Mastering Trading Psychology: Randy How's Insights on Emotional Mastery

What is the number one psychological problem that you've seen with all the traders that you've come into contact

with over the decades? Oh, the number one by any stretch of the imagination is

Randy Howell is a world-renowned author and trading psychologist. His secrets in psychology has helped

unprofitable traders become millionaires. The successful trader wins by being an expert at losing. And I

believe that trading is the perfect selfmastery. If you do not master the self, you are not going to be a

successful trader. There are a lot of traders out there who say trading psychology is What

are your thoughts when you hear that? First thing I ask, are you profitable? There's a wonderful thing about trading

is that most of us spend a lifetime avoiding our psychological demons. In trading, they're going to stalk you.

When you're looking at charts, you're actually looking at emotions. The vast majority are not profitable. The trading

gods really don't care the success rate of a trader to become consistently profitable. 2 to 3%. And we're moving

that 2 to 3% to 30. We have a brain that is about 6 to8 million years old. It's all about survival in the moment. And we

bring that brain to trading. We believe that we can control outcome. We believe that we can make things happen. And then

you get into trading and you find out that this is a game of probability, not certainty. Loads of people in the

trading space say that we need to treat trading like a business. Would you say that's a the wrong thing to do? The

truth is is that um trading, [Music] the number one podcast in the trading

space, the fastest growing, and that's thanks to every single one of you. Hey guys, before we get into this

episode, I just want to say this is an incredible moment for me directly and for all of you, no doubt as well. Randy

How is an absolute legend in this space. When I first started trading almost 10 years ago, I used to see his clips and

his lectures all over social media and YouTube, generating millions of views and impacting millions of traders across

the world. So the fact that I got to sit down with Randy myself to speak to him and to extract so much value of exactly

how the trading mind works and how to operate as a trader the right way and to be profitable. It was incredible for me

and a huge thank you to Randy. I'm so so happy to be able to bring to you an episode on words of wisdom on how to

master your trading psychology with the one and only Randy How. Welcome everyone to the words of wisdom podcast. We are

back once again as still the number one podcast in the trading space and the fastest growing thanks to all of you and

our incredible guests. And we're on the big US tour still and we're on our second destination in Carolina and we've

come here for one person only and that is a world famous trading psychology and performance coach. He has authored many

books and you probably seen his face many times that I know I did in my the one and only Randy How.

I'm embarrassed. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Yeah, I really appreciate it. I thank you for, you know, sitting down with us cuz I know we had you gone back and

forth for a while and I'm sure you get so many requests. No doubt. Um it was great to to speak about, you know, some

of the trips you've done and the speaking engage. Yes, you've done as well. Well, you were

really interesting. You know, it's like you you who is this guy? This is interesting. You you really got my

curiosity up. Really appreciate. I'm glad we did. I'm glad we did. But I wanted to kick things off like in just

straight away in terms of like what is the number one psychological problem that you've seen with all the traders

that you've come into contact with over the decades? Oh, number one by any stretch of the imagination is that the

brain that they brought into trading is unfit to actually manage the conditions of trading. We have a brain that is

about 6 to8 million years old and it was built for the African savas and it's it's all about survival in the moment.

Okay? And it's acting on instinct. And what we do is we take that brain that is still operational. 95% of our decisions

that we make on a daily basis never go through cognition. They are emotionally based from this very old brain. And we

bring that brain to trading and we have built a mind. We have in this mind we believe that we can control outcome. We

believe that we can make things happen. And then you get into trading and you find out that this is a game of

probability not certainty. and they come in and they

come face to face with it, they get emotionally hijacked because that brain does not understand the difference

between risk and threat to life. Caveman had no money to play with. What he had was survival and he was um he shared the

world with saber-tooth tigers, same caves. And ultimately

a threat to self is a threat to capital to the primitive brain. And you get in there and what happens is people want to

not lose because to them that not losing is guess what? Getting deranged by saber-tooth tiger. At the same time, you

also want to win and you will get cranked up. Like for instance, if you're if you and eight guys find a woolly

mammoth and you decide to attack it because it's going to feed the it's going to feed the village forever and

all this kind of stuff, you're going to have to get really cranked up. That's a dangerous animal. People died.

So, in the same way that when you see overtrading, it's the same principle going on. It's seeing the reward big

news and it gets cranked up and it it blinds itself to the risk that's involved. Mhm.

So out of it is the first order is that we're bringing a brain that thank God evolutionary it allowed us to survive

but now we're asking it to do something that evolution didn't build. And if you're going to go beyond that and get

to where you're actually consistently profitable in your trading, you're going to have to train instinct

that has been around for 6 to8 million years to accept a very different reality with the uncertainty that that you deal

with in trading all the time. That's where it starts. I love that. And there's so much to

unpack there. And it's so fascinating always to hear how the markets brings that fight orflight response even though

there's no physical action really involved other than the that's that's as far as it goes. Yeah. But no physical

action in terms of as you say that that actual risk of life, right? But there's risk involved and that risk sort of

bridges between the two. But have you ever come across when you're working with people trying to help them sort of

navigate and change that mindset and be able to handle that that risk better? Would you say that you've worked with

people with it not able to remove themselves from that brain that evolution?

Yeah. All the time that's if you take a look at the success rate in trading, you know, 95% are going to go down and

another two or 3% are going to be marginal and make some money. But there's only two or 3% of people who

actually generate wealth out of this. And those are the people who have been able to reorganize their mind for

whatever reason. Not necessarily with the traitor psychologist, but somehow they've been able to remold the mind.

And there are other people who are scared. I can't tell you how many times it's very common for me to have a guy,

he's I'm working with him and he's made some really breakthroughs. He's actually putting really good trading mind

together to act not on winning and losing but on performance and it starts showing and that he's extracting more

capital out of the markets than he's giving back in. He's really happy elated and he tells his friends

and say and then he'll say you got to go you got to go see this guy. Oh no. Uhuh. I'm not going to go see any shrink. What

happens if he finds something wrong with me? And I'm going of course there's something wrong with you. You're you're

taking a brain incapable of doing what you're asking it to do and you're trying to force it and then it bucks at you and

kicks you kicks you hard. So yeah, it happens all the time. Let's take a break for a minute there,

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description below. Now, let's get back to the episode. What would you say those trades? Have you seen any sort of common

traits with those people where they've struggled to make those changes? Um they really believe in winning and

they have to win to prove themselves. It's like particularly like with alphas uh their winning is not just about

money. Money is representational of power, of mattering, of status. And that hooks back into our caveman stuff is

that if you were an alpha and you went out and took that willy mammoth down with friends, what happens? You've got

tremendous status. You had first dibs to the food. You had you had leadership qualities and you

also had first dibs on the breeding stock. So your genes were going into the future at a higher rate than anything

else. That's hardwired. And so people come in wanting to win, wanting to prove themselves. And if they make money, they

have power, they have status, they have all this, and they forget that the the rules of success in trading are

enormously different than the rules of success in the world out there. It's kind of like it's kind of like Newtonian

physics, large particle physics, and quantum mechanics. They're different rules. And if you try

to apply if you try to force Newtonian physics principles onto microspcopic type of particles, it blows up in your

face. And it's the same thing that uh alphas do because alphas blow up money, man. They they really do.

Is it kind of the because of the need to be an alpha and the the the traits of that personality aren't suited towards

what the markets are needed? I've actually had um a guy that I worked with a number of years ago was a very

successful serial entrepreneur. When he graduated from college, he sold a bar business for half a million dollars.

Now, I don't know about you, but when I got out of college, I didn't have an extra half a million dollars floating

around. But then over time he had always been able to be able to size up companies, understand what was not

functioning and then to build them and to sell them 10 20 times more than he paid for them.

And then he uh was talking to his brother who was a trader and he found out that trading was a capital inensive

business. and he said, "Oh, well," and he had just sold a position for cash

that gave him multi-million dollars worth of cash. So, he had said, "Oh, I've got it. I know how to I know how to

build businesses. I can do that easy. And now I've got the capital for a capital intensive thing." So, he went

out four years later, he's not making any money. Wow.

He's uh and then he comes to me and we start working and he became consistently profitable. One day we're talking and he

says, "Randy, I want to thank you. This is the best money I've ever invested in my life. I know that I'm not going to be

a trader. I'm not willing to give up control. I'm really good at control." And I've

realized that I have to give up control and I have to accept that my power comes from my ability to perform. I can't do

that. And I was like kind of weirded out because my job at that time I thought was to help people organize themselves

into a more powerful mind for trading. And I'm talking to a trader, very good trader, and I was telling him about this

and he says, "You know something, Randy, it's just a cry and shame to take a perfectly good entrepreneurial mind and

try to force it to become a trading mind. It's just so whacked up." So yeah, there there are traits and there are

ways that when you look at it, you go something, you know, it's just not really the amount of effort

may not be enough and the truth is is it is it going to fulfill you? Do you feel like there are people that really aren't

capable of change just as you mentioned there that those are those alpha do you think because a lot of people when it

comes to trading that one of the big appeals of it is that anyone can do it and from anywhere and you don't

necessarily need a lot of money and and and so on and so forth. But what's the reality of that look like? Is it a case

where there are really are a lot of people out there probably who aren't capable of trading and even if that

means that they do it for a long time they're just not capable of the change that's needed as you said relinquishing

that control the power that trading is necessary uh for consistent trading. Well, I'll tell you something. In my

individual work, uh, we follow a program where I'm I'm actually teaching a process, okay? From understanding

emotion very differently than you probably do now to learning how to regulate emotion to being able to

produce an observer where you recognize you and your thinking aren't the same. To discovering the destructive part of

the human potential and then also building an empowered elements of yourself that have been with us since

the beginning. and you learn how to reconstruct the mind you bring and it's very powerful and um I have about a 30%

success rate with my individual clients. Now I used to think God but I don't want to tell anybody that much less have this

all over the dang universe. And then I realized a guy was talking to me says Randy if a major league baseball player

hits 300 for a lifetime he's going to be in the Hall of Fame.

That's great. And I realized that you know something, the success rate of a trader is to become consistently

profitable at two to three%. And we're moving that 2 to 3% to 30. And at the same time, you still you

still have groups of people for whatever reason. I have uh in my file this morning, I

looked in there. I said, you know, these these files have been in here for like a couple years and I've never seen them.

I've actually had people pay money upfront and never show up for a first meeting.

Really? What's that all about? Okay, talking about fear of like being

exposed and at the same time is there's a lot of people who just are not willing to change. They they think this is the

way it should be and I'm going to be bullheaded about it and I'm going to force my will upon the markets, upon

life and stuff like that. And uh the trading gods just kind of laugh at that stuff about us us uh being able to

control the will of the markets. And so there's a lot there's there's lots most I wish there were an evaluation tool

that would allow uh traders to really find out before they start sinking a lot of capital, a lot of uh their their

interest into it whether or not they actually have um what it takes to begin to shape that. Mhm.

I really That would be an interesting thing. It definitely would be.

I'm I'm actually talking to uh a guy who used to be in one of used to work with me and is now running a goodsiz

organization where he's saying, "Randy, I would like you to start teaching at in my group. And what I would really like

to do is offer this instrument that that helps helps us to decide whether or not we're going to actually work with these

people, whether or not they actually we can at least get in more narrow about whether or not they have a chance

Yeah. of doing this because it's it's a hard business to

Well, that's just it. It's not really a business. There is a business aspect to it,

but it's a it's it's a mindset problem of where you're actually having to remold a mind

that to and get it to do things that it truly was diametrically opposed to by evolution that has been hardwired into

an instinct. Yes. So very it's very hard in terms of

business. One thing you mentioned there, it's like it's like a business because I've heard loads of people, especially

cuz there's a couple things we can touch on, but we'll start with the business element, which is loads of people in the

trading space say that you need to treat trading like a business. Would you say that's a the wrong thing to do? Good

luck. Um, obviously trading is transactional in that you're you're extracting capital,

you're putting back in capital, and at the end of the day, you're finding out uh what your return on investment is.

Okay. So, and you're going to have to pay taxes on that. So yeah, there is an aspect of it being business. But to

think that I'm going to take the mind that I use for business, winning and not losing, being competitive, and if you

think you're going to produce the mind that's going to be able to execute and recognize that you're going to be

losing a lot, okay? And you're going to have to you're going

to have to become an accomplished loser. Okay? I mean accomplished in order for you to be able to wait for

the moments when things work out well and that guy hits target and then you put a leader on it and just goes into

orbit and you make a lot of money and get a thrill. The rest of the time what you're doing is you're you're protecting

your nickels and dimes and you're you're you're making your losses as small as possible

and that that's not a business model that very many people know about that it you know

it's true. You know it's true. One thing that we did mention in terms of people not being capable of of trying

to change and they get kind of stuck of like I don't want I don't believe that I want to stick with this way. Do you feel

there is an element of especially nowadays but even throughout your career no doubt there was still

mentorships and guidance but rather than social media and being so readily available it was probably more so in

seminars and things like of this nature. But regardless, do you think a lot of people build a lot of limiting beliefs

that they get really stuck to and sort of really put into their foundational uh beliefs even so that it becomes so

difficult for them to break them because of the maybe even a pedestal that they've put this particular trader on uh

that they're learning from or someone they look up to or someone they want to mirror and that's the message they're

providing them. So then when let's say someone like yourself is telling them no you need to think in this way or put

these practices in place and they're saying no no no well I've learned from so and so or this person does it this

way. Is that a do you think that's something that definitely happens? Oh all the time and it it really

it really boils down to um that all of us are born into a world and I don't know if you've noticed but we've been

born into an incredibly broken world. Okay. And it just so happens your brain's function is to adapt you to

survive in that world, whether or not you're a wilderbeast or whether or not you're a human being. And

unfortunately, what happens is it adapts you and your brain. Most other animals u bring at birth.

They have they have ancient systems already set up. A giraffe can run in three hours. A chimpanzeee can walk and

hang out. Human infants, I don't know if you've noticed, but they are born remarkably undeveloped

and their brain is developing livewired in the moment to the environment around. And what happens? It's going to pick up

the rules, the beliefs in that family system, in that in that culture, in that community. and they're going to become

so solidified that you would never see that you're looking through those beliefs

and we all bring those beliefs and it's not rocket science. That's the whole thing is it's about mattering. If I make

a bunch of money, I'm going to matter. If I make money, I'm going to have prestige. If I make money, I have I'm

going to have a worth. And a lot of people find out that they have a a sense of selfworth that deeply limits their

ability to make money. They have low they have a monetary worth that gets just snagged.

I had one guy who grew up in a bluecollar family in Detroit. His father worked in the automobile factories and

he just railed at these executives who have made too much money. Nobody's worth a million dollars. Well, I met this guy.

He's working with a high six figure uh account and every time he goes over into seven figures, a million dollars, he

loses back down into the high 600s. When I met him, he had been doing that for 10 years. And you're seeing that he didn't

know that he had a self-limiting belief that had been absorbed at the dinner table

of a perfectly fine family. Okay. And the other one is that you have this sense of worth. You have this sense of

uh uh competency. I'm not good enough. That's I can't tell you that happens all the time. I'm not good enough. I'll

never make it. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. And a sense of belonging and a sense of being lovable.

And I want to really get on I have a friend um an enormously successful trader. I I know for a fact uh he's made

between two and $300 million in the last several years. Incredible.

He's Yeah, he's he's he's of this generation. And um he never used trader psychologist. He never did anything like

that. And I said, "Mitch, how did you do this?" Because when guys do that, I you know, I want to know how they did. And

he says, "Randy, I'll tell you exactly what happened." He says, 'You know, um, I carelessly blew threearters of a

million dollars in a day back when for me threequarters of a million dollars was a lot of money. And it it was it was

rocking financially what was going to happen in the home. And he hadn't told his wife yet. And he finally came to the

moment he says, "I have to do that. I have to tell my wife." And he comes and he tells his wife. and he thought for

sure that the wife was going to be very angry and leave him and all the catastrophic thinking you would imagine.

And what happened when told what she did is she went over held him and they cried together. They cried for 15 20 minutes.

And what Mitch came out of that came out of that as is recognizing come win or lose he still loved. M

and he said it was there that I no longer I just thought of this as you know I'm I'm taking different sides. I'm

doing my best job performing but whether or not I win or lose I'm okay. That is what freed him from being an adequate

trader to being this this this phenomenon. Mhm. So yeah, the those are the basic

self-limiting beliefs that if you're human, they're there and they're they are the beliefs that you're going to

have to heal with compassion, not with tough guy, but with compassion.

And out of that, what happens? You start growing new beliefs about your ability to manage uncertainty.

But if you're trying to prove your worth, if you're trying to prove you're mattering, trading is a really terrible,

terrible place to force your will against something that you can't really comprehend. Do you feel when you are

working with someone who has limiting beliefs, what's the sort of process you go through is one of the first processes

making them aware of that limiting belief, helping them to observe it for themselves and accept that limiting

belief? Yeah, but I I I take it a step further than that. I again I teach a process and

people have no idea what an emotion really is. They have no idea. They don't grasp that

all thinking is emotional state dependent. It is your emotions generating your ability to produce

explanations about what's going on out here. And so the first thing I'm doing is I'm

educating people that you don't have emotions. They have you.

And that until you wise up and put down all the the barky sounds of being a tough guy, the emotion is still going to

overwhelm you. It is more powerful than you ever imagined. Your body is part of that emotion. The way you breathe, the

way you hold tension is part of that emotion. It's the arousal element. And once it hits a particular threshold,

it's taking out the mind. It's taking out the cognitive mind. So I'm teaching first of all I'm getting people to

understand that they really need to change their opinion about emotions. It's not like you can do live without

emotions. The only time that you don't have emotions is when you're dead. However, you can develop freedom of

emotion so that you actually become the spearhead of being able to develop an emotional cocktail that thinking arises

out of that allows you to perform really well in trading. That's the that's the fir the second part is that you have to

regulate the emotion. And the first part of the training with me, you're learning how to breathe diaphragmatically as you

trade. You're also having a mirror or a video camera on you to see all the tenseness and see that you're not

breathing, which means you're accelerating the emotions sent to take over mind, hijack mine. And then I teach

when you do that I also teach mindfulness of where you recognize that you and your thoughts are not the same.

That again you don't have thoughts they're having you. They're creating your stuff. And most likely it's history

coming right through you and continuous creation. Like for instance I come from a family that lost generational wealth

the the generation before me. Wow. And it was always the McMillan's getting the money back from the Okconors

who stole it from them. It was just, oh, it was crazy. And I found myself um always trying to get the money back. And

even into adulthood, I found myself in one business. I would do something would happen, I would want to get the money

back. That's what I knew and understood. If I was going to have power, I had to get the money back. Then it occurred to

me that you know something, money is actually a transaction. It's really more about um it's the grease

that makes things happen. It's not a good way to measure your inherent worth as a human being.

And in the time that I finally learned to change that belief to where now um capital is really more about an exchange

of values, exchange of what people see my worth, my work is worth. And since that has occurred, uh it it's

we have done we've done really well financially. Before I was always trying to get the money back,

completely different mindsets. It's those kind of beliefs that once you begin to develop the empowered elements

of your potential that you can actually bring to bear and you can turn toward the self-arning belief and you can

actually identify it much more easy because now you're realizing oh my god I as a human being have been given this

gift of being captain of my own destiny. I can build the way the mind engages the challenges of living

and the way that I'm currently dealing with it is not working well. That's why people come and work with me.

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description below. Now, let's get back to this episode. What would you say in terms of let's say

someone was entering trading? They're a few months in, they've just found their interest as someone

to put on their radar like to help them make that, you know, to help them as much as possible in the beginning of

their journey. What would you say to them? First of all, find a good teacher, a good method teacher, and learn that

method to the point where on paper you can you can make money. And then uh what happens is then you're

going to need to learn. And it may be that you just go from paper to real cash and everything's hunky dory. I I don't

deal with people like that. At the point where they start actually risking real capital, they turn on the

ancient brain. And that is the time where you need to be learning how to what psychology of trading is and how

you go and intervene in emotions and build emotions. So what I what I basically say is that

once you come to the moment where you turn over, get really small, go to micros, do whatever you can so that

you're not blowing yourself up and start seeing that the moment you add money to the equation, everything

changes. And then that's when trader psychology becomes really interesting. They will

never believe you if uh if you say you're going to need this. Oh no, I'm just going to get this

system, man. My teacher knows how. we're gonna just be ming money, blah blah blah blah blah. No. Get there and all of a

sudden have feel the potential of loss or the potential of making a bunch of money and what

happens is that the emotions just blow you out and you're back in ancient caveman time and your thinking brain has

just been relegated to the caboose of a of a train. Is there any uh exercises that you give

to traders you know that they that they can do on their own to try and you identify things?

The simple ones are breathing. What I what I in almost all my work particularly when I'm presenting do my

little presentation my dog and pony show. What I'm asking people to do is not to believe me. Get a mirror. Get a

camera. Point it at yourself while you're trading and notice how much tension is in your face,

in your shoulders, in your fists. And notice that you're not breathing. And once they grasp that those are parts

of an emotion and what they've just done is they've just kicked it up to fight flight. When you feel all that that's

that's fight flight ready to act and at fightf flight thinking is just hijacked.

So the first thing I do is I have them do that simple exercise and it begins to wake them up. And I've also I get a lot

of uh people who will write me and in fact one Doris read while we were coming over here where this guy is just taking

these really simple exercises that I'm not necessarily intending to help people grow themselves into a

better trader. I want them to come through me. And what they're doing is they're

finding greater levels of success. That's just from breathing. And the other element is that uh everybody can

start practicing mindfulness and recognizing a great truth is that no just because you hear voices in your

head doesn't mean you're crazy. But you are crazy to ignore the voices in your head. There are some there are some

destructive elements in there. There are some highly empowering parts of the self. But in mindfulness, you begin to

be able to start sorting out uh all this cacophony going on in your mind and actually recognizing that it

can be ordered. And what's going to happen? the observer, the CEO of your company needs

to wake up from its deep sleep and recognize that the committee of the mind uh is in a mutiny and that you have to

decide that I'm going to learn to put this mind together so that it is empowered and I'm leading not from my

fears, not from my greeds, but I'm leading from discipline. I'm leading from impartiality. I'm leading from

patience and that you can read my book, you can read you can watch the videos, you can that stuff's constantly out

there and Dolores and I get feedback about how people's lives have changed just from that. I love that. I love

that. In terms of emotions when it comes to greed, is

there like somewhere that that that stems from or like why traders seem to be a very common theme when it comes to

greed in particular? Well, first of all, there in the background of this, we're we're labeling greed as bad.

It's not. If you didn't have greed, you wouldn't find the motivation to go do things and make things happen. The deal

is is um is that is that greed in conjunction with a number of other emotional programs that allow the greed

to give you the motivation to seek better and and particularly what you're doing is you're saying I there is a in

my work I actually use uh a heart rate monitor and an app that aligns the heart rate within within certain parameters

that are indicative of a good trading mind and a a deteriorating trading mind and a get

the hell out of this trade trading mind. Okay. And you know ultimately uh greed uh is

just something that needs to be managed like any other emotion. You know it's like uh you can be compassionate all you

want but if you just give away everything you end up poor at the end. So compassion has to be managed. the

courage, you know, we want to have courage to act, but we don't want to do really dumb, stupid, suffic.

So to me, greed is that, yeah, sure, it gets in the way because we have this idea that if if we had money, that would

solve all the problems in the world. I used to work with really wealthy people when I was a therapist.

And what I found is that the wealth was so great that they could insulate themselves from having to change. they

could just send attorneys and ultimately but if you're actually in a honest God feedback relationship with

your environment you're looking at greed going it has some really it has some good qualities to it. The thing is is we

need to start defining how those qualities are going to activate because if you really have a belief of scarcity,

you want to make money and you're greedy to get it and that greed starts dominating the

committee of the mind rather than having a balanced part of that mind. And so ultimately it's not it's not that greed

is bad. It's just you don't know how to use emotions intelligently. Your EQ your emotional intelligence is low. But as

you develop that EQ, you begin to see that. I mean, even shame, understand shame has a bad rap. If you want to

change, you're going to have to employ shame. Shame is an emotion that says

the way you're currently organized is not working for the good of the whole. You need to reorganize yourself. And

what it does is it starts the party, disorganizes you, and the brain flips out.

and it wants everything in the world not to feel that again. So, it shuts it off. But if you really find the courage, um,

a number of years ago, um, my wife le I led my wife into a business debacle that cost me

couple million dollars. Wow. Okay. And I felt nothing but shame at

that time. I was this guy who thought I am I am so cool. I am so great. and we were living this high life and then a

recession happened. The business started failing and we were financially underwater and I was deeply ashamed.

I was a failure. You know, I wasn't the man that I purported to be. And I I said, "Dloris, you can leave. I know

you're going to be leaving." And she has a temper, but boy, she she really got angry. And what she got angry about was

that she that I thought that her love for me had anything to do with the abundant

success that that that I was claiming. And out of that though in the in the dissolution of

that organization itself what we discovered is that the one thing that I really wanted to be and wanted to do

with my life is I wanted to help people grow as I had been able to grow and get out of the um confinement of the

self-limiting beliefs that I was born into and had executed. So the greed ended up reorganizing me

into much more higher functioning. So if you have failure in trading, that failure it's just it's not saying

there's something wrong with you. There's it's saying the way you're currently organized and your competency

needs to be looked at and changed to be able to match up with the requirements of trading.

So like even shame, guilt, all that they are they are they are there because they were integral parts of our survival

as a species. So even even fear the same same element is that there are benefits to it.

Failure failure fear oh I tell you failure you know the brain does not learn from success.

Success hits the dopamine button and it it it more hardwires the pattern. Yeah. And it'll get you in a lot of trouble.

Failure is forcing the brain. That's the way the brain learns if you look at failure and all of a sudden

you're going, "Okay, it's not about me. It's about my competencies." And you learn to reorganize yourself to do

better. Uh Ray Croc McDonald's, uh he was famous for having the words uh I failed my way to success.

Yes. Okay. And it's the same thing is that uh if you're if you're afraid of failure,

oh my god, don't step out the front door much less start trading because in trading you have this thing of where

let's say you take loss. I teach my folk to do this is one is this a method mistake and let's say that

no you executed your you know your your method was fine and all that that doesn't need to be looked at reformed.

Is this a psychological mistake? Let's say that no, you actually performed quite well and you did exactly what your

rule said and you still lost. So what happens? You realize that loss is just simply probability.

You're not going to learn from it because it really wasn't a failure. I actually consider that to be success in

trading. But if there's a psychological mistake there, it's exposing it so that it can be worked with. If there's a

method mistake there, the same thing is it's exposing it. So you can decide whether or not that method, that rule

actually is delivering the goods or whether or not you're growing past that methodology, those sets of rules. So no,

all the emotions are built for you to be able to survive as a group and uh they get kind of they can get skewed,

but they don't have to be. What processes would you give to traders as they're actively trading? Is there

things that once they've entered a trade or executed on a trade or the trade has given its result as you mentioned like

you've asked for example did that fit your plan etc. Uh but are there processes that you're when you're

working with someone that you're tracking you're keeping on top of you're asking them to do and getting feedback

from them? It depends on how well trained they are. And my and again my process is that

first of all they're going to be uh I use these forms that basically take all sorts of information about

physiologically what's happening to you because I know that the physiological aspect of yourself cannot be separated

from your emotions from your cognition or your spirituality for that matter. and you're looking at this all in place

and you're saying, "Okay, if I'm watching that and I'm and I'm seeing my breathing and stuff like that, I can

regulate that and I can maintain the kind of mind that I need to trade with." I also teach that you should be setting

alerts every 10 to 15 minutes so that the alerts just sitting there saying you need to check in to uh is your mind

still in the right place? And you should be able, if you're working with me, you should be

getting to a point of where you know what it you know what the the empowered mind looks like, feels like when it's

present. Okay? And so you're you're having you're setting up an alert. And I also have people uh take breaks about

every hour. And the truth is is that um trading is a massive drain on your cognitive

system. the amount of glucose, that's the fuel. Uh when you're looking when you're

looking at trading, it's like a 1965 muscle car GTO stomping it and you're sitting there stomping it and you're

seeing the gas gauge go. That's pretty much what the high activity, the cognitive activity that

you're doing in trading, that's what it's doing. I don't care who you are, is that after

about an hour, hour and 15 minutes of that kind of load, uh you're going to start running out of glucose and all of

a sudden your mind's going to get dull. It's not going to be sharp and you're going to start making mistakes. So,

there's a there's a process of taking care of yourself. But when it really comes down to it, what

I'm teaching a person to do is to find what I call the ruler living within them. And that ruler

exemplifies discipline, the ability to maintain order under pressure. And what happens with most people, they

discover that their ruler goes awall. You know, they get all cranked up about the orphan wanting money. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Or the inner critic saying, "You might as well give up. It's never going to work. It's never going to work." And

what you're looking at is saying, "Is ruler present?" Because you know ultimately if you do not have discipline

everything else is for not but emotional discipline is a

requirement and if you develop like for instance with me it is uh it is a Roman centuran and I have a fascination of

Roman centuran since high school I took a lot of Latin and in the second third year you're

reading texts and I read a book by Julius Caesar called I came I saw I conquered and what it was was a life

the life of centurans. I fell in love and that that centurion symbolically just stayed with me for

ages to the point where this almost became a conversation where I finally asked this part of myself, um, what is

it you need from me? And in this hallucination I'm talking about, that centurion looked at me and says, I need

the sword back. The one you dropped on the ground and never picked up again. I did that with a stick that I used as a

sword to play king. And uh I threw it down one time because I I grew up in a profoundly crazym home

and I gave up and I threw it down and I didn't pick it up for about 30 years. And that part of me, as weird as it may

sound, that part of me was sitting there waiting for me to get to a moment that he could wake up and come become part of

me again. And I claim that all of us have those kind of heroic qualities living within us. And a lot of them get

pushed down for us to learn how to survive in an environment. And if you're going to become a uh a much better

achieving human being and a better trader, you're going to have to find you're going to have to find those

qualities. Again, they're there. They're part of the genome. They're part of uh group survival of our caveman things.

And you're going to have to learn to build that into a very different committee of the mind that can engage

life's challenges. Life changes radically when that happens. I went through a heart transplant where I was I

was on death row for a couple years. Wow. And I had to maintain this uh this

empowered part of myself. Um cuz it it it was bleak. And yet at the same time, I now look at

it as probably the best thing that ever happened to me. Really?

Oh, it just opened my eyes. And now I'm at a point where I realize I'm 73. And sooner or later, you know, I really

should retire quarter kind of maybe soon through it. But I what I want is I want a systematic programming that people can

see years after I'm gone and work with and learn how to find that power within themselves and to grow it and to take

their God-given gifts and manifest them is

doesn't sound like trading, but it can start with trading. No, definitely. No, but I can see where

it intertwines though. And in terms of in terms of that like making a systematic approach, is there any

element of your work where you're looking at uh personality traits of individuals? I tend to look um I don't

look at personality traits. I look at um I used Carl Young's archetypal system and where there are 12 different

archetypes and they are they are personality traits like the ruler is discipline

the uh the warrior is courage the caregiver is self soothing selfassion I've heard of these yes

so they they there and but the thing is what I Carl Young when he studied what he discovered is these traits were in

all human beings no matter what culture you came from they were common from our uh from our

our African experience. And the deal is is that I'm more interested in naming him from that

perspective because I'm looking for their purest form to pull forward. You know, I don't need u a guy who

already is um having a very big strong problem with his greed uh manifesting a powerful ruler that

becomes a tyrant. I'm I'm looking for I'm looking for a person to be able to pull a ruler out of themselves that has

the highest good um that I believe that a human being can strive for. And so

and my favorite saying is by Thomas Jefferson, the guy who envisioned the United States. He said, "The price of

freedom is eternal vigilance." And what I hold is that we can build a mind

but that's not enough. We have to maintain it to be able to engage the challenges of our life and to do

something with them that no other animal has ever been able to do ever.

Yeah. We are this is like u we are literally conscious creation. And

by the way, I count creation as the big bang and the organization that came to where

life and the way it evolved into where one animal ended up starting having consciousness.

I consider that to be a miracle that is unexplainable. And if you have a empowered committee

that you have developed, it's much easier to actually take responsibility for that kind of mind and to develop it.

Are you going to fall off the wagon every once in a while? Oh yeah, of course we our job is to strive and to

build that. And I believe that trading is the perfect selfmastery is that if you do not master the self,

you are not going to be a successful trader. That's a big line. That's a big line, but it's so true because trading

is almost as you do with some of your exercises, it's putting that mirror in front of you. If you want to succeed,

you have to be able to look very clearly and detailed manner and almost objectively at that mirror and not be as

you said earlier like not feel shame even though shame has its positives. Not feel shame for what you see.

Yeah. Not not feel toxic shame. Toxic shame. You become a character flaw that nothing

can be done about at that moment. Let's take a break for a minute though, guys, cuz I want to tell you about our

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below. Now, let's get back to the episode. In terms of uh a trade like someone you may have worked with in the

past for example taking a heavy loss you know a significant loss more than the usual sort of loss and it really is you

know playing on their mind maybe even impacting future performance. Absolutely.

You know what do you do in those circumstances? Well the first thing is that when you

take the loss you're going to have emotional chemistry in the body that you do not want. And the very first thing is

you exercise. You want to burn that chemistry. And then, you know, from my standpoint in teaching people what to

do, what you're doing is you're going back and reorganizing yourself around something that I call inherent worth.

I I believe inherent there is a section of us that is inherently worthy of being

loved, of being respected and stuff like that. And for me, we keep pushing that inherent worth away and we keep looking

for performances to cover that making money. And you know, ultimately this isn't about making money. Look, in two

generations, um, a very wealthy man is going to die and nobody's going to remember him.

He may have a foundation name, but the the the thing is is what do you give like this guy Mitch, you know, he's

building a foundation for God's sake. He's teaching people and funding them, okay? Uh within his system of trading,

and he's he's not doing anybody. He's taking people who are financially really challenged,

which is uh uh I probably wouldn't do that myself. That's that's a whole another, you know, working with money

conversations that people have about what the meaning of money is. He's doing that.

Um, he's altered the way he perceives money, the way he believes in money, and he wants to help produce a better

potential life for others. That's to me um um I'm hoping that that's the way that

people they will not remember be my name but they will remember somehow that they became much more

equipped to deal with the challenges of living. Definitely. How important is that do you

think the beliefs around money because the amount of people obviously everyone I say obviously but loads of people get

into trading more so focused on the money element. Oh yeah, right. But unfortunately, a lot of people come to

trading with very little money to begin with. And in my opinion, that's a very bad

recipe because the a lot of the messaging they're getting is that trading brings easy money. Y

it's easy to get rich from uh from from trading and therefore they bring this very little money sometimes with no

money already and they might be going into debt to try and trade which is a whole different conversation. I've

actually had that happen where the guy was telling his wife that yeah, we I'm doing great. Everything's fine. And then

the first thing she knew that there was trouble on the horizon when they got the foreclosure messages.

I can imagine. And yeah, he they lost their house. Wow.

So yeah, it's it's easy. Well, so what how much of that is important to a trader in terms of like

those beliefs around money and being able to change those perceptions around money? huge

is that understand if you go back to the notion of cavemen. This is these are guys living 100,000 years ago. The

concept of money just was irrelevant. If you dumped a truckload of money in front of them, they might use it as uh tinder

to to light to but they would have no concept of it. Yet at the same time,

the brain is going to produce explanation. it's going to produce symbolic representation. It that's just

what brains do. And the connection between uh money as a source of uh safety, as a source of power, as a

source of status uh became embedded into um your whole sense of power, your whole sense of trading. If I have money, then

this. And uh it's interesting. You go into a trading community and the guy asks you to sit

and just watch people talk and stuff like that. And uh what I know is that only two or 3% are profitable.

And yet when you listen to this crowd of people talk, you would think every one of them are just tunning it.

What happens is they they're in they're living in selfdeception. And as long as they're living in self-deception about

their money beliefs, then they're stuck with the performance level that they're in. is that

in trading it's not about winning and losing. It's about performing. Is that your job is to perform and

execute your plan every time regardless of what happens. And if you do that, you extract more capital out of the

market than you put in. What happens is so easy though when you see something and that thing that thing's coming near

your stop and all said, "Oh no, I can just give it some more room." Blah blah blah blah. You're gambling at that

moment. The moment that you decide to give it more room, you're gambling. A friend of mine, uh, David Deetay, is um,

enormously successful trader. Uh, and when I first met him, he was an intuitive trader. He had been he was a

market maker. He was just all that stuff. And he runs his own runs his own group now. and in his group uh you have

to be at an elevated level to take his intuitive trades because he's not going to let people who

are just getting into the business do that. And one day he said this is this an intuitive trade we're getting in and

only a certain group of people could do it. They got in and what happened is that once David's in he has certain

markers that is going to tell him whether or not he's going to stay in that trade or not. It didn't hit those

markers and he got out at small loss. Next day his buddies come up and say, 'Oh man, did you make all that money,

too? And it was the biggest thing this month. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And then they started

saying, "Why didn't you do it?" And he said, "Because it was an intuitive trade and it didn't it didn't meet my

criterion once I got in." For him, it was nothing. That's just the way you did. Everybody else though gets

seduced by the idea of money, of power, of the prestige, and you know, look at me. So that's you know money uh

is all involved in that and everyone is going to have to change those those beliefs and particularly scarcity

thinking you know um scarcity thinking is thinking that what you have will be

taken from you and it just so happens that if you happen to have a mortgage

you're already primed for it. Yeah it's true. Okay.

Very true. Yeah. So, you're looking at it that way and you're realizing that I also have to work through the scarcity

that there's never enough or it will be taken from me and those beliefs are going to impact

your trading phenomenally much less if I make a bunch of money people are going to like me and stuff like that. That

that just gets all the other stuff. What about in terms of striving for perfection? Do you find that a lot of

people come into trading and they're trying to be perfect? trying to be they assume that there is something they may

learn or something that they can gather that will allow them to never lose and never really have any significant losses

and only really win. Oh, that's the perfectionist. That's a that's actually a personality type I talk about.

And the perfectionist believes that if you do everything right, you won't be wrong. And if I want my engineer, the

civil engineer who built the bridge I'm driving over, I want him to be a perfectionist.

Of course, I want the accountant I work with to be a perfectionist. I want the airline

pilot that's that's taken me through the sky to be a perfectionist. However, if you take those traits and

put them into trading, you're going to lose. And so, the thing is is that

perfectionism truly has to die. Perfectionism is really about anxiety that you're going to be wrong and you're

trying to make sure that you prove you're right. And the truth is is that it's not about

being right or wrong. It's about whether or not you learn and whether or not you perform your plan. And

um the perfectionist believes if I just do a little more. Mhm.

And then they miss the trade because they're just trying to accumulate accumulate more data to be able to make

a better better read on the market. Yeah. Entry time and stuff like that. So perfectionism that's that's just um

sorry about that. That just that just doesn't work. Definitely. And you mentioned discipline

earlier and obviously the ruler. In terms of discipline, is there certain things that you will advise traders to

do in order for them to be more disciplined? Get rest, not do stupid stuff like uh

drink way too much uh sugary drinks and don't don't all that stuff, but ultimately it's really more about

training. And I I use a technique that is fairly simple. It's um it's symbolic

representation where I'm looking for you to find something in the world that has symbolic representation to you of

discipline of maintaining order under pressure. The Roman centurion. Uh other people may find Winston

Churchill. Other people may find a lion. Other people might find an owl. It doesn't really matter. It could be a

person or not. Um but what you're looking at is going you could even use like Gandhi. He was highly disciplined,

you know, he and he beat he beat the British, you know. Um, but what you're doing is