Rande Howell

This is a common problem. Essentially it really doesn't matter what you think. What is important is what you believe about what money and risk. Self limiting beliefs about you adequacy, your worth, and you sense of power are automatically triggered in certain moments in trading -- particularly the moments where you are actually risking capital (worth) rather than pretending to think about it. I encourage you to explore the money narrative that your beliefs are rooted in. You are born into these beliefs, and they have you. You do not have them. I also like SUIJA's idea of ramping up your capital in stages. Each stage will trigger the automatic assessments of your worth and competency and ideally needed to be worked with as you acclimate yourself to a new mindset about money, worth, power, adequacy, and risk. It's a good way of building strength rather than blowing yourself up. Rande Howell

Well named. Personally my favorite is from the Chilean neuro-biologist, Herberto Maturana, who seperated new born lambs from their mothers at particular moments. One of the times was when the new born was first dropped. He and his assistants would clean the after birth, rather than the mother, and give the babe right back to the mother, no more than 5 minutes. The lambs did not grow up to be the social lambs that flock together. They distanced themselves from the flock and become isolated and bahhedd alot. Attachment,attunement gone amuck. Rande Howell

They call that Dependent Personality Disorder. Great sex until until it becomes pattern and boredom, or drama, set in. Maybe she was Harlow's girlfriend first.... Rande Howell

Sorry about that. I spent 20 years in advertising and marketing research in a quest to discover why people buy things -- often stupid things. And Dan Hill's work became my Bible of sorts. Bottom line, the members of an audience (or tribe) make emotional decisions rooted in their need for mattering, worth, power, and adequacy and then (afterwards) make up an explanation to rationale their decision. The limbic meaning making is for more powerful than the newly formed neo-cortex. The deepest implicit (read out of awareness of the individual) meaning embedded into the amygdala makes buying decisions out of a desire to feel connected and powerful. Dan Hill's work involves video taping people during focus interviews and then studying the video afterwards by slowing it down and watching for micro expressions of emotions. These are ones that last no longer that 1/25 of a second and therefore out of human awareness. They were able to get out real buying signals by doing this. And they discovered thinking had little to do with buying. It was all emotion based on a need to feel powerful, like they mattered, worthy, and adequate. And since emotion considers only short term solution, habituation to short term gratification habits beneath conscious awareness. Much like drug addiction. No focus on long term gain. It is the individual who has to get beyond this. Marketers will prey upon you vulnerabilities until you get this. So will Wall Street. The source is 50 million years of emotional brain development and a lack of mindfulness on the individual's part. Nature and nurture. By the way, all this stuff starts with the "touchy, feely" attachment and attunement to Mummy and Daddy. Many years ago it was demonstrated that Rheus monkeys would attach to a rag and a clock to avoid the chaos of a lack of cherishment and belonging. All those associations that marketers are building in their advertising to build a relationship between you, escape from your personal abyss, and their products are, at the bottom, rooted in the escape of attachment and attunement wounds. And our avoidance of healing them. Anyway, people got a lot out of my misguided answer to your question. So thanks. Rande Howell

Honestly, the most important trait I look for in a potential client is the passion they have for trading. This equates to Lover in the archetypal language of inherent attributes of our human. When passionate, I know they are willing to give up their current organization of self to become the trader they could be. Very few people are equipped off the shelf for trading. Some are. Jan Arps, and his son Hawk, are such people. They both have strong logical minds that landed in families that taught risk management from the craddle. So they were able to unravel uncertainty from being bonded to fear allowing them to think logically in probability oriented environments such as trading. This is rare. Nature and nuture breed a near perfect storm there. Capacity for self honesty is next. If they have passion and can develop self honesty and are willing to work hard to emotionally regulate themselves, I have found a large range of people can develop the inherent traits of discipline, patience, courage, and impartiality. Maybe they have to also work to find a place in trading that lines up with their talents, but that can be done. Those 4 inherent traits are the things that a trader either needs to be born with or develop. The major characteristic when those four are present is that the state of mind doesn't change whether the trader wins or loses. They have the confidence to look at the failed trade with curiosity and look for a methodology mistake, a psychological mistake, or simply probability. If it's method or psych, they correct the mistake compassionately and move on. If it's probability, they just move on. The traders I have not done well with (and really try) tend to have a really significant anxiety organization that does not respond to the emotional regulation work that is in the first part of my training. I'm in trouble then. The technology is tried and true, but the condition I'm working with needs to be treated -- not worked with. These people will generally have been treated for anxiety unsuccessfully for a number of years before they get into trading. These are not just regular worry and self doubt people. These are people with significant disruptions in attachment (trust) or adaptation to trauma (reactive fear) that wired in deep seated reactiveness. Most people have the potential and simply have some glitches in psychological skills development that comtaminates them form developing their potential. They just have to want it enough to change. Rande Howell

Nature and nurture is a both/and proposition. Through the process of attachment and attunement, our brain comes to very primal valuations of our worth. It is this internalization of this worth that is so important. To the young developing brain, worth in their parents' eyes is equated with survival. Without their care, the child dies. So the developing brain is invested into organizing itself into someone that the parents will take care of (love and belonging). The inherent worth of a human being gets compromised here. There is an external judge of that worth (wounded parent) that greatly influences the brain's development of identity. And how they prove their worth. This is not just our families of origin, but also our culture. It is the intergenerational conditions to this worth that is transmitted to each of us and becomes embedded into our neural circuitry as our beliefs. Due to human fallibility, our fallen nature, or our wounding (however you wish to define it), we come away needing to prove our adequacy, our mattering, our worth, and even our power because of the conditions placed on the developing brain's need for cherishment and belonging to a group that will take care of it. This is called external validation vs. internal validation. All grown up, trading exposes this situation in the most powerful of ways. The vast majority of traders equate their success or failure in trading as a measuring stick of their worth. This is an extention of the money narrative learned in the soup of the family and culture. People who find transendence in life also find their worth and value through internal validation. Their worth is inherent to their humanness. As I think you suspect, I believe there is more. My belief (no empirical proof here) is that the human condition is composed of both destructive and constructive elements of our being. And it is our place as human beings to become mindful of this primordial struggle and to consciously decide which elements of the self to feed and which ones to resist. What most people who work with me find out is that trading is only the context that is used to ferret out this inner battle. No matter where you turn in life, you will find this inner struggle. In trading, unlike many other domains in life, the trader can not avoid his inner life. He no longer has to worry about avoiding his psychological demons. Because he is in trading, they now are stalking him. So the trader has to equip and prepare himself to cut through his own self deception and come clean. It is a journey that I feel honored to be part of. Takes faith in a courage and a wisdom not yet born. This is our choice. Rande Howell

We are born into stories that connect money, power, worth, mattering, and adequacy. These histories have been moving through the generations like an avalanche coming down the side of a mountain. And we don't see them because they are wired into our perceptual map of the world long before we can think or reflect. They are the attitudes, biases, and assumptions of our family and our culture about money and risk. We don't have a money narrative -- the money narrative has us. This money narrative will dominate your perception of trading. What you believe about yourself and money is not yours -- you are just the most recent crest in the wave of history. Waking up to this history and changing the narrative is critical to changing the core beliefs from which your trade. Rande Howell

A committment to learn a skill (methodology) set that requires a long term view to become competent in the knowledge. However, there is a vast difference in trading and athetics. Sports requires body and mind to perform in synch with an emphasis on body. Body training in trading is minimal compared to athletics. Mind and belief training is really the crux of the inner game of trading. Much of our value of self is tied up in our money narratives. If a trader doesn't become mindful of these beliefs (and change them) operating in the background of his awareness, it will be difficult for him to ever compete with a skillful trader who has combined platform, methodology, and psychology into a winning combination. A researched guess is that 80% of any decision is emotional, rather than logical. As long a trader doesn't have the meaning that is attached to his emotions regarding money in an effective place, he will always fuse uncertainty with fear. A good trader has learned to de-couple this. This allows a very different mindset to be present while trading. How a trader learns to do this can be different. Some are born into circumstance where risk management is the norm. Others suffer through years of self learning and arrive at an effecitive belief system around money and trading. Others seek mentors and coaching. Trading is a flat playing field when you take full responsibility for the money narrative that drives your trading. Rande Howell

The limbic system, and particularly the amygdala, does not perceive time in terms of past, present, and future. It experiences everything in the now -- no matter how long ago it happened. This brain structure is also the site of our implicit memories -- or pre-verbal memory. It is where our deepest sense of meaning of self is embedded. Takes a little work to re-wire. But if you going to trade, better start re-wiring. Rande Howell

Violent criminals and trading floor financial types have a lot in common. Both have tragic ways of dealing with their humanness. Trading, as a discipline, forces the trader to become aware of the inner community living within the self -- both destructive and constructive. Without management of this inner community, we continue in the old learned patterns and assumptions that become wired into our perception as our biases and beliefs. The necessity of self honesty for this task, I believe, is a key factor in the lack of success for many in trading. In many other domains self deception as an aspect of dishonesty is relatively easy to mask and project away from the self. In trading, it is reflected in the PL. The avoidance of discomfort is central to the way our brain adapts us to survive in this world. It is also this very discomfort, when approached courageously, shows us the path to move beyond our tiny pain to a much greater satisfaction with living. But it does require the courage to be honest with yourself. Long ago I quit working with truly difficult populations because I realized the patterns had turned into concrete. With the violent prisoners, I discovered that I could teach them to manage anger a little better than the guards guarding them, but did not solve the criminal mind that lurked in their inner community. With personal development, I discovered that people wanted a magic fix so that when they left the seminar they had a "high" that they confused with power. In trading, I discovered that a person has to develop the capacity to become self honest and has to focus on long term personal growth to develop the psychology to trade well. Otherwise, they have a tendency to blow up their accounts or their lives. It's an interesting group of people to work with. Rande Howell

Suiya "Rubbish - people do not suddenly start ponzi schemes, they dont suddenly steal. They have either been doing it in some form or another for many years, or its a cold calculated scheme. These are not crimes of passion." You're right. People don't suddenly fall into delivering a Ponzi scheme. And this trader didn't. There was a road to predition. Step by step, in his mindlessness, he was seduced into becoming a human being that he didn't recognize. The FBI characterized it as a Ponzi scheme. He didn't until he woke up to it. His view was that he could make up for the losses (after all he had been a superb trader for a number of years). All he needed was some time to make up for the losses and some extra capital..... He always thought he would make it up. Remember, he wasn't caught -- he turned himself in. He could have transferred assets to safe havens and moved. But he didn't. I don't agree with what this man did. And I expect him to be disciplined. When I worked violent prisoners, I worked with a guy who had beaten two men to death in a rage. As I came to understand his history and how he grew up, I could appreciate that violence was just a natural thing for him to develop into. He didn't set out to beat those guys to death, but he did anyway. I had compassion for him (I could truly understand how this natural born killer was created) and I wanted him to stay in prison for his protection and for society's protection. And you're right there were missing checks and balances. This is not black and white. It is both/and. His problem was grandiosity and it ate him and many alive. Most traders act from self doubt and fear -- so this is not the direction that most are sweep away in. Within each of us is a destructive side that we need to become observers of. If we don't, it comtaminate the mind that trades. Rande Howell

Trying to find an external solution to an internal problem gives you a momentary fix. Like a seminar high, you feel on top of the world for a moment, but then the pattern (rooted in our woundedness) comes back and it's the same old game. Chasing the Holy Grail outside of the self without first attending the enemy within keeps people stuck in their suffeing. Transforming the self the last place people tend to look. I see alot of that in traders. Rande Howell

On this level yes. He had sold a small software company that provided the initial capital for his trading. Interesting, I ask clients to become mindful of the "money conversation" to which they were born and from which they developed their perception of money -- and what money means to them. This guy grew up in a family where he could never prove his worth particularly to his father. Money became a measuring stick and then a drug when the situation arose. Know thyself really applies here. Rande Howell

Self deception, whether in the form of self doubt or in the form of grandiosity, is still self deception. Just opposite ends of the continuum. Generally I work with traders who deceive themselves into believing the voice of their self doubt. Ocassionally a guy shows up who has fallen into the deception of his exaggerated worth. The guy I spoke about did not intent to fall into predition. In fact, once he saw what he had done, he turned himself in and has cooperated completely -- against the advice of his attorney. In addition, he is one of the founders of a church, supported orphanages long before he fell into the spell, helped start a school for Asperger's syndrone kids, supported financially and personally homeless shelters, and was active in prison ministries (very funny I know). He fell into the spell of deception and it corrupted the very core values that his life was based. And right now he is suicidal in his thinking. If you have ever been around people, power, and money -- you discover this is more common than you would imagine. Go to Washington or Wall Street and it is the norm. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. The people he hurt were mostly family, personal friends, and Christian charities. It didn't start out as a Ponzi scheme. He had made a small fortune by shorting the housing market, and his investors were rewarded handsomely. Then in 2009 he began shorting the developing recovery. He bet against the ability of the Fed to print money and lost big. He then paniced and fell into revenge trading and lost more. Only then did he start lying. In his lying, he believed he was going to make up for the losses. By this time he was drinking strange Cool Aid and fell into total corruption of his values. And he will pay. I offered this story to show the other side of self deception. For most, having the kind of success (fairly made) after struggling with trading for years is a pipe dream. Yet, it happens. And it needs to be a part of ourselves that we can be mindful of. This guy is mindful of this trap now -- only way too late. Taking our blinders off our vision requires self honest work where we seek first to understand rather than a hardened heart that judges without understanding. From my point of view, except for the Grace of God, go I. Rande Howell

What SIUYA and johnw are saying here is important for every trader to hear, particularly as they start becoming successful. Self deception can really kick in as the trader becomes successful. Right at this moment, this is really apparent to me. A former client of mine, who had become quite capable of emotionally regulating his emotions and had built a very good organization of self for trading, recently came back to me for help. But it was way too late. He is being charged with a Ponzi scheme for defrauding clients. He looked at me and told me that he never saw the self deception until he had blown up his $5 million account -- and a lot of others people's money in the process. Now as he is cooperating with the FBI, he is seeing that he blew a lot of money. He is waking up to his self deception. It is staggering to him. What's interesting is that this is a real decent guy. But one that was not vigilent to the destructive tendencies that live within each of us. He got seduced, little by little, by his self deception until the capacity to self observe the self was totally pushed aside. So, even in success, the trader has to strive for self honesty and watch for deception. It may be easier to see the self deception and externalization of blame when the trader is losing, but the potential for self deception is always there. The other thing he said to me was that clearly he had not "gotten" my work. He said what he totally missed was that there is forever an internal struggle going on within the self. He came to believe he had conquered that internal struggle. This is self deception. Rande Howell

I believe you make an important distinction here. And, if you don't mind, I think I will start using it to describe the evolution of a trader. A one man sport is much like performance in trading. You quickly discover you can be you own worst enemy or you can be your best friend. Really requires an audit. Businesses fail at about the same rate as traders fail. It is the psychological skills that you develop in the running of the business that drive the business model. And in trading an alpha male psychological type forments a disastrous trading experience. The two skill sets are very different. You don't take and dominate in trading as you might in business. Type A needs to tone down to see the markets and self from a different perspective. Rande Howell

Taken out of context, anybody's message can be distorted. For the vast majority of people I work with, they seek to serve a purpose greater than themselves in their trading. Most frequently it is their families. And they are still seduced by the sirens of the song that many brokers and educators sing about trading. They get in, and they discover that there is a lot more to trading than they initially thought. Hopefully by this time they have developed a passion for trading and will give them the motivation to make the inward changes that allow for a successful trader to be developed. As Einstein quipped -- the order of thinking that got you into the problem is not the order of thinkiing that will get you out of the problem. The person you are that gets into trading is rarely the person that will bring success in trading. The person has to change, adapt, and reinvent themselves. Rande Howell

What a great question. I wouldn't say there is a black and white line to be drawn. But there is a grey area that transitions from Yes and No. I find most fear-based traders have learned and adapted to a view that blows up their trading accounts. In the same way that they have learned to blindly perceive from one perspective, they can learn to think from a more empowering perspective. I come from the therapuetic and human potential traditions, so I have come to see trading as an excellent arena for change and development of self. If you have effective beliefs in your trading life, then they will show up positively in your trading account. If you don't, then you are transferring capital to those that do. It comes down to -- are you willing to change the beliefs that drive your life to become success in trading? What I am looking for as a criterion for working with a client is whether or not they can trade successfully in simulation. If they can, I know that their cognition allows them to trade, but their emotional belief system blows up their ability to trade when risking capital. Here I know that uncertainty has been glued to fear -- and this can be treated. I do draw the line when I hear they are taking such drugs as Seroquel, Depakote, Lithium, or other drugs in this class. The level of Al consumption is also part of this. This is a sure sign that they're is not "normal" fear or impulse. And they won't be able to trade successfully in simulation. That's the grey line I use to assess potential. There are also those that have experienced serious trauma in their lives that I much prefer that is taken care of before they that trading. However, much of the material I use in the emotional regulation elements of my work come from working with this very population. Thanks. That was a great question. Rande Howell

This is what I call Orphan or the automatic reactive patterning of the limbic systen as it triggers to threat matches in present time from past threats. In mindfulness training, the trader begins to separate the fusion of identity (the "I" you speak of) between the Orphan and the Observer within the streams of thought that show up in mind. "I" am not angry about past abuse and seek revenge; the child like fear-based part of the self called Orphan is taking over the story being told in the mind and , as a result, "I" become angry and revengeful. There is no final self on the horizon, only a current organization of the self. This is what I call Orphan taking over the Internal Dialog. What I encourage people to do is to bring into awareness what I call the Compassionate Warrior as part of the narrative being constructed about self in the mind. Compassion is what heals the wounds of the Orphan, not beating yourself up as so many traders do. The discipline and courage of the warrior is that part of the self that is called into the story of the self to both contain the reactiveness of the Orphan and to move beyond notions of fairness and onward toward a disciplined and impartial organization of the self that can trade effectively. It is surely as much a part of you as the Orphan. What matters is the emotional regulation of your Orphan nature and direction of your awareness to the discipline, patience, courage, and impartiality that also live within you. The Orphan learns that it is safe and allows the developing inner trader to take possession of the mind. Good luck. I honor your courage to expose your vulnerability. It's a good way for others to see and learn from the internal struggle within all of us. It is this struggle among the forces within the self that must be mastered both in trading and in life. Rande Howell

MM It has been many years since I read that. If you look at the tax structure and estate taxes of Florida (and FA's rigoroous enforcement of 6 months residency), you'll get the picture. They get separated from family and other sources of meaning and move to the march to the sea. Good call on you part. Rande Howell

I'm with zdo on this one. The silence of an internal dialog is the one thing that you have to be courageous to bring into awareness. Just because we are not aware of it does not mean we do not need to bring a greater understanding of the self into our awareness. There will always be blindnesses. The point is to stand on the shoulders of some of the giants who have come to an effective understanding of what makes us tick. And what keeps others in fear. This is the transmission point between winners and losers in ths game. Coming to know thyself. This is the ticket. If you grasp that very few people experience life threatening fear, then it becomes a mandate in trading to downgrade the forecast from imminent demise of self to discomfort. A lot can be done in the level of concern rather than fear. Blessings of the moment Rande Howerll

No doubt people are seduced by the sirens of easy money and an easy life. All the things that feed into our culture's notion of success (and retirement). But just like the folks who retire to Florida after grinding out a life of work, believing they have paid their dues on the good life, the actualilial (MSP) tables show that they are dead in 5 years. Having given up on purpose driven life, they die. People inherently have to find a passion in their lives. What I look for when I'm interviewing prospective clients is whether they have this passion for trading. Passion enough that they are willing to change so that they can re-organize themselves because of their love for the game. Rande Howell

What a great comment. Where is that unmute button. For various reasons people do not live and create lives from the full deck of strengths they are endowed with as human beings. They are pushed out of awareness or buried. In trading, you are nearly forced to go hunting for them. It is in reclaiming these forgotten parts (or potentialities within our humanness) that we re-organize the self into a higher functioning self -- and a better trader. I use the archetypal system of Carl Jung and his modern interpreter, Carol Pearson, to put a language on these potentialities so that they can be named and worked with more concretely. If you know they are there and that they live within you because they are inherent to your humanness, it is much easier to find and awaken them. In my work with traders, I focus on what Carol Pearson calls Ruler (discipline), Sage (impartiality), warrior (courage), and Caregiver (compassion). These are the initial elements of our psychology that must be developed to approach and reconstruct the fear biased brain that is also inherent to us as humans -- this is called Orphan in archetypal language. Most of us live from the fearful Orphan position of self for their entire lives and forfeit the potential to live lives much more fully. Out of that fear, as Benard Shaw pined, we live lives of quiet desperation. Traders tend to beat themselves up in their desperation. Have yet to find that this is a good change strategy. To move this from a humanistic perspective to Christian Biblical perspective at this moment of Easter, the aurthor of Hebrews reports in Hebrews 2:14, "...and that in his death he might destroy ... the power of death .... and free those who all their lives where held in slavery by their fear of death." It is in the freeing of ourselves from the deepest of fears that is inherent to the human brain, that the door is opened to the potentials that live within us also. There is a great personality inventory that I use with my clients called the pmai by Pearson that measures the strength of current expression of these inherent parts of the self. Better it reveals the shadow forms. These are the ones that gives traders profound trouble. By the way, the Myers Briggs was developed around the Jungian archetypes. Carol Pearson's inventory is far more useful as an aid in personal development. Rande Howell

I much prefer the term internal dialog compared to internal chatter. It gives a much better understanding of the mind that your bring to trading. Step back and listen to the conversation you are having with yourself. First discern between fear, worry,concern, and vigilence. The chemistry may be similar, but the mindset (set of beliefs) is very different. Unless there is life threatening circumstance or altering circumstance you facing in the here and now, fear and worry are not the emotional states that allow for disciplined and impartial trading. If you bring fear or worry into your trading day, you have already lost or, at least, you have set yourself up to not win. The "I" you describe yourself as is only a discription of the internal conversations in the mind to which your attention is riveted. In the same way that they become fused with fear and worry, they can also be focused on discipline and impartiality. What is required is the skill to emotionally regulate the meaning that has become attached to the emotion. This frees the mind from fear and allows you to choice the state of mind that you bring to trading. This does not mean you free yourself from emotion, rather it means you choice the emotions and state of mind from which you trade. When a person is saying they are trading without emotion, usually they are really saying that they are trading from the emotional state of impartiality. There is a reason that trading represents a transfer of capital from one set of hands to another. When you emotionally manage fear and worry, you can trade from discipline and impartiality. At that moment your mindset is very different from the 95% of traders who trade from fear. In their fear, they set up the possibility of acting irrationally, and in your discipline and impartiality, you are in a position to take advantage of human fear and greed. Rande Howell

Biology, brain, and psychology really light up in your comments. The brain (particularly the Americans who sit in front of TV's for their quoto of excitement), is built to avoid uncertainty because it produces ambiguity -- and out of ambiguity the emotional state of confusion is triggered. The fear biased emotional brain interprets confusion as the fear of death. Then you put that state of affairs in a modern human being in front of a computer screen trading and it spells trouble for a disciplined and impartial state of mind. Life itself is management of uncertainty. If uncertainty is glued to fear, you have a losing trader. We all need to be tested, which life or trading will do, and the trader must train themselves to bring a more empowered mindset to the uncertainty of trading. Or he is essentially gambling. I can see how your experience in the wildness of nature hones a state of mind suitable for trading. Maybe you ought to develop a business around taking traders out into the wilderness..... Rande Howell