Free Rande Howell webinar: Stress-Proofing Your Trading Mind

Stress-Proofing Your Trading Mind Keeping Calm in a Sea of Turmoil   Hello Trader,                Stress is what happens when you engage challenges where the outcome is uncertain. In trading that means when you risk capital while facing an uncertain future. What if stress did not kick in and take over your trading mind in critical moments in your trading, how different would the results of your trading be? For most people, it would be hugely different. They would have the discipline, courage, and patience to act on their trading knowledge (in moments where their hard-earned money is being risked and the trading mind is being put to the test) without fear.   Truth is that few traders are aware that their biology, emotions, mind, and behavior (performance) are inseparable. Traders try to compartmentalize body and emotion away from thinking and behavior. Consequently, when they put capital at risk in critical moments, they don’t see the body revving up as an emotion erupts. They disconnect from their primitive emotional nature by attempting to push down emotions that come into play when they are feeling threatened (that’s every time the trader puts capital at risk). By doing so, they miss the opportunity to retrain their brain so that they can become successful traders. Ultimately, trading demands a very different stress response to uncertainty than your brain was designed to deliver.   So, What Is Stress Response?              Imagine a situation in trading that you have problems dealing with effectively. It could be entry, it could be managing a trade, it could be when the trade goes against you, it could be when the trade becomes profitable, it could be taking a loss. Any of these challenging moments represent you engaging (as a biological organism) the challenges of living. It is your response to these critical events that define your stress response. What defines your stress response are your beliefs about your capacity to handle the uncertainty of the critical moment. This is where your stress response faces a fork in the road.              If your brain interprets the activating event as something desirable, the physiological response to the stressor still continues, but the brain interprets it as a wanted challenge. This is called eustress – this is good stress. When you get butterflies in your stomach before a big match or game, you are experiencing eustress. You are getting cranked up to play and the physiological buildup of energy is preparing you for elevated performance. And you welcome the opportunity.               On the other side is distress. This is where your brain has developed a negative anticipation of the activating event (what if I lose?) and it interprets the situation as a threat. The stress, in this case, is ramping up for fight/flight. What I want you to understand is that, physiologically, eustress and distress look the same. It is the beliefs you hold about the event that cause you to have anxiety (fear of the future) or confident engagement (eustress) about the near-term engagement. So, it is the belief that you hold about your capacity to manage the uncertainty of the activating event that determines whether you experience distress or eustress when stepping into an event with an uncertain outcome. What can you do about it?   Stress Proofing – How Do You Do It?              Anytime you are heading toward a critical moment where there is risk attached to the outcome, there will be stress. It is only a matter of whether it’s the good (eustress) or the bad (distress) form of stress. And before getting to the belief that drives the locomotive of emotional stress, let’s look at how you can become more in control of the intensity of the emotional reaction to the stressor that you are facing.               First, you need to calm the emotional arousal that is triggered by engaging a situation with an unknown outcome (known as a stressor). As you approach the looming event, the brain is beginning to prepare you for the encounter. This triggers emotions in anticipation of engaging the stressor. Because emotions have a signature that includes the way you breathe and the build-up of tension in your muscles, you can use the way you breathe and the way you hold tension in your body to calm down the revving up of the emotion so that it does not sweep you away.               With training, this is where diaphragmatic breathing and muscle relaxation can be habituated as part of your response to the stressor so that you stay calm rather than get stressed out. The advantage of this is that you bring a level head to the engagement of the stressor. This is called the Relaxation Response. You literally are training your biology to respond very differently to the approach of the stressor. Historically, your brain is a negative assessment machine and sees stressors as threats to your biological existence. So, it is easy for your stress response to automatically direct itself toward distress.               Training yourself in these techniques is called stress inoculation and is the first step toward stress-proofing your trading mind to the prospect of risking your hard-earned money to unpredictability where you do not have control over outcome. But at the bottom of your stress response to dealing with uncertainty are the beliefs that you hold about your capacity to manage the challenges of dealing with the uncertainty found, not only in trading, but also in life.    Beliefs – the Invisible Hand that Steers Your Life       Beliefs are not true. Beliefs are assessments (interpretations) that you have fallen into that have taken on the power of truth. These old limbic learnings served you well at some moment in time and habituated into familiar patterns. Then they sank beneath your awareness. And they are activated when you approach stressors (risking capital to an uncertain future. It is these limbic learnings (implicit beliefs) that have to be rooted out and changed for you to have a different response to your habituated (learned) responses to uncertainty.         This is not rocket science. These implicit beliefs will connect your sense of mattering to winning and losing (having to prove the self). They will limit your sense of worth or your belief in whether you are deserving of power and money. They will attack your sense of adequacy (not competent). But they are only assessments that were made that have taken on the power of your character and your truth…they are not the truth.   Getting Started on the Journey of Self-Mastery       The first step is relaxation response. When you calm the triggering of the initial stress response through emotional regulation, you have made your first step on a journey of self-discovery. For many people this is enough. For others, it is the first step in learning how to change the beliefs that hold your trading performance prisoner. The added benefit to turning toward your fears that hold you back in trading is that the resulting self-mastery also opens the door to change in many other areas of your life. This is real stress proofing.       Learn more. Check out the associated video and webinar. You’ll discover that our courses teach the skills needed to complete the quest of self-mastery and stress proofing your trading mind. [Facebook](  [Linkedin](   Rande Howell Traders State of Mind www.tradersstateofmind.com   Free Rande Howell webinar in October 2023 Title - Stress-Proofing Your Trading Mind Speaker: Rande Howell Date/Time: [Thursday, October 5, 4:30-5:30pm EDT]( IMPORTANT! The time shown is in U.S. Eastern Daylight Saving Time! Description:   Stress will kill a perfectly good opportunity, even if you have trained diligently for it. As the risk or opportunity looms right in front of you, your prepared trading mind disappears, and, before you know it, an irrational mind takes over your trading. Stress is going to happen – any time you engage a challenging moment, it is there. The question is how do you stress proof your mind so that you stay calm, cool, and collected under pressure? Come to this free webinar and find out. Register here. Please [click here]( to register for this free webinar. IMPORTANT! The time shown is in U.S. Eastern Daylight Saving Time. [New free Video - ]( Stress-Proofing Your Trading Mind How do you deal with stress in the heat of the moment? Ignoring it doesn’t work. Stress happens anytime you engage a challenging moment. That happens multiple times before, during, and after a trade. Learning how to deal with stress in trading is what all traders have to learn how to do. This is called stress proofing. And this video can teach you had to stay calm, cool, and collected during the challenging moments of trade. Watch now. Please [click here]( (and scroll down a bit) to view the video. Developing Traders State of Mind Group Course - Winter, 2023 The emotional brain is built to seek safety in a dangerous world. The world that it was created for has long since disappeared. It developed a hair-trigger to the fight/flight response because that is what was needed for survival. Now, it has been taken out of the jungle (where risk meant danger) and is being asked to act civilized in a world of probability - where risk is not lethal. Without re-training and re-programming the emotional limbic system, this is not going to happen. It is built to react to danger quickly. It was never built to ponder your rules when it is experiencing vulnerability, discomfort, and fear. It was programmed to act from your survival instinct.  Until this is done, your emotional brain will continue to hijack your thinking brain when you feel the discomfort of uncertainty and risk. This is your silent partner. The question is: Are you going to try to continue to pretend it's not part of your trading mind? Or, are you ready to re-program it for the modern world of trading and probability. Fortunately, this can be done. The Developing Traders State of Mind Group Course Teaches You How to Master Reactive Emotions The Group Course has been called a wake-up call by many traders. Most simply have no idea how the brain and mind work to produce performance in the clutch with risk on. You learn here. It's more than a wake-up call - it a door that opens you to a whole new world. You learn how the emotional brain (so focused on survival) needs to be handled to become an effective working partner with the thinking brain. This course is eye-opening. I had no idea how to fix the problems I had with my trading until this course. Learning how to manage emotions is only the start. You learn how to create a mind built to manage uncertainty. Bottom line is that I know longer sabotage myself and have become profitable. I wish I had taken the group course a long time ago. It's a difference maker. SD From the start you learn how to calm survival emotions down before they become big and hijack your trading mind. That's just the first step. The major benefit is that you learn how to create a mind built for trading, rather than survival in the past. This is what has to happen for success in trading. You have been using a brain/mind created for circumstances that no longer exist. What is needed is a brain/mind built for probability management. Where you learn to become comfortable with the discomfort of uncertainty rather than triggering to your survival instinct. This is what every trader, to be successful, has to learn. All those who register now will be enrolled in the Winter 2023 Group Course, which has its 1st Group Meeting in January, 2024. Give yourself lots of time to study, and get started now! The survival Instinct is not going to just go away. It is your partner. Do you want to learn to work with it so that it helps you to become the trader you can be? [Please Click here to register ]( the Group Course. [Please Click here to view a video about the Group Course or for more information.]( The DTSM Group Course teaches the same basic skills that are taught in my individual course, but is only $1195. This can be spread out as five payments of $239/each over a 10-week time period. It's a whole lot of training for a reasonable cost. SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING PAYMENT - PayPal CANNOT be used as a payment method for this Group Course since PayPal does not allow for rebilling. If you have any questions regarding this, please contact Delores at delores@mytradersstateofmind.com     Mindful Trading: Mastering Your Emotions and the Inner Game Author: J. Rande Howell, MEd., LPC If you know how to trade when not in the pressure of trading, but you have not been able to trade live from a calm, detached, and disciplined state of mind, this book will open your eyes. Mindful Trading actually shows you HOW to develop a peak performance state of mind specifically for trading. This book gets in the head of a trader. You will meet a number of real life traders who have overcome self doubt, fear, and impulsiveness. You will see how they overcame self-limiting beliefs and began trading from an empowered state of mind. You will discover your core beliefs that actually trade your system and methodology. And without change at this fundamental level, old self-limiting patterns of thought and belief re-assert themselves shortly after your brain pushes off any "tricks and tips" you learned from self-help seminars. It is this change at the organization of meaning and biology that makes this book so different. A number of disciplines are folded into a unified process that really gets at long term change. Those disciplines include neuro-biology, emotional intelligence, ontological reconstruction of the self, attachment theory and the meaning of the self, and Jungian archetypes. In Mindful Trading, imbedded in self-limiting beliefs, you are carried through a change process that transforms traders mired in mediocrity to a re-organization of the mind for peak performance trading. Mindful Trading is available both as an [Audio book]( a [paper book]( and a [downloadable e-book](. [Read an excerpt from Mindful Trading]( free and you get to look inside a trader's mind) And consider the companion study tool: the  [Mindful Trading Companion]( [e-Workbook!](   Explore a Trader's State of Mind Coaching Relationship with Rande Howell This is a personalized course for the trader who is ready to move beyond being stuck in self limiting beliefs. If you have recognized that it is you that stands in the way of your becoming a more successful trader, then this challenge can become an opportunity for re-invention of yourself as a trader, rather than something to avoid. It's like a door opening to an entirely new world. Great athletes recognize that the mental aspect of their game requires a performance coach for them to reach their potential. Trading is the same. Self-limiting beliefs have to be rooted out and changed - and a peak performance mindset has to be developed. It's all part of the training. Having a methodology that gives you an edge is not enough. You have to develop your mind so that it gives you the psychological edge to use your methodology and platform so that the uncertainty found in trading favors you. This is trading beyond fear. It is trading from a disciplined, impartial, patient, and courageous state of mind. Without emotional regulation training, this can take years (if ever) to achieve on your own. Teasing apart uncertainty from fear is simply something that the brain will not do on its own. The psychology to this has to be developed...or you stay stuck in the same old self-fulfilling prophesies of mediocrity. Do you want to move beyond fear and trade from a calm, detached, and disciplined state of mind?  If you are seriously considering registering for the Individual Course, then [click here to check out a free, no obligation consult with Rande Howell.]( get to see how this powerful technology of the mind can move your trading to the next level. To make this free consult productive for you, I recommend that you first attend one of my free webinars. This will lay down a lot of groundwork so that when you speak with me -- you'll be hitting on all cylinders. Also, reading my book - Mindful Trading - is advised.     [Website]( Book]( & Interviews]( Videos]( rande@mytradersstateofmind.com | [www.tradersstateofmind.com]( [By joining you get to keep connected to this powerful training process for the development of the potential you have as a trader. And if you decide differently, you can always un-subscribe. If you're a student of trading, this newsletter is a powerful tool for your development.]( Empowered Horizons | 1824 Prescott Ct., Iron Station, NC 28080 [Unsubscribe {EMAIL}]( [Update Profile]( | [Constant Contact Data Notice]( Sent by rande@mytradersstateofmind.com powered by [Trusted Email from Constant Contact - Try it FREE today.]( [Try email marketing for free today!](