Your Feelings are a Weapon!!

Every Tuesday Chuck releases a new Trader Tip video on YouTube. This week we will discuss how feelings used as a weapon has the potential to turn everything in your life around. Take you from a place of isolation, loneliness, pain, despondency, hopelessness, and take you to a place of joy, vision, purpose, happiness, fulfillment to have things you've never had before, if you embrace this. Watch the Trader Tip Episode for more information! 

You can read the episode transcript below or watch the video that follows.
If you have any questions, please reach out to us. We look forward to being a continued part of your trading education!

Much of the literature around training psychology describes trading in a Zen state where there are no feelings, just quiet. In the Zen state, we focus on the elimination or the minimization of feelings. If we can quiet our mind, we can see the market as it truly is. This is also sometimes called trading from the flow state. When we're in the flow state, time slows, and we remove our attachments from what's going on. This is a very powerful frame from which to trade. Now this is known, but what I want to highlight today is there are some aspects of this that I think are misconstrued or mis portrayed. Yes, we do want to trade in a flow state, we get to operate from our prefrontal cortex, and we get to use all of our resources without the inhibition of fight or flight type of motions. But having said that, most traders want to minimize feelings, and they want us to strive to trade free from feelings. This is an illusion, this will never happen, and this is what we're going to talk about today, because feelings, what we feel is part of who you are. It's an integral part of who you are, and if you choose to shut down that aspect of you, there's actually major ramifications, not just for your trading performance, but for the overall joy of your life. That's what we're gonna talk about today.

To become the traders that were capable of becoming, capable of being, we need to embrace our feelings. One of things we want to remember is that feelings themselves are not good or bad. we put labels on them ourselves, we really don't know if they're good or bad. We just interpret them as such. what feelings really are, is there a signaling mechanism. So if I feel fear, is that bad? Well, it depends. If fear makes me get out of a trade early, or fear makes me avoid a trade altogether. Yeah, that could have a negative consequence, but if fear tells you to get the hell out of there and run, when somebody is about to mug you, it could save your life. It's to same emotion, but with different outcomes, different interpretations. Feelings themselves, they are a signaling mechanism. It's very similar to a red light, green light, red light, green light, or to a tornado siren. Today was the first Tuesday of the month. At 10 am, where I live at 10 am every Tuesday morning, the tornado sirens go off because they test them. It's a signal. It's a signal to take cover. It's a signal to protect yourself. I just want you to stop for a second and I want you to imagine what would happen in your life if you chose to ignore all the signals. What if you said, You know what, I think traffic lights are bullshit, I'm not gonna pay attention. I'm just gonna go where I want to go, and you start running red lights. It's only a matter of time until you crash, until you are put into major pain. That's what feelings do, they signal. They help us be aware of what's going on around us and in us.

What we want to understand is that feelings equal power, feelings equal power. Without feeling there is no truth. If we don't feel our feelings, if we don't allow ourselves to feel there is no truth within us. Now this is a very abstract concept that we are going to talk about. Today we're going to talk about in this discussion, we're going to talk a lot about men, and the reason we're going to focus on men is that society teaches men not to feel. It embraces women feeling. Women are constantly experiencing emotions and sharing them. With people around them. That's just what they do, and society accepts that, within reason. But society does not accept men having feelings, particularly in past years. What are men taught to do? They're taught to stuff their feelings. They're taught to avoid showing their feelings. When we're kids, we're taught by our dads, you better not cry, you better not embarrass me, I don't want to hear that you're scared, man up. We are taught this sort of thing. We are taught to avoid showing feelings, and really the one exception is anger. Anger is an acceptable societal feeling for men. They can show anger, but they can't show anything else. Now, so we feel feelings all the time, particularly when we're young. But we're getting these messages of don't feel, and so what do we do? We stuff, we stuff our feelings, and this is important because when we stuff our feelings, we lose connection to ourselves. When we lose connection to ourselves, we start to become lost. Because most men are taught not to feel at best, men feel uncomfortable. When they feel feelings, and at worst, they fear their feelings, they're scared of their feelings. The bottom line is, is that for most men, when feelings come up, they don't know what to do with it other than get that out of here. I'm fine. I'm okay. You don't need to worry about me. That's what we do.

If without feeling there is no truth, what is truth. Truth is being in touch with who you are. It's being in touch with who you are. Being in touch with your feelings when they arise, and then living life with congruence with your identity. This means that if you feel like you should say something to somebody, you say it, if you feel like you should be sad, you say it, if you feel like you should be angry, or you disagree with somebody you should tell them. You should live your life with authenticity. This is where the truth comes from, from being your authentic self, not a shadow self, not the self that your family wants you to be, not the self that your friends wants you to be, but you. When we start to understand our truth, and we start to accept our feelings, our power rises.

For men to avoid their feelings, men isolate, and they sedate. They isolate and they sedate and as a result, men become weak. Men are not their strong selves when they are isolated and sedated. You see this a lot man comes home and he just wants to be left alone. How do men sedate? They stay through drinking. They sedate through drugs, smoking pot or marijuana getting high. They sedate through eating. They sedate through pornography, and they sedate through video games. One of the questions I have for you. It's just it think about what you do during your days. If you drink a lot, particularly the evening or you drink alone, why are you doing that? Just being honest. Why do you do it? You come home and you get high. Why do you get high? If you come home and you just eat and eat. Why do you eat? Why do you binge eat? Do you come home and watch porn when your wife's at home? Instead of being with your wife you're off somewhere else in the house watching porn. Do you come home play video games all night? These are all signs of sedating you are trying to escape what's going on in your life. You're not happy with your life. So you're choosing to sedate. Why are you doing that? This is where we got to start to get clear. Because if we act in a position of power, we won't want to sedate.

When we're truthful, we will connect with ourselves. Part of isolation and sedation is men are trying to connect with themselves. They can't connect through their feelings. They're trying to connect through their sedation. As you start to fix this, you have less of a need for these things. You won't need them because you'll connect with yourself and you'll connect with people that you care about. Man who sedate and isolate go numb, over time, they go numb, and when men go numb, they lose the ability to connect with themselves, and they lose the ability to connect with their spouses to connect with their kids, to connect with the people that they love most, and sad. Their lives become devoid of love. Because they're not capable of loving themselves, no one else is gonna be capable of loving them either, and they become increasingly lonely, and bitter. It's rough. It's really, really sad. One of the reasons I'm talking to you about this is we have generations of men, but it's getting worse. We have a generation of men that all they do is drink, get high play video games, watch porn and eat. The guy know families, they're out of shape. They feel like shit. They've got no money, and they've got no spiritual life, and they are miserable. There are millions of them. They're disillusioned, they're lonely, and they're pissed, but it's their fault. They just don't know it. Let's go further into this.

Truth comes with feelings. As a result without experiencing our feelings, there is no truth. For us to know truth, we have to be able to connect with ourselves through our feelings. We lie to ourselves, so we can avoid having to feel. If we want to operate from the truth, if we're not telling the truth, then we're telling lies, and we tell lies to escape, to escape our pain. Now, why are we talking about all this? If you want to be a great trader, you need to have full synergy and full power available to you to make great decisions. Trading always comes down first and foremost, to your psychology. The other things are important, but you can have the greatest system in the world, and if your psychology is messed up, you are not going to make it, and if you're always isolating and sedating and hiding from your feelings, you are not set up to succeed as a trader. You are leaking energy all over the place. The light is not magnified the lightest diffracted it's diluted.

This brings us to the next point. If we suppress our feelings all the time, if we're numb and we don't allow ourselves to feel when we start trading, trading brings out feelings. That's what it's going to do. It's going to bring out fear, it's going to bring out greed, it's going to bring out doubt. It's gonna bring out uncertainty. It's gonna bring out you questioning your very self worth. That's what trading does. For a man who stuffs his feelings, "I don't want to feel, I don't want to feel I do whatever possible so I don't have to feel my feelings", and now we go start trading WAM here comes fear and WAM here comes greed and WAM here comes anger and doubt, and victimhood and all of this stuff starts coming at you, when you don't even like it in the first place, it is going to scare the shit out of you, and you are going to make horrible decisions, horrible decisions. This is big. What I'm telling you is if you stuff you cannot succeed.

Let's talk about four reasons why we don't feel our feelings.

1.) when our feelings come up, we judge them. We may immediately be like, well, that's bad, I shouldn't do that. I must be a piece of shit for feeling this way or wanting to do that. We start judging everything. We judge it as good or we judge it as bad, rather than just accepting that. Judgment is such a bad thing.

2.) We receive outside judgment for our feelings. You start crying. When you're five years old, and your dad tells you to knock it off. Boys Don't Cry. Or you start crying in front of your friends, you fall off the equipment, all your friends started laughing at you, "you're a baby, you're crying". We start to respond to the judgments from people outside ourselves.

3.) We worry that if we feel our feelings never end, we actually start embracing them, they might not go away. That scares us.

4.) Sometimes we never learned how to feel in the first place. When these things come up, we don't even know what they are. We don't know how to interpret it.

This leads us to the core Four for success. To be a great trader whose performance is both outstanding and sustainable. There's always stories. I'm a walking example, make millions, lose it, make millions, lose it. Okay, we want to not just be outstanding, we want to be consistently sustainable, be able to continue to make money over time. For us to become a trader, a great trader who is outstanding and sustainable, we must practice supportive habits in these four areas.

1.) Faith, you got to have something you believe in. You have to have a spiritual framework. It's very difficult being an atheist, and being long term successful, particularly being long term, happy or joyful.

2.) Family. Your family needs to be right, and one of the things we don't think about if your faith is right, if you have a great structure of faith, a great system of faith, it'll make you great by that alone. Your faith will make you better, it'll push you to heights that you would never have on your own. Our families the same way. A lot of times as men, we view our family like we love our family, we like hanging out with them, but we kind of view them as a burden. Sometimes it's something that gets in the way of what we want. Nuh uh! If you have a great marriage, if you have a great relationship with your kids, it's going to spur you to be better in business than you've ever been. Stress will go away and you'll operate from a place of abundance, not a place of scarcity.

3.) Fitness. You got to take care of our body. Our body is where our energy comes from. It's where our fuel comes from our body is a weapon. It's what allows us to do what we want to do. It needs to be strong.

4.) Finances. I want you to understand that trading is not your finances. Trading is part of your finances, but this is something I really push on with my students. Trading is a vehicle it's not the end all be all, and what you see when you start looking at some of the greatest traders of all time, they make more money in their investments in their portfolio than they do trading, not early on, but later that's most definitely the case. Backing other traders, building trading firms, being involved in capital investments and other companies, making long term investments; That's where they end up long term making the real money. Your finances need to be outstanding, and if your finances are great, it'll take the pressure off you in your trading. It'll make it easier for you to trade on what the market gives you rather than trying to force it.

If you are balanced and strong in all four of these areas, your faith, your family, your fitness and your finances, you will bring your full power to your trading, and the results are going to show you will be outstanding. Not only will you be outstanding, but more important, you'll live a life of purpose and joy, a life that matters. When you watch these YouTubes, or you attend any of my classes, I want you to understand that is why I am here. I'm here to help you realize your life purpose, and to live a life filled with joy, and trading is just one of the ways that we would that help us get there. Trading is not everything, it is what helps you get there.

I gave you a lot today, but I would encourage you to go back and watch us at least twice. Because there's a lot here for many of you not for everyone. But for many of you that are watching this today. This should slap you in the face and make you really start thinking about what are you doing? Because this is a framework that has the potential to turn everything in your life around. Take you from a place of isolation, loneliness, pain, despondency, hopelessness, and take you to a place of joy, vision, purpose, happiness, fulfillment to have things you've never had before, if you embrace this. Stay tuned every Tuesday for additional webinars like the one today, where we're going to help you think about your trading in different ways to help you take your performance to an elite level. God bless and I'll see you next week. Bye.