the problem. Okay, We've just got a brain that doesn't work and it produced a really good certainty of survival. But the thing is, is that it didn't do a certainty of long term thriving. So we got that. We know we've got a problem that's not going to solve itself. That's the piece I want to tell you. Ignoring it's not going to solve it. A new strategy is not going to solve it. But what's going to solve it is. You recognize that. Hey, we just didn't get the brain, we didn't get the genetics lottery that produced a brain that could automatically play in the worlds of uncertainty. But it can be developed.

You can in fact, train that brain to be able to manage uncertainty. You take a look at this surfer right here. Most of the surfing photographs that you look at, you see this guy, like he's really in control. Coming down a big line, big, huge wave and everything looks great. Well, what you're doing here is you're looking at a very competent surfer. But what happened is he's having to try. He's, he's dealing with uncertainty. He does not know if he's going to get the great ride that he wants or not. What he does know is that he can bring a particular mind built for the performance of engaging uncertainty. That, my friends, is not natural. Okay? Some people are born with it, some people finally learn it. Like my friend Mitch, he learned it. Okay? Most of us are also going to have to learn it, that we were our own worst enemies, because we don't want to take a look at that. We want the problem to go away some other way. No, the solution is going through it. It can be taught. And my question is, how do you do it? How do you do it? Okay, well, there are lots of different ways that it can be done. I've seen, you know, I know that there's not very many people who actually become successful traders. It's very low and the chances of you actually making it are very slim. And that's the first place of where you're going to have to say, okay, it's a slim thing, but.

What is the lever that I need to do? How do you go about doing that? It just so happens that we as traders, state of mind actually teach how to rebuild a mind that can.

For periods of time, particularly when you prepare the mind for that performance, can in fact produce the performance mind needed to manage uncertainty.

And again then, if your methodology is right, if you've been well trained and your methodology actually has an edge in it, that's when you become consistently profitable. So.

It really comes down to a really new understanding.

Of our brain on uncertainty. It comes to an understanding of emotion and thinking. Because at the very, you know, it's very common for me to still hear this really crazy notion that when you trade, you just leave your emotions at the door, you shut them off. And what I've discovered is that doesn't work well. It sounds good, it sounds tough.

It sounds like a good Monday morning quarterback in a chair. But the thing is, is you have an organic brain that is built for short term survival. And what you're discovering is that.

All thinking is emotional state dependent. Okay. This is the point where you have to get it. You're going, oh, you mean if I ignore emotions, that doesn't mean that the thinking that I have is still clean. No, it's not. It's coming from suppressed emotions. The deal is, can you turn toward that fear of loss and can you transform the belief that's behind there? So what we want to do is say, okay, if we make an assumption, it's an assumption I use is that there is no differentiation between your biology, your brain, your emotional nature.

Your cognitive nature, and even your spirituality. It's all Located in what appears to most people as a body, a brain. Get into quantum mechanics, you aren't so sure anymore. Okay, the deal though is if you begin to say it, oh, all emotions are biological action potentials that really organize the relationship between the environment, the markets and the organism, the trader. That's what they do. When they find a short term solution to a problem.

What they do, the brain will lock in that into neural pattern and it becomes reinforced. It becomes what is known as hot wired, highly insulated, so that when it triggers, it automatically takes over and the message doesn't even get to the thinking brain. That's when people are saying, I don't know what happened, Randy. I mean, I was okay, and all of a sudden I was doing this wild crazy stuff. That's because in the loss or the potential loss coming up, it triggered that, oh my God, I have a fear of loss. I have to fight. And it never. That information simply got blocked. Because thinking brain, you're no longer in your strategy, you're no longer in your methodology. You are a bucking horse in a burning barn. Okay. And blowing up accounts. Okay, so now we've got this thing is that, whoa. The two things you need to know is that emotions are biological, they're not psychological, though they do take over. They slam dunk.

Psychology, okay? You think you've got the psychology, you've got the numbers, you can pray in paper, you can do all that stuff, then you risk that capital and then the money goes against you. Caveman takes over and before you know it, you're doing weird stir stop. That's the emotion as biological action potential. Then the second big thing is that all thinking is emotional state dependent. You're going to have to get to the moment of where you recognize, okay, the deal here really, your job as an emotionally intelligent trader is to be able to build the emotional programs, call them up to produce the mind, the kind of thinking needed to work with uncertainty.

There's a good chance that you learn to pull up a particular mind that can engage power struggles, just like in any corporation. All sorts of power struggles going on there. That doesn't work in trading though. So now you're going, oh, so I'm going to actually have to get emotionally intelligent about the way I build a mind that gives rise to a mind.

From the emotional programs that engages uncertainty. Yep. And what happens is the first step though is that you're going to have to learn to be able to emotionally regulate the intensity of the automatic emotional programs that do fire, because otherwise the distress is going to hit there and all of a sudden you're going to get unraveled before you know it. But in emotion regulation, and that's breathing, that's the way you hold tension. It's my promise to you tomorrow, if you trade and you watch yourself with either a mirror, particularly a phone, record yourself. You will just look at your face and your shoulders and what you're going to see is a bunch of muscle tension. You're going to see yourself holding your breath. You're going to see yourself panting.

Using only a sixth of your lungs. What you're doing is you're aiding and abetting and emotional hijacking into fight flight.

Breath and muscle tension are part of an emotion, part of the emotional arousal of that emotion firing because there's a change in status in the markets and therefore there is going to be a triggering of emotions. And it just so happens that your brain is a negative assessment machine. So most likely it's going to be negative, it's not going to be centered. And the very first stop is learn how to breathe diaphragmatically as a pattern, as a habit, so that you're not getting swept away.

Many of the people understand, many of the people who hate to lose, they get swept away and they ended up really doing damage to themselves. It is through the breathing and the muscle tension relaxation that you can actually lower the intensity of the emotion so it doesn't hit that trigger point and sweep you away into.

Into a bad place.

So after that, and by the way, this is what we teach in our individual courses. This is what we teach in our upcoming group course that starts in January. And I can tell you we have nearly 20 people in that course already. And there is, it's going to be cut off at 30 because I don't like. It's just not good for the students when there's more than 30 people. So the deal is we've got that and we're going, okay, I get it now that my emotions are out of control. I don't know how to use them. And Randy is teaching me how to do. And by the way, this skill that I'm telling you about right now is 4,500 years old. It was used by the Indian yogas. So it's not like this is like cutting edge technology now. The way I use it is. The second principle though is that once you've got calm down, that's not going to solve the problem, but what it's going to do. Calm down will get you to the door of the mind. Now we need a tool right there at the door of the mind.

That can open that door. Look inside and start making sense out about what's going on. That would be mindfulness. And mindfulness is rooted in the understanding that you and your thoughts are not the same. Those are not your thoughts.

You and your emotions are not one and the same. I'm just an anxious guy. No, you've learned to be anxious.

Also. You and your beliefs are not the same.

You and your beliefs are not the same. Thank God. Otherwise I'd have a hard time doing what I do with people. That's the very first thing. And you begin to realize that in mindfulness you learn that your brain is a community of arrival emotional programs that have duked it out to create a self, not necessarily one that's good for trading, but itself that allows for short term survival. And when that brain produces mind.

That mind takes on where the emotional programs have voice as thoughts in your head. And the conception I use of the mind is the committee, the governing committee of the self. Where you have a power struggle going on. Amongst the different things, some are impulsive, some are destructive, others are really well reasoned and centered and stuff like that. And you have been asleep at the wheel. In waking up in mindfulness, you also start recognizing another powerful thing. There is no permanent self. There is no I. What there is is a brain, through adapting you to survive in the world, has taken your potential and organized it into a particular self that can survive short term in the world. Now in doing that, a lot of the potential that you exist also as not included in that self. So when you start identifying with who you say you are, the I, the self, what you're doing is you're cutting yourself short. What we're doing is saying, wow.

What happens is that in quantum mechanics you learn that.

There is just infinite wholeness. There is infinite.

It'S completely there. And what happens is that the observer of that potential is what gives form to the potential as a self. So what you're doing is saying, okay. In this extraordinary quantum field that we exist in, the observer that we are is what organizes us into a self. And when that happens, we get blinders on and we can't see the potentiality that's right under our notes. And what we're doing is saying, okay, right there with this observer, we're recognizing that the old self was a good self. It helped you survive, so it locked in. But now you're asking the brain to do something that the old self can't do. Not because it's bad or anything like that, it's just, it's built to do some short term survival and you're looking long term thriving two different animals, you're going to have to rebuild that. And so then you're going to use that observer to be able to do that. And by the way, for those of you do or do not know, that's actually me in that photograph. I've begun to take a few photographs of myself every once in a while. So now. Okay, now we're going to this mind boggling thing. What did Randy just say? What you learn to do is you step out of the organization of self that you have been and recognized. That's just one particular organization itself. There are many voices living within the self that you can reorganize into. And yet again, that's a photograph of me. Okay, so we're getting it is that in mindfulness becomes this powerful tool that starts allowing us to start changing the way we have been shaped into a self and to begin to expand it and recognize we can start finding other areas of ourselves that we can start locking into and bring into working awareness. Develop and work and bring into working awareness. That's where it gets fun. That's where you realize, hmm, this trading committee, the CEO of this thing has been asleep at the wheel. But in waking up in mindfulness, he realized he's got a mutiny, a power struggle going on and he needs, or she needs to start taking control of what parts of the self, parts of your potential are going to show up. Build a working mind that engages the uncertainty found in trading. Not the world you were in, but this. So they've gotten voice. And by the way, this is yet another photograph of me. Okay. Yeah, I got obsessed with this. You know, I couldn't find the kind of photographs I want, so I shot some. And that, that actually was shot in Australia. Now the deal is this is all of us have different voices running around in our head. If you are of the opinion that I don't want to, I don't want people that have voices in my head. They're going to think I'm crazy. I consider you to be crazy. If you do not acknowledge that there are special interest areas in your brain that take on shape, take on voice, and they're highly competitive. And if you do not take charge of that, you're going to get slam dunked. Okay, so the deal is you're going to go, okay, I know that in the mind there are all these voices. And what happens is I Start getting centered and I start finding what I would call my own inherent worth and my own inherent strengths. I can live with this monkey mind and recognize it's not me. I can start rebuilding it and retuning it to be able to handle the chores, the rigors, that uncertainty, the uncertainty of trading demand of you. That's what can be done. And what you're also recognizing is that you realize that there's always been an internal dialogue going on inside your brain. Ignoring it, you know, because society doesn't think you should be able to hear voices in your head or because you don't like that inner critic voice that's dark and telling you that bad things all the time. So you're just going to ignore that it exists. And you're going to. You're going to. You're just going to kind of put blinders on yourself so you can't see or hear things. What I'm saying is that your job is to master it. Your job is to master the mind that you bring into trading. And what I want to do is to kind of when you do that, I call it the empowered mind. And what I'm interested in is that by the way, the golem, that little critter on the right is what I would call your orphan nature. This is from the Lord of the Rings. If you're not there, it's the best archetypal emotional program movie I've ever encountered in my life. And what you're looking in here, you take a look at Frodo in the center. This guy had the internal struggle. The other guys had an external struggle with all the enemies going on. But the truth is, is that Frodo had a struggle within himself that he had to master. He couldn't do it by himself. He needed Sam to be able to do the last yard. Was that internal struggle of wanting, greed, greed, greed, all that stuff was there. But it required the resources of the discipline of a ruler Aragon. It required the courage of a warrior. All those guys trotting off in the bottom of the thing. And also that internal warrior of Frodo. It required the self soothing of a caregiver. Many of the females were also incredibly self soothing. And they were also warriors too. And they also needed the wisdom of a sage, the magician of the sage. Because ultimately there will always be an inner critic who will attack, who will always criticize, will always tempt. And you're already working in a soup of where it's all probability. You don't know anything for certain. And it's easy without a highly disciplined mind to be able to show up with, really calm down and realizing that you're worth it, it's okay just as you are. You already have inherent worth. Your deal is to start working the competence and working the program. You follow your rules. This, friends, is how it's done. You end up going in and you start going, you know something? I need to start restructuring this mind. I've had some, I've had some, maybe some an organization, the mind that has been useful for a long time, but now I'm this new feel and it's no longer useful. I need to rebuild it. Other people realize, oh, I've got some work to do. I've got some serious work to do.

Because ultimately.

As long as you're thinking about it in your head, it all seems wonderful. But the thing is, when you start reorganizing this, you're going to discover that emotional programs that have taken over and gotten used to being in the brain, basically creating the mind that engages life, are not going to be just turned off and go, oh yeah, I'll just go, I'll go out and go my merry way and I wish you guys great. No, they're going to struggle, they're going to want to maintain control. But ultimately, as you work with this and you start developing the discipline of the ruler, the courage of the warrior, the self soothing of the caregiver, and the impartiality of the sage. What you do is you build the minimal core needed to be able to deal with uncertainty. And when you do that, you don't sit on your laurels like right here. Everybody here is being put to the test, okay? The leadership qualities within yourself have to be there to maintain, to maintain the order. You're sitting there going 25 miles an hour, you're sitting on that, you're trying to keep that boat from captizing. You have to have the courage to face your fears. You also have to be calming your fears in this kind of water, in this kind of boat. And while that's going on in the calmness, you have to be able to, have to think clearly. This is when it all comes together, friends. This is all neural circuitry.

And you can shape it if you have the will. If you realize that, you know, something is just not going to work the old way. And I'm going to have to start figuring out a way to reshaping this of transforming my mind. So that you started out at one area, but you did not comprehend the potential you had. And as you go through this program, you start recognizing that you start out and metamorphize into something that you never recognized. Friends, I grew up in a profoundly alcoholic, dysfunctional, crazy making house where my mother was not only alcoholic, but bipolar. And it was crazy. And if you had seen me even 30 years ago, 35 years, 36 years ago.

Things would have been very different. It's hard to even look back now and recognize I used to be another person than the one that I am now. The thing is, I've worked on myself. I've come to the moment where I realize that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. And my friends is what I hope is that you recognize that no fault of yours. Okay? This is just kind of the way. This is the way the deal works. But if you want to find success in trading to become that really good loser, you're going to have to learn to rebuild the mine so that losses are only landing on the wrong side of probability. You don't have to hate them. They're just losses. Wins, they're nothing to get excited about and get euphoric about and lose all your money because you got too euphoric. They're just landing on the right side of probability.

And the deal is this. How do you become that change? Well, it just so happens that we have a group course coming up that in fact addresses everything that you saw in this.

Everything that you just saw in terms of the skills that have to be developed from the emotional regulation, from the mindfulness to recognizing that there are some bad critters running around in your head, and that there are enormously empowered characters living within your head, that all can be developed, can be nurtured, and that you can rebuild the mind for the challenges of living in uncertainty. We have a group starting here real soon in January. And the deal is that.

It'S starting. You get. And by the way.

Yeah, that's the first course. What most people do with this group course is they realize, particularly the regulation work with learning how to breathe and changing the habituation. The way your body responds to uncertainty takes about a month of working and changing the way you breathe and the way you hold tension in your body. So that's why we have as many people in the program already. They're getting ready for the core course. And the people who show up the day of the course will be about a month behind. Okay, so the deal is, we want to make it so that you'll get in early.

So when you do that, you get a free gift by showing up, by signing up on 11 or 24, you get our emotional regulatory workshop. It is a consolidation of this work. It works hand in hand with the course. But the deal is that it is five sessions, two weeks apart, where a group of us get together, we go over this syllabus and go over each one of these skill sets so that you will be able to access and start building the mind that allows you to trade with a probability based, empowered mind rather than the certainty based mind that evolution gave you. Okay? And again, nothing wrong with that brain or that mind. It's just that it's doesn't work in trading. And we invite you to come. Okay? Also the individual course, that course is for people who are darn serious and they realize that what they really want is they want to work with me individually. And it's a 10 session course that occurs over a three or four month period. And it goes over the same stuff but on a much more deep level. I mean, it gets deeply personal, okay? And it's powerful. You get to your stuff that is holding you back from being the kind of trader that you need to be to be able to be successful. Friends, that's what we're offering. And my hope, no matter what, is that you find success in trading. My hope is that you learn from failure. The truth is, is that the brain does not learn from success. It learns from failure. It learns from losses. So friends, please learn to take the failure as a way of growing. Or as Ray Kroc, the guy who founded McDonald's, said, I failed my way to success. Okay? Now if you have any questions, I would be happy to answer them. Here's Tony. Are these sayings based.

On scientific. Oh yeah, I am, yeah. There's a whole base of this. This isn't even new material anymore. It's just that, you know, it just doesn't float out into. It doesn't float out into regular working people very well. But no, this is all very common emotional intelligence work. Is that even. Long before I got into working with traders, I was using emotional intelligence work just like this to work with post traumatic stress disorder at risk, youth, violent prisoners, the whole nine yards. This is deeply, this is deeply vague. What is my success with traders? It's about 30%, Randall. And a lot of people.

Oh, Randy. I would say, oh, Ray, Ray. At first when I did the numbers and says, Ah, 30%, golly man. What I realized is that 98% of traders left to their own devices fail. And what we're doing is we're improving 30% and basically if you follow baseball and if you hit.300 for a lifetime, you find yourself in the hall of Fame. So out of that, that 30%, we have plenty of people who are looking for instant success. They're looking for, you know, something that I can tell them that makes a difference, and they're looking for magic and stuff like that, or they're not willing to do the work, you know, okay. It's kind of like they show up and say, okay, well, I've, I've seen the video I did. You know, I listened to the, the audio and, you know, I did a couple, I did a couple guided meditations, but, you know, I just didn't have time to apply it to my trading. That's probably 60% of people work with, you know, if you are that built, this is not a good course for you. You're going to be, you're going to be the 70% of the traders that, that don't work well in myself. But if you find, if you find yourself and you recognize that you have an opportunity that you're not going to find very often that with the depth of understanding that I have about the brain on uncertainty and how to work with that brain on uncertainty, you have a chance, a good chance. You know, this is one of those. You go, okay, what I'm going to do. Can you talk about the price of the course? Yeah, the, the group course is basically $1,200, $11.95. And it can be broken down into five payments. Five payments every two weeks during the course. So we try to make that workable. The individual course is right at $4,000, $39.95. Oh, it includes me. That's why people end up doing that course. But it's a much better. But includes 10 sessions, and it's all done by zoom. So it's really deeply personal, and I'm very comfortable with that. Is the homework so complicated that a person. No, that's not it at all.

Okay. Is the homework so complicated that a person can't do it? No, that's not the problem at all. It's not that it's complicated, but what I'm asking you to do is to actually develop. Most people run from their fears, even tough, tough guys. What it really comes down to it, when it really comes to actually facing their fears, they don't want to do it. They really don't want to change. They want to talk about change, but they don't want to do the work of change, of actually going in and changing beliefs as Neural circuitry. I'll give you an example. A friend of mine was in the Vietnam War and he was Southern boy. He and three guys volunteered and they knew what they were getting into. They grew up army. They knew what they were going to be getting into. And there were three dudes from New Jersey with that really, you know, that Jersey, that Jersey swagger. And they were just talking how tough? Wa wa wa wa. And then they got to Vietnam and they got in the going on patrols for the Viet Cong. Used to only pick off one guy at a time and they just didn't know which one. The guys from New Jersey just chickened out and they couldn't do the work anymore. The other guys learned how to do the work and they said, you know, it's going to be our survival. Okay. It's the same thing here is that changing a belief that you have about your ability to manage uncertainty is.

It's not easy. Do you ever work with traders during live trading? I've done that a couple times. I don't like that at all. But what happens is that I want people live trading. I might be asking them to hold back on the level of capital they're risking. Because I'm looking for finding the basically the fears and the beliefs behind those fears as they enter certain moments. And that's what I want to be able to slow down and work with. And we want to be able to. We want to get at. We want to get at those beliefs driving performance. But that can only be done during live trading. There has to be, you know, there has to be skin in the game. Hi, my name is Jude. I just wanted to find out if you record and put one on one sessions online. No, I don't. But what happens is I have many people on my one and on the personal stuff who record the conversations.

Yeah. In the individual course.

Yeah. And the group courses are recorded and they're made available so that everybody has them. Yeah. For the students. Yeah, we don't, we don't give it to everybody, obviously, but the, the individuals. Yeah, they record it themselves and they spend a lot of time re listening to the session, going over the finer points, points of it and stuff like that. Okay, let's see. Is there any other questions?

Yeah, and I would also. I don't see any more. So look, you know where we kind of the better way of saying this is Happy Holidays. You know, it just so happens I come from the Christian tradition and I see the birth really.

As the birth of enlightenment within ourselves. And the truth is that coming out of a heart transplant, I find just myself being grateful just to be alive. So I come into a moment like this holiday, and I am in a big deal of being very thankful that I'm alive and can participate in the wonder of life. So I want to thank you guys.

It's been a lot of fun.

Yeah. And this recording will be available on the website tomorrow, but give me a little time. It won't be up till probably after noon. So there you go. Thanks, Randy. I learned from you that you can only control your performance and let go of outcome. Yes. That's what it really boils down to. That is exactly what it boils down to. You can control the mind you bring to performance. You can't control the outcome, but it gives you the edge. So, friends, thank you and happy holidays and happy new Year.