Controlling Your Emotions Under Pressure

[Music] you're in control until the moment you're not until that pressure gets real then all of a sudden all that careful planning all that stuff you do just flies out the window why is that you know the thing is is you study hard you have invested heavily you've learned a skill set that most can actually make money when the money's not real but when that money becomes real something you can lose all of a sudden it gets down deep inside you and something occurs that honestly traitors don't understand they don't understand what's going on they have a tendency to think that oh i can handle this these are emotions i can just take those feelings and push them away or i can barge through them or i can do something and learn to master them by pushing them around by ignoring them but the truth is it doesn't work that way it may have worked that way before you got into trading you might been able to like man up on something and push hard and work hard and say i can do this and with every bit of the rigor in you you were able to produce that yeah that's a different world than trading in trading the model is really about probability and you don't have a brain built for probability you have a brain built to produce certainty to be right to win and not to lose that's what i refer to as the caveman brain and the reason you can't trade the way you can when the money is not real is because that emotional brain the caveman brain does not tell the difference between money which it doesn't understand and life and death when you're in a situation and that trade goes against you and it goes past your soft stop and you're doing everything you can not to lose i'll give it some more room you were playing out a drama that began about at least six and a half million years ago where to caveman when he was in a fight if he lost that means he got consumed he was dead and so you can see the urgency the problem that's the emotional brain very few traitors ever get themselves to be emotionally intelligent and start integrating what is going on in the thinking brain which they think's reality you know it produces all this cognition all this thinking all this stuff the problem is it doesn't even see this powerful beast living within it the emotional brain the caveman brain it's instinctive and what you're doing when you put pressure on yourself in training you're triggering the instincts of that caveman ancestry years and it's popping up to fight flight the thinking brain never saw it coming it's incapable of that it doesn't it has language centers where the emotional brain doesn't have language centers it doesn't have thought it has movement i mean understand emotion is defined e out of motion action out of the body it's all action oriented and it's not built to think first under stress it's built to immediately go and either attack or avoid the threat in front of you and that's the problem we don't see that and it bites us at the very time we need to be there so the first real thing is what do you think an emotion is okay they're constantly dominating your thought they're taking over a good trading plan that knows how to execute an edge and then blowing that out and all of a sudden you're a bunking horse and a burning barn just like that that's emotion now what is it well there's a couple definitions that are interesting from neurobiology one is any deviation from a standard sensorial pattern okay and if you're looking at your charts and you're seeing that thing go up there's all sorts of stimulations there are all sorts of perturbations going on which means you're triggering two emotions the question is which one dominates which one takes over the closer you get lost or the more you want to win okay to feed the crowd are all that that's what's happening to you so another definition that i use an emotion is a biological action potential okay that coordinates action between the environment the markets and you the organism the traitor by there being a change in status in the market by definition an emotion is going to merge it triggers the thinking brain never saw it coming this is all instinctual this is all automatic it is all familiar pattern the last one to find out about this is your thinking brain meanwhile we're taught to believe that we're thinking creatures we're not we're emotional creatures who think that thinking from a neurobiological standpoint is a behavioral output okay the thinking and then the behavior are linked together but the thing is the emotion was there first and pops open so the key is what you really need to get whether or not you like it or not whether or not you could ignore it before trading or after is that emotions dominate thinking all thinking is emotional state dependent and what you're looking at with your performance and your p l statement you're looking at your beliefs your emotional beliefs about your ability to manage uncertainty and if you had caveman ancestors those beliefs are going to crash under stress they're going to go to fight flight they're going to feel threatened and either move to avoid or to attack the source of that threat that's what's happening in your trading how do you go about working with this first of all by recognizing that the mind the brain that you brought to trading built around that caveman model brain is just not going to produce the kind of success you believe is possible in trading that's that's the bottom line you've been able to force your will you've been able to do a lot of stuff in a different environment a lot of people have been very successful in corporate careers and business careers and then they get to trading try to use the same success formula and it blows up in their face that's because the worlds are different the probability mine is what trading is all about that's the antithesis of what your survival caveman brain is built for though so if you want to produce consistent profitability if you want to find emotional control you're going to have to go back and acknowledge that instinctual emotional brain that you brought from your caveman ancestors is prime center the moment stress happens and you're going to have to learn what am i going to do with it and if you understand the way an emotion works we've talked about the definition of emotion but the very first stage when it pops open there's an arousal moment where it's revving up revving up getting ready for action and it could be immediate it can bypass thinking very easily okay then what happens is there's a motivation that motivation is telling the emotion which way to go attack avoid approach we want to approach to maintain order of the mind in trading but we are built for fight flight okay from our caveman ancestor so the motivation's telling what to go to go and then the feeling after after a direction of the emotion has been established and then after it's revved up it reaches a critical mass moment where boom suddenly a trigger's opened and that emotion is flooding through your brain flooding through your body as chemistry you're cooked at that moment your brain just got taken out and suddenly it is serving this emotional brain it's no longer pretending like it's in charge it's not so you're looking at that going okay how do i deal with that we've talked about okay there's arousal there's motivation there's feeling but there's also predisposition that's what i call evolutionary psychology that's the genetic temperament you bring and you're going to bring it from ancient survival strategies not probability based mind you're gonna have to work on that you're gonna have to work around that to be able to stop it from activating that survival instinct from activating and taking over mine when under stress the last one is belief okay believe me your p l it's telling you the effectiveness of the beliefs you have really at the very deep ends about your ability to manage uncertainty okay and most find in training those beliefs are not effective they're gonna have to change where do you start you start with acknowledging an emotions biological and you start using your breathing as part of biology you start using your muscle tension and relaxation as to interrupt the process of that emotion if you're diaphragmatically breathing it's very hard to go into fight flight but most of the traders i work with when i first start working with them they're either holding their breath or they're very shallow breathing they're a target a sitting duck for an emotional hijacking and they don't even know it because of their ignorance about emotion and how to use emotion now so we've gotten to that point we said okay we need to learn how to disrupt and control the intensity of the emotion we also need mindfulness to be able to step back out of our thoughts as if they were us and to come to a profound insight you and your thoughts you and your beliefs are not the same what beliefs really are are assessment made by the brain about its capacity to manage itself in the environment once it finds a perceptual way of managing that neither good nor bad it locks into it and suddenly that becomes a limbic belief and when you add cognition on top of that that big huge thinking brain of ours it becomes a belief a subconscious belief and all of a sudden you're going okay those are the ones i've got to get at mindfulness is used to step back to observe and to begin to open the door of the mind and begin to see who in the heck is in charge of that mind of yours when you get under pressure it's not the good guys i promise you it's going to be the bad guys the one that want to blow up things from there what you have to do is you have to learn that the mind is really more like a board committee that manages a company called you and that there is no permanent you this thing called you is actually one potential organization of your potential into a self that got locked in by your emotional brain and you've been in the fallacy of thinking oh that's me no it's not it is just simply one organization of a potential self what we want to do is go in and see the ones that have locked in and we want to disrupt that and what we want to do is to replace them on this governing board of the mind we want to replace them with what i would call the empowered mind the mind that's rooted in the discipline of ruler the courage of a warrior the self-soothing of a caregiver and the impartiality of a sage that's very different than the survival mind that's the mind that can manage probability it can maintain order of the self it has the courage to look at what it literally what's stopping it you it has the compassion to actually recognize that through compassion is the doorway of change that's where you find your inherent worth that's when you start realizing that oh i'm just one potential organization of a cell and i can become designer of myself i can become captain of my own destiny so you organize that and then what you recognize is that the movement toward our destructive nature is never going to stop it's always there but what you do is you train yourself to have this empowered mind present okay as the new as the new committee and you have to be vigilant because that's the price of freedom friend how do you do this well what i encourage you to do is get the head knowledge what we're talking about now but i actually ask you to take it deeper if you haven't are you not familiar with my work get my free book from the website just start there then start doing a lot more youtube then read the articles and ultimately though it comes down to two courses a group course and an individual course where those are the places where the education is presented for you to be able to learn how to take the tools of change and start applying them to yourself to build the mind that can maintain emotional sobriety under pressure it can be done you can teach an old dog new tricks the thing though is you have to acknowledge that it's you're going to have to work at it you know you have besides 6.5 million years of evolution you also have decades of conditioning you know yourself and so you're gonna have to you're gonna have to work that down and this is only if you really want to be successful in trading okay where all of a sudden you change from being a person has to win not lose to where a person what you're saying is this is probability i know that what i have to do is i have to work on my performance i can't win i can't lose i don't have control over that but i do have a lot of control about the mind i bring to that moment of performance that's what we teach come learn friends i look forward to it and be well and good luck with your trading [Music] you

Channel: Rande Howell

Views: 12,029

Keywords: psychology of trading, emotional control, losing control, over trading, fear of losing, revenge trading, over confidence, giving it all back, patience, emotional discipline, disciplined trader, in the zone, self control, emotions in trading, self development, sabotage, impulsive, trading psychology, mindfulness, Mark Douglas, mastering trading psychology, improve trading psychology, control my emotions, losing composure

Id: 0Z676U1RDF4

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2022