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The AlphaMind Podcast
Mastering trading is not about mastering markets but mastering yourself. The AlphaMind Podcast focuses on the 'Trader Self'. We look at the person doing the trading, their interactions with the market, the impact the market has on them, and the skills, actions and activities needed to navigate their way through the complex and uncertain terrain of financial, commodity, energy and crypto markets.
The AlphaMind Podcast
#157: The Market Doesn't Care About Your Story — What The Body Keeps the Score Teaches Traders About Risk
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What Trading Can Learn From The Body Keeps the Score
with Steven Goldstein and Mark Randall
A trader knows the right move — and physically can’t make it. This episode is about why, and what trauma research reveals about performing under financial risk.
Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score has become required reading in trading circles — not because trading is trauma, but because the same nervous system mechanics trauma research has mapped in detail also govern how traders behave under pressure. Steven Goldstein and Mark Randall break down five lessons from the book and translate each one directly into the language of risk, drawdowns, and decision-making under threat.
What you’ll learn
• Why the rational, decision-making part of the brain goes offline under perceived threat — and why “just follow the plan” fails in the moment
• How neuroception, the nervous system’s unconscious scanning for danger, shows up as physical sensation before a trade goes wrong
• Why a single catastrophic loss can fragment a trader’s whole sense of self, not just their P&L
• Why journaling and post-mortem analysis alone rarely change behavior — and what bottom-up, body-based work adds
• Why co-regulation with another person, not solo reflection, is often what lets a dysregulated nervous system reset
“The market doesn’t care about your story, but your body is keeping score whether you’re listening to it or not.”
Timestamps
0:07 — Cold open — welcome back
1:00 — Setting up the book & Lesson 1: The rational brain goes offline under threat
13:38 — Lesson 2: The body knows before you do
30:13 — Lesson 3: One bad hit can fragment the whole story
41:20 — Lesson 4: Talking about it isn't enough on its own
50:53 — Lesson 5: Safety in relationship is what lets the system recalibrate
1:02:54 — Close & sign-off
Resources mentioned
• The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk
• thealphamindpodcast.com — full back catalog and where to subscribe
The AlphaMind Podcast explores the behavioral and human side of taking and managing risk, hosted by Steven Goldstein with Mark Randall. New episodes and the full back catalog at thealphamindpodcast.com.
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AlphaMind brings powerful change, growth and development to people and businesses within global markets.
Driven by a deep understanding of how markets work, and how people and businesses function within them, we partner with clients to create personal performance improvements that elevate returns across their trading activities.
Go to the AlphaMind website to know more.
Welcome to the AlphaMont podcast. Yep, we're back from a break and uh Steve Golstein and myself are just really looking forward to put forward um a sequence of guests really interesting podcasts and kicking off today with one that um I know that both Steve and I have um had many discussions about in terms of uh of of how trading really affects us deep down and what we can learn from that. And uh there's a book in particular that um we want to focus as sort of uh sort of thing we're hanging on to uh in this particular session. So I'm just gonna hand over to Steve, and I'm sure he'll he'll be very pleased to uh welcome him ownself back to uh the podcast to guess um start off with referencing this book and some of the things that we're gonna dip into today.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sure. Um hi Mark, good to see you again. And uh as you know, it's uh we're back now. A lot of people messaged us in that meantime to go, where are you guys? What are you coming back? Are you coming back? Um and we're delighted to say that we are. Um, and we're starting today with a discussion about trading that's connected to one of my favorite books. It's a very well-known book in the world of psychology, psychotherapy, coaching by Bessel van der Koek. The book is called The Body Keeps a Score. And the book is called Mind, Brain, and or has a subtitle, Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. Now, that might sound a little bit extreme for trading, um, because really the book talks about deep trauma, uh, what we would call real-world traumas, um, people called in war zones, um, soldiers returning from war uh with uh post-traumatic stress, um, people who have been abused um and been within abusive relationships. Um, and um it it it studied this and it studied the effect of these on people and uh the different ways that people deal with these aspects. Now, I I often talk about trading being a trauma, um, not this sort of trauma, but um a kind of whole series of traumas one after the other, um, personal traumas for people, um, traumas where we end up um questioning our own sense of self, our identity, our ability. You know, trading is is a very lonely job. Even if you sit within a trading room with hundreds of people, it can feel like the loneliest place in the world. Um, and a lot of people, you know, when dealing with the um the markets and uh um the randomness and the uncertainty and the um the destructive power of markets that it can have on you, um, it can destroy your your your self-image, your self-worth, your sense of identity in a way that really does feel like a trauma. Um so we're gonna go through to this today, and I I hope this resonates with you. And um and we're gonna discuss this uh between us. So just to really set up the book, um Bessel van der Kook was uh was a psychiatrist and a trauma researcher um who's done decades and decades of clinical work, uh working neuroscience. And and the core thesis of the book is that trauma isn't just a story that's stored in our memory, it's actually stored in our body and in our entire nervous system. Um and that's why talking about it alone uh often isn't enough just to resolve this. This courses through our veins, this courses through every part of us, and and it gets retained in the body, these traumas. Um and what really uh drew me to the book, as drew so many people to the book, is how how often it is quoted by leading traders that I work with, um, who eventually make their way to it. And and it helps them start to understand um some of the dynamics of of the pressure performance relationship. Um so today I want to sort of talk with Mark, and you know, this is really going into a space where Mark very much operates in about five lessons that I I would say that I took away from the book that I think would be really interesting for you, the audience, to listen to and you know, try and process for yourself and you know, think about how it affects you in some way. And the first of these is is um it's not really the term call called in the book, but I call it amygdala hijack. Okay, it's where the rational brain goes offline under threat. Um and and Van der Koop's done a lot of neuroimaging work um which shows that under perceived threat, uh our prefrontal cortex, our medial prefrontal cortex, um, the part of the brain that we generally use for rational rationality, uh self-awareness, reason decision making, that gets quick, that gets shut down, it goes quiet. Okay, it gets taken over by the fear response from the amygdala, which is a much more ancient part of the brain. Um, and and the brain's threat detector system suddenly is it's switched on to high. And this is why you know, just rationalizing something that people in an emotional state doesn't resolve it for them. You can't rationalise that moment because people are not engaged with the rational brain, and they don't have the ability to just switch the rational brain on or not. Um, you know, they're not neurocol neurologically capable of thinking their way out of that moment. Um and uh you know, if you ever see someone who's caught in a trauma or a panic, you know, what what what a a doctor or a medical person or even a coach would do is get them to breathe at that point, just sit with their breaths and count their breaths as a way of slowing it down and and getting back to rationalizing and being rational. Um, and and you know, if if as a trader um you recognize this particular moment, it's where you have a plan, you have a process, you're watching the market, uh, you know what you want to do, and then the market goes a little bit crazy, volatility um picks up, or certain levels get broken. Um if you're in a trading room, there's a lot of shouting and screaming around you. If you're working at home, you're seeing you know, you're seeing the market just suddenly, you know, move in leaps and bounds away from where you were. Um and you just get you you might be at that point taken into almost a sort of mini panic state, and you kind of lose sight and forget your process and your plans. Um and you only realize the time where afterwards, when this is over later on in the day, when you're looking at your PL and you're looking at your performance and you're trying to understand what happened, and you might say to yourself, What was I thinking then? Why did I do that? That was not in my plan. What made me do that? But the reason was it's because you've neurologically kind of gone offline. Your your prefrontal cortex, your thinking capabilities have gone offline and been taken over, been hijacked by the amygdala. Okay. Um, so I'm I'm gonna throw this over to Mark and get your views on this, Mark.
SPEAKER_00Great, and thanks for that, Steve. Very interesting topic. This uh you're about to find out quite close to my heart. So 200 million years ago or so, when the early brain was evolving, um physical threat was uh was was there to be dealt with. And the amygdala was the early part of uh what that brain, of course, is part of our own brain, often referred to as the reptilian brain from our own perspective. And the amygdala, of which there were two on one, there's one on the left and one on the right side of the brain. Um, they're called amygdala because it's a Greek word for almond, because they look like almonds, and um yeah, so but this was for a physical threat 200 million years ago. But we're when in the modern world, of course, we perceive threat, and that threat can come from all sorts of places. Um we can create our own threat, by the way, that our mind wanders into disaster, but also if from a trading point of view something nasty happens, the amygdala is kind of like a tripwire, so it trips you in thinking I'm under threat. Now, the problem is that we're using a 200 million old sort of operating system to face what is generally an emotional type of threat, uh, because it's emotional control we're talking about in terms of trades and our um reaction to trades going wrong. And what it does, it floods the body with cortisol and adrenaline because it thinks you're about to go into physical threat. And you're just looking at a trade disaster, let's just say. So it's it's tearing you up for a physical threat. So it widens out the arteries to allow blood to pump to the must big muscle groups. It takes blood away from the surface of the skin so you can get a cold sweat. Your hair might stand on end, you might get a bit of a sort of a dry mouth as well. Your digestive system's offline because that's not important if you're about to try to survive a physical threat. Um, your heart starts to beat faster. And people out there thinking, I recognize this, it's just this is me in moments of panic, and it is panic. So the physiological state of the body is changing because of a perceived threat that your body's treating as a physical threat. So it's making you teed up to run the heck out of there to escape this threat. So all of these things are going on, but the cordazone adrenaline takes time to leave the system. And as Steve said, prefrontal cortex, you know, the if you're under physical threat or under perceived physical threat in this case, you're not thinking about your pension plan, you're thinking about how the hell I get out of here. So prefrontal complex thinking, or even the appetite for complex thinking is offline, um, as your body is, you know, just trying trying to deal with threat. And of course, we hear that uh it can be it can be a faint, it can be a freeze, you know, get the hell out of there. There are various aspects of how we could look at threat in terms of our reaction. And I and I've seen, as stated on podcasts before, I've seen somebody freeze, absolute, you know, Rigor Mortis freeze because the threat was so overwhelming. So it is um it is difficult. And Steve mentioned briefly about um the use of breath. We must also understand there's a huge amount of research, and I think um the author mentioned it in his book too, about the fact that the amygdala can be shrunk, but it also can grow. So the more perceived threat we're under and we're not managing, the amygdala can actually get bigger. So it actually becomes even more of a problem. Um, using stress management processes, like particularly mindfulness, that's been shown to reduce the size of the amygdala, which means when you come under perceived threat, your response to it is much more managed because the amygdala and its processes has become a little bit more controlled. So there are ways to look at this, but of course, if you start thinking I'm I'm gonna get not bothered and I'm gonna carry on just as I am, you know, reacting to threat in this way, where adrenaline and cortisol is gets flooding the system. I give you a clue your sleep's gonna be pretty bad as well, because the cortisol and adrenaline just doesn't help sleep. So you wake up the next day, you come to the market, you've got a compromise mindset, it all kicks off, and you're already on the back foot. Over time, this creates um huge anxiety, it can create depression and recurring depression. And Steve and I will tell you that, and quite a few people that we've coached, we've seen that show up where people have shared that with us. That you know, this becomes, as we call it, a bit of a doom loop, but it's a mental doom loop that we get stuck in because of the chemical side of our reaction to trauma that's in our body. So, yeah, there's a little bit of an introduction from me. It's yeah, trauma can take its shape. You can have small trauma, you can have big traumas, but if you're not careful, it can turn you into the green-eyed monster. And you look back and you just think, What the hell was I doing? Why did I do that? Why did I say that? If you're in a big corporate environment and it all kicks off and you've got the wrong version of you showing up, you might well have conversations that get you into even more deep water. Um, so um, yeah, it's dangerous on many fronts, unmanaged, it's lethal. But I talked about the symptoms, and many people will think, yeah, that's yeah, I I recognize that.
SPEAKER_01Brilliant, brilliant. Thank you, Mark. And you know that you you mentioned something about the physical threat, and people might be going, thinking, well, you know what, I'm I'm not in the jungle anymore. There's no tigers in the bushes, there's no snakes under my seat, um, there's no deadly spiders uh waiting to come out of the woodwork here at home. Um, but you know what, it it this this often means uh an identity threat as much as a physical threat. Um, but I will come back to that because I think we're gonna talk about a point a little bit later on which talks about this identity threat. Um, but it means as much to our our um our psychological system as a physical threat. Um the second point in the book, okay, which I wanted to draw, and this is why this book is so profound, is that he argues that the body knows before you do. Okay. And by you, I'm talking about you know, your mind for you, your conscious you. Okay. Um his argument is that and it draws on the work of a um a well-known scientist called Stephen Porges, who came up with something called the polyvagal theory. Um and there's there's an old psychologist joke, which is what goes on in the vagus nerve stays in the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve is um a major part of your uh nervous system which connects your your your brain to your stomach. And people often call the stomach the second brain. Um and I I think it's found to have more um more more nerves in it um related to to thought than most mammals, about the same as a cat. Um so uh and you know, when we talk about getting butterflies in our stomach, that is why. Um how we feel, you know, and and and and and and the words about the stomach come out in our coach, in our trading, you know, gut instinct. You just think of the very term we use. Traders who trade from the gut. You know, the the the stomach feels things often before we're conscious in the brain about them, as we do in other parts of the body. I mean, if you were to ever do a body scan, which is a great technique used in certain um psycho uh psychotherapy fields and also within mindfulness, the work of mindfulness. Um, you know, I I I've done that where I feel an awkwardness in a different part of my body, maybe in my chest, maybe in my arms, maybe the top of my legs. We've all felt the hairs on the back of our neck stand out at various times, or a pain in our neck. Okay. Um and and and the idea between this the polyvagal theory, uh, as Van Van der Koek describes it, um, and the concept of neurosception is that the nervous system is constantly unconsciously scanning for danger. And it's doing that, and it's happening faster and earlier than conscious thought. Okay, so when you think about the tight chest before a trade, you ought to check the position for a tenth time, the shallow breath before hitting send, that's not noise, but that's neurosection firing before the conscious mind is caught up. Um this is the what if moment where FOMO and fear of regret causes us to do something that the conscious rational mind has planned for us. Okay. And this is this is real, this is happening. This is why it's impossible to trade unemotionally. We try as much as we do, we do. In fact, you know, I I have uh a kind of issue with with much of the trading industry out there. Uh and you know, I've been around the block many times on this 25 years as a trader, um, 15 years as a coach working with traders. And and you know, one of the mistakes I I used to try and make, and my colleagues all try to make, is to think we could trade without emotions, you know, and I see this in lots of trading academies and courses where they're trying to teach people to trade without emotions. Okay, even some of the big hedge fund academies try and do this, try and create an emotional decision making. But you know, in the real world, not in the laboratory, you know, unless you're a robot, these two aims are impossible. Okay. Um and that's why, you know, we're wired this way through our we we we operate through our central nervous system, which has evolved over millions of years, as Mark said, you know, the amagdala 200 million years old or something. Okay. Um so the feelings we have they occur before thoughts. You know, so unless you plan to miraculously flip millions of years of evolutionary hardware, you have to accept that right reality and start from there. And I meet some incredible traders who have come to terms with their emotions, factor it into their process, and actually have become much better traders. So I'm gonna throw this now over to you, Mark, about uh you know how the body knows before you do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it is interesting. The speed, the speed of reaction. One of the things that I thought about was that if if you pick up something that's hot, your response to it is quicker than thought. Yeah. Something in your system telling you to drop it. It's an immediate reaction that is milli, milli, milliseconds. And if you had to think about it, you'd you'd you'd burn yourself. But there's something in our system that reacts quicker than thought because you know, new neurons are everywhere. But in terms of also how we um it engage with and this drifts into presence a little bit, you know. We we often talk about presence and what is presence, it's it's guess being uh aware of the um what we consciously see, but also understanding there's another layer that's below consciousness that we're also picking up signals from, and it's understanding those signals and translating them into you know actually doing something. And I know that uh we've had some people that uh that we've coached that reflect upon being in a flow state where things just but where time sort of slows down, things become easy because they seem to have an intuition about what's going on uh that they can't really put their finger on. And I think that perhaps is some of the answer that there are times when you can't really explain why you had that thought or feeling, but accepting that uh and being tuned in to those feelings turn up, and those two those feelings mean something, and if you tune in at the right way, right level, they may well help the way that you're you know and analyzing markets. Um, and of course, it may be that you're in your peripheral vision you're picking up signals. You know, we often focus so much on on perhaps in trading the bid and offer in the depth, but you know, it's what's going on in your peripheral vision or what you're hearing from a trading wind point of view in terms of uh a peripheral sort of piece of noise showing that the interest rate desk has just got busy and you're trading foreign exchange, and that might be relevant. Awareness and uh presence becomes part of this because these signals have to come from somewhere. Um, you know, you and all of your senses are permanently tuned in to kind of figuring out what what's going on, particularly around potential threats, but they're listening to everything. And it's you trying to decipher that. So even recognizing the fact that this is going on is important because it allows you to think okay, there's something else I guess need to be potentially aware of. And oh, yeah, I did I do get those feelings every now and then that I can almost predict what's about to. Happen next in a way that happens next. And I then think, well, why didn't I do anything about it?
SPEAKER_01You must have had it. You must have had time for anything. I I did as a trainer. I did. It didn't. It felt like magic. If I talk about that in my book, and uh it feels just like instinct almost or intuition, the word you you mentioned about a minute ago. Another word we don't even know yet. Yeah, isn't it? We go from instinct to intuition, they're they're kind of so connected. Um and I always like to think of you know, I read something about the um the way uh a baseball player or a cricketer um reacts to uh the delivery of the ball from the bowler or pitcher. Yeah, 100 mile an hour ball. Well, they've actually they've actually you know, scientists have actually assessed this, and they said to adjust and adapt to the ball leaving the hand requires a response time of something like 400 milliseconds or less, which is faster than conscious conscious neural processing. Okay, so so what they've found that elite batters do um is they bypass slow deliberate thought by using advanced predictive coding in their brain. Um and and and and they have a fine-tuned sort of visuamotor coupling. Okay, so in other words, what they're doing is they're they've learned to take cues from what's happening just before it happens. Yeah, they're already shaping up to play the shot before the ball has left the bowler's hand because um you haven't got time to make a decision after that. Okay, so they're they're anticipating the trajectory of the bodily clue cues, right? And how maybe that's going to bounce on the pitch. And all that's being done in real time, okay, by the human brain, by people who have seen these patterns over. That's why practice works.
SPEAKER_00And they're not thinking I think Simon Mundy mentioned it in one of his podcasts when he was on with us that uh it's action without thought. So you're not, you've not had to they've not had to think about that. Yeah, they're not to think, oh, what am I about to do? Because I'm noticing this.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, in cricket they've noticed that they're already working it out without them having to say, yeah, can you work this out?
SPEAKER_01There's there's looking ahead in cricket, they say that elite batters project their gaze to where they predict the ball will arrive.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Um, rather than chasing the ball reactively.
SPEAKER_00I mean, that's the mathematics behind that is hugely complicated, but it gives you a sense as to how complex our brain is.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And what it's what it can do if we give it the opportunity to do it, and we can tune into that.
SPEAKER_01And there's a lot of interesting stuff there. So professional players manage to stabilize their head orientation to minimize the visual purr, which then allows the eye moments to process the crank, you know, the final critical microsessors. All this is done by passing the the the pre-frontal cortex, which actually works quite slowly. And the same thing happens in trading. I know incredible traders who are so reactive, okay, and they kind of see the setup happening, but they couldn't even describe it. No, you know. Uh uh, I always remember working with a guy at a bank about 10, 12 years ago, phenomenal day trader, FX day trader, okay. And he was just in out the market all day long, okay, just watching the numbers on the screen, not even the charts, just watching the numbers. You know, he'd have some client trades going through his books, which added a bit of extra context and insight. Um, and he knew where he wanted to be ultimately positioned, but he would just then use, you know, it was the noise of everything happening around him, people saying stuff, seeing the behavior of markets that would just give him the cue to just execute without thinking. And it it was phenomenal. And he he was the most successful trader within the business.
SPEAKER_00And I guess there was trust there, wasn't it? He trusted himself at that time.
SPEAKER_01We got to the point after a while of really trusting that process. Um so so you know that that the entire process was trusting it. And I see this for phenomenal traders today. Okay, it's it's you don't have to be a day trader to happen, but you can see stuff happening that's giving you clues before it happens that gives you a chance to just you know adjust yourself. Um you know, a lot of the best traders, you know, we go back to Amrit in in the the the Unknown Market Wizards, um, who I worked with and um I I spoke about in my book. And you know, sorry for the little plug there, guys, can't help it. Mastering the mental gamma trading. It's a habit, it's a habit. Don't worry about it. Um you know, he that was him. That the work he did off floor was ridiculous to prepare. Well, he was deep now, wasn't he? He he was the deep now. Deep now. So when he was on the floor, it was just all in the moment, all the reaction, but he prepared for those reactions. And they may not they may not happen, but if they happened, he was ready for them and he knew what he wanted to do, and then he would adjust it. And and so it was it was intuitive, it was gut feel, it was instinct, but it was also all that meets preparation and planning. So, you know, to see that that that's where we can see this sort of working together as as a beautiful coordination. Um moving on to the the third uh takeaway. So really the the second takeaway from that, by the way. In fact, there's two takeaways. We never talked about a takeaway for the first one. The takeaway is build the rules and processes before you're in a threat state, not during it. Okay. Um be pre-committed mechanical triggers exist prior precisely because you cannot reliably reason your way through a live drawdown. That's why we have stops, okay. If you use a stop method, not every method uses a stop, by the way. And I know some people think that's crazy, but that's probably because you don't use that method. Um, but the second trait takeaway we've got from the body knows before you do is treat physical sensation as data. Okay, a quick body scan before entering a trade, um, calm or activated. It's a legitimate risk management input, not a soft optional add-on. And this is what the best traders are doing, whether they've done it by design or it's just an evolutionary evolution of their own trading process. That's what they're doing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's fit it's filling mindfulness as part of your process because it's a mindful activity.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So it's the what's the way it's a weapon. I mean, if if you if you look at it, it's an absolute weapon. A lethal weapon, not just a weapon, yeah.
SPEAKER_02A lethal weapon. It's you know, for some people.
SPEAKER_00Is doing it because it enhances is pro-tuition a word. What's what's the slightly forward thinking version of intuition where you're slightly forward of current point in time? Is it pro-tuition or proception?
SPEAKER_01You know what? I've never heard of pro-tuition, but what you've got me doing is going on to Claude right now, our best mate, yeah, who's with us on this call, uh, and asked, Is pro-intuition a word? And he said, He said, Isn't a word I recognize? Did you mean prostitution?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, probably or protrusion or I think there is a word where your where your level of intuition is slightly ahead of you, or slightly ahead of what you see as real time, because we process with a lag. And anything that can reduce that lag and get you closer to real real time, I think gives you a chance. And I'm trying to work out what this all about is all about. Um, anyway, so I think there is a word. We'll work out what the word is in the show.
SPEAKER_01There's a whole series of words that Claude's come up with. Okay. Um, prescience, foreknowledge or foresight, sensing what's coming before.
SPEAKER_00Prescience, yeah, prescience. That's it. That's I like that one.
SPEAKER_01So, you know, if you meant sensing things before they happen, it's a prescience is the word. So, yeah, we'd like to mention, we'd like to, by the way, introduce our listeners to Claude, a new member of the team, um, who's doing this completely uh with his best mate, Gemini Pro. Voluntarily. Okay. Um, so let should we move on to the third, um, yeah, third of these uh the these points from the book? Um, and it it it really comes under the sentence one bad hit can fragment the whole story. Okay, it it's what I call the identity hit. Um, and Van der Koopt discusses how trauma can fragment a person's coherent sense of self, leaving parts of them still reacting as though danger is present long after the event has passed. Um effectively, here what he's saying, and and you know, this is where I come back to, you know, you were talking about the amygdala responding to a physical threat, okay. But the the the the idea here is that as beings, we've moved on from the basic uh reptiles of 200 million years ago and the proto-mammals and the the early low um uh low class of mammals to a much more thinking mammal, okay. Um and the higher level mammals, you know, they start to have this, okay. And um, you know, they start to have an identity, and and that's because they're social animals. That you know, we are social beings, we rely on others to get by. If we if we didn't, we'd we'd fade away if we're cast out of the group or the um the the clan, the society, the tribe. You know, we can't function. Okay, it's a death sentence effectively in the natural world. Okay, it's why loneliness is hurt so much because we're primed not to be lonely and we'll adjust our behaviors to make sure we we we retain the um approval of the clan. It's why we need the approval of others, it's why we need contact is essentially one of the most human um uh um elements that parts of being human. So so loss of identity, okay. The identity here is us fearing, okay, that others are going to disapprove of us and we're gonna become isolated and thrown out, and we lose our sense of self at that moment. So people aren't processing money loss, okay, because the brain doesn't know what money is, not not the ancient, even the modern brain, you know, money's a recent invention, okay. It means something. What money is is it means something, it has a meaning, okay. What people are really processing is the hit to their identity, their self-esteem, their sense of self-worth, their sense of self-value of who they are. Okay. If they can't like themselves, how can other people like themselves? Okay, so in trading, a single catastrophic loss, um, even within a sound process, even within the parameters of what's bearable, can really fragment a trader's trust in themselves. Um, and that doesn't go away because that's the trauma hit. Okay, it stays in the body. Okay, so they then become braced. You you mark, Mark, if you could see me, I'm tightening my grip here on myself, my body, my arms are coming in, being held tight. We tighten up and we're braced for the next blow-up. We, you know, we we start looking around looking for it, okay, and we start sabotaging our process. We sabotage good trades, we won't take them, or we'll we'll we'll quickly take a profit, or we'll cut a loss even too quickly, okay? Um, because merely it might have some echo of the one that hurt. That's all. And what we we can often I use the term catastrophizing when I'm working with clients. You know, people expect something to go wrong, and then this attitude manifests in their trading, and the very failure they consciously want to avoid, they're actually creating.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this reminds me of we talked about Federer in the past, didn't we? The sort of the ability to take a hit, to reset, recover, and guess get back in the game, um, and having a process around that, but also a process of preconditioning so that hits don't scar, you know, and I think that um we we see a lot of scars from the people that we talk to, uh, scars that are difficult to forget. And I think if if you have a scar, if you have a wound that is poorly um managed, as it were, you know, you you can you can have a wound on your leg, and I've got one from about 1968 where I cut my leg with a standing knife trying to trying to cut a piece of wood that I'm looking at now in this hot climate that we now exist in. Um, and that's a reminder of what I did back then. Um and and scars remind us. But if if if I'm sure if if that wound back in 1968 was was, you know, just more carefully attended to, it would it would not have it would not have been a scar decades later. So I think how we manage being wounded, um, and whether it leaves a residual scar on us is important. Um, if we carry out some of the processes we mentioned today, then we can cope with a hit, as it were, and it then it doesn't scar us. And I guess you know, the uh part of the book title, what's it the body has the score? I think unmanaged, you know, you're gonna you're gonna be super scarred. Um managed, you're gonna ex you know you're gonna manage through a a hit. And going back to the Federa thing where you kind of move on and and you've forgotten about it, as it were, and it doesn't scar you, but you've you've had a recovery, you have a recovery plan to that hit. And so the ability to recover from a hit also requires you to be in the right mental state to have that process. Now, if you're falling apart at the seams and um you know stress is the predominant mix, and of course, we've we've we've we've talked about well, what does that translate? That translates into fight or flight or freeze or faint and all that chemical stuff going on, you know, with 10% less IQ and prefrontal cortex offline, you're not going to be able to work out your recovery plan anyway. So it kind of gets worse. So it's almost like you need to start off with these processes to be able to manage the amygdala hijack, to be able to manage the threat response that turns up chemically. For you to deal with a hit to know in confidence that you've got a structure that guess goes, okay, I've got a process, I've left that behind, it's not scarred me, and I'm back in the game. Because that's what Fedra does. He's doing that up until the point of now being partly retired. You know, he's he was historically known to guess have this ability to guess move through. I think in the early teenage years he didn't have it. So it he acquired he acquired it into being such a managed state where if he had a hit, he recovered, he moved on. And we talk about that in in our work, you know, you you how you your relationship to a trauma is important. You know, what do you have a process around it? And is it is it a trauma that doesn't leave a scar because you've got a good process? Or are you fighting with the fact that you're constantly scarring yourself? And those scars are reminders to that event that takes you back in time to rewurry it and rethink it and refill it. Um, because scars are you know that you don't want to be a trader with lots of scars, you want to be a trader that's that's on top of these wounds so that they don't become lasting wounds.
SPEAKER_01And do you know what it's not always easy to identify these wounds to see where they come from? I mean, we we have them throughout our life growing up, they shape us and make us, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00I mean, yeah, you need to go through the experience of it. That's why some of people sort of come into trading without the experience. Well, you kind of you need to go through several cycles of this to kind of work it out. Otherwise, it just makes no sense.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I do tell people who come to to me for coaching that haven't had, you know, minimum two to three years in the market, you know, often often a bit longer. Because I mean, first of all, I think before you start working with a coach and dealing with with this stuff, you have to learn the foundations, the technical stuff. But then you need to have had the hits, the bruises, that you've got to bear some scars, and then we've got something to start talking about. Yeah. Okay. And you'll be trying to learn how to adjust and adapt to that. Um, and I do have certain clients who I've worked with for years who will come after they've hit a big speed bump and we'll try and unpick their trading back to the point where this started to happen, and then we'll try and unpick what that particular instant was and what the score was, and you know, and then how that's manifesting in what they're doing now, and you know, and how that shapes their current. And actually going through that then frees them and lifts them out of it, and they suddenly start making money again. Um, and it, you know, you can find people who don't normally have fear in their trading who can suddenly become very fearful for what appears no reason for them, but once we can link it back to something, they can often move on it. So so again, you know, this this one bad hit can fragment the whole story.
SPEAKER_00I think it is important, it's important to recognise the fact that we're not all perfect. Well, I don't think any of us are perfect.
SPEAKER_01So, no, no, no, you're the exception there, Mark. I'm gonna pass up you you're the exception, but I think most of us aren't perfect.
SPEAKER_00Don't beat yourself up if you suddenly get a hit that you don't deal with appropriately. That's normal, that's normal. That that that is life. You say in Djokovic where you whack it, you whack your racket against the net and all sorts of chaos. And he's got the most uh mindfulness strategy of of many people, but you know, sort of have yourself a bit of room that occasionally you might need to guess think, okay, except I guess need to relearn that process. So yeah, we're not all perfect, and don't give yourself up.
SPEAKER_01It's not just humanity, we're dealing with uncertainty as well. So, you know, to expect us to be able to solve an impossible answer.
SPEAKER_00Why I see her talking about it and saying you've got to and have to, you must do this. Yeah, we know that uh life can um throw things that that do get you down, but um it's it what we've talked about today hopeful hopefully gives some structure around well how how perhaps I can prepare for it and deal with it better.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. So so as a takeaway from that that third one, the the identity hit and one bad hit can fragment the whole story. You know, there's no easy answer to these, but you know, you you want to be trying to separate that specific bad trade from the whole process, which is as I said, this is what some of my clients would do. They'll come and talk about it and try and get close to what it is, name precisely what went wrong rather than letting one loss quietly rewrite the entire story so that you end up going, I can't trust myself anymore, or I can't trust myself with risk. Um, so that's that takeaway on the third one. Now the fourth one. Um talking about it is not enough on its own. This this is what Van this is what Van der Koopt's kind of central clinical argument is. The the top-down approaches, such as talk the therapy, understanding your story through an intellectual lens, um they're helpful, they're often necessary, but alone they're not sufficient. Real change also needs bottom-up work, approaches that engage how we're feeling, how our body's reacting, how our nervous system is working, okay. And and and this is where the mind and body work is done, okay. Um you know, the coaching, the grounding of self, the breath work, you know, this really starts to make a difference. I'm gonna hand over to you um very quickly, Mark, um in a second. But first I want to talk about because we haven't really spoken about this, the uh the golf open recently, the British Open, won by Ryan Fox. Um fast that even the TV cameras couldn't catch up with his winning shot and missed the start of his final part. It was incredible to see. Um, but he he talks, he talked afterwards about the breath work he's done, and between shots, just walking to the next shot and counting his breath. Yeah, so he silences the mind.
SPEAKER_00Well, I can I well I can add to that. So early 80s, um, I got invited on a Network golf day, and there was this, and I was you know, early 20s, and there was this I don't know, he must it must have been 60, but he might have been 40, he could lose a sense of age, you know, when you're that age. And um, he was a fantastic golfer. And in between shots, he was bird watching. I mean, it was just ridiculous. He had a bit of binoculars track to his bag, and he so he played. Golf shot, and where most golfers you know were sort of thinking about their next shot, he was bird watching, and it's remarkable there's a woodpecker up in that trail with 18 miles of birdwatching. But you could kind of work it out in the end that he was not thinking about golf at all, and he was using tuning into his senses, and I think you know it's kind of a relaxing thing, observing. You tend to calm yourself down by observing and paying attention and listening to sounds and you know try trying to be curious. It's all part of you know a mindful walk in a way, and it wasn't about breath, although his breath would have been slower, his heart rate would have been slower because he was involved in that type of practice. And he turned up to his next shot as fresh as a daisy and didn't do a practice stroke. And I think it was a four handicap or something. It was just ridiculous. So it was much in the way that you've mentioned here. It's the what you do in between the action was was really, really important. Um, you know, I thought I was smart enough at the time to notice that because I was already on my own journey all those decades ago that was emerging as to my methodology of managing me. But you could tell it's the action was one thing, but it was the action was defined by what you did before the action. And in golf, as you mentioned about Ryan, it was counting the breath, and that of course would have made presence, it was reducing heart rate, it was calming the system and giving him mental energy to just turn up and do what he did. Phenomenal, wasn't he? Even on the what was he, world top 50, world top 70? Um, but it was great that you mentioned that, and I don't think he's unusual. It's great that you talked about it, and I think that if you talk to many of these top performers, they will all mention something around breath work, something around how they breathe, when they breathe, how they use the breath to guess. We knew it was a huge thing for Federer, wasn't it? Massive.
SPEAKER_01And I think, yeah, Djokovic and I think high performers, you know, elite performers. I think is it um Taylor Swift? And you know, they they do a lot of this stuff.
SPEAKER_00Well, but I mean England World Cup team had uh meditation system, Williams, all the F1 teams, yeah. Uh absolutely all the drivers I'm you know, Nico Rosberg's commented, I'll say again on my LinkedIn post, Mr. Nico Roseberg. Um great advice, Mark Randall. Um, but so yeah, he's all over it. All of these people are all over this stuff that unfortunately a lot of blokes, I say blokes in the world of trading, kind of laugh at thinking, oh that's a bit girly, that's a bit about emotional intelligence. Oh, I won't, I won't really, you know, do I really want to be seen to be doing that? But wake up, you know, wake up the world's greatest performers bit in what are they doing in terms of performance, are doing this stuff for a reason, and they're doing it because they can be slightly ahead of themselves in terms of presence. They're dealing with disappointment and moving on from it rapidly, and they realize that disappointment's gonna come, and the things that traders can learn from that by embracing that philosophy. I mean, it can change your game, it can change your PL.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it this this is, you know, I you know, I always talk about the importance of doing, you know, the physical and the practical work to make yourself better. Journaling is one of the best, okay. Um, maybe do some post-mortem analysis in the planning and preparation. Um, you know, uh a lot of people now are using AI reflective coaching um to help them. They're talking things out and seeing what patterns are coming back from their AI machines. Um, these are really helpful, but that they're also limited, they're outside in. We have to understand that there is only so much you can do. This is the mirror, and you look in the mirror alone doesn't resolve things, okay? You know, there's my reflection now what? Okay, useful, but they don't necessarily switch off a body that's still floods with adrenaline.
SPEAKER_00No, it's it's very interesting you say that because what what they're not doing, they're not listening to the tone of what you've just asked. It's not looking at your body language in response to things as you go about you know the conversation, the dialogue, which of course, in a real you know physical coach is uh you know a paying attention to response as well. And of course, AI doesn't do that, it's chucking out some some some logic. And I've done the same thing, and some of it's led down rabbit holes that are difficult to get out of, right? And you think, where's it going with this conversation? This you know, I'm gonna end this. Um, and so it's it's not going into your soul. No, no, it doesn't understand you and your response, and or that you've just raised an eyebrow to a comment where you think, okay, he's not, you know, that that's not landing well, or he's questioning that. Um AI can't do that. Uh I'm sure to go down the line there by all sorts of things that it can do, but it's not it's it's not able to get into your soul and to monitor in real time your response to certain things as it as it communicates with you.
SPEAKER_01It's what I call the limits of intellectuality, okay? You know, we can only talk out so much, we can only reflect so much, we can only look at our reflection so long. That's only the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, it's useful. To use a metaphor, it's useful, it's it's essential, but it has to, you know, it works best with something else. So, you know, breath work's an example of doing something for the body. Mindfulness, that's stuff you can do yourself. Okay, it steals the mind. Okay, the deliberate reset, okay. So physical routines before, during, and after big sessions are held. You know, they they add something, you know, but trying to improve say basic somatic awareness, bodily awareness, which is what coaching does a lot of, you know, making people conscious of all these in, you know, what's going on within them, what's going on around, how these are coming together um to impact your trading.
SPEAKER_00Well, you say it's gonna center, I think it's gonna button there because I was coaching somebody the other day who I then refused to coach for the rest of the session because I said, You're exhausted, you're just looking exhausted. Yeah, whatever conversation we're gonna have, you're gonna give me the wrong response because you look a bit stressed. And as a coach, you can make that cool, right? You yeah, it might somebody might be interacting with AI at the wrong time because they're suffering or they've got trauma, and so they're a little bit vulnerable.
SPEAKER_01And AI is not gonna give a monkeys of your state, but as coaches, we're looking at that and we're thinking there are moments we think, actually, let's let's stop this conversation now because you know I think AI coaching has been a brilliant addition for people. Um, and I encourage my clients to do it, but also to put a limit on it as well, to understand its limitations. In fact, one of my clients he he downloads our conversations, the scripted them into his AI machine, he downloads his trading performance, his reflections on his trading, and then he he asks it to identify patterns, what it's noticing, you know, to sort of you know what he needs to be aware of. Um, and then he he says, you know, what's a good thing for me to take to Steve for our next conversation after a while. You charge him for that. Yeah. But the funniest one was he turned around to me one day and he said, I was putting all this into AI, I was stuck, it was things weren't working out, and eventually I went, it was Claude just went, Oh Steve. Perhaps you should call Steve, set up a session. And I was like, Yeah, recommended by Claude. Um so anyway, this brings us to the, you know, that that's the takeaway, really. You know, it's it it goes beyond that, it goes beyond intellectualizing, it goes beyond the mind and into the body. Okay, do that work and examine that work and explore that work because that's the hardest stuff to understand. Okay, which brings us to the final, the fifth takeaway, okay. Um, and I think you're really gonna like this one, Mark. Okay, it's safety in relationship is what lets the system recalibrate. Okay. We are people, we are human, we are social beings. That's probably the the core essence of being human is connection to other people. Okay, one of the most uh quoted lines in the book is is being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health. Okay, co-regulation, the feeling sense in the presence of calm, attuned persons is often what allows a diseulated nervous system to reset more than any technique practiced alone. And I'm gonna take this a step further, okay, because a few years ago um I did a course on uh sort of particular philosophy that I follow in my coaching and my the field of psychology that I'm into is called gestell psychology. Um and there was this course being run on gestell and trauma, um, a series of trauma workshops. And one of the things that really stood out to me from it is was and then they were talking about the trauma of addiction, like mainly people who've been through various addictions, drink drugs, alcohol, sex, and sugar, and many other sort of addictions. And uh what they were arguing was the the the cigarette or the alcohol itself wasn't the addiction, it grew out of the connection. These people started being in places where they were connected safely to other people, they were no longer judged, okay, they were no longer it wasn't a painful experience, it was a pleasant experience. So they were saying, you know, these people who often were had gone into drugs at an early age, or if you look at where people become impressionable and start smoking, it's as we're becoming young adults where we need companionship, where we need to be approved by our peers and accepted, and you fall into a crowd that accepts you. And what are some of the habits of that crowd? Smoking. That's what gets you accepted by the crowd. Okay, you do it because other people are doing it. Drugs, it's what gets you accepted as a crowd. And then the real hit actually comes from being accepted by the crowd, not from the drug itself, but uh we then associate the drug taking with a hit and we try to recreate that pleasure, and that's where the addiction starts. And that's a very simplistic explanation of it, possibly too simplistic. But I was fascinated by that, and it really helped me understand just how true connection is. And this comes back to the idea of trading, how we often go into ourselves and it becomes a really lonely we we get lost in our head, a really lonely experience, even when we're surrounded by others.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. What's coming to my mind as you say that is perhaps it's sort of the early parental guidance of actually mix mixing with the right crowd, or not mixing with the wrong crowd, and how you can look at perhaps peers that have come from school and look at all their different directions, and you can see people that clearly mixed with the wrong crowd and the disasters that come with that. Um, but also um, you know, mixing with the right crowd and you know what what that uh gives us an opportunity. Sometimes we perhaps don't have a choice. Um but if you look at the world of trading, you kind of do have a choice. So, you know, being in an appropriate community, um where there's professionals guiding it, um, listening to right podcasts. I mean, listen to podcasts with people with experience talking about it because this is a kind of community as well, in a in a way. Um and so we have a choice. I mean, that we know there's a lot of traders out there that are choosing the wrong type of people to learn from, that are listening to the wrong type of intuition. Um, and that sort of fits into you know, social media is not called social media for a reason, it's kind of part of your social sphere. Um, but going back to, and I guess you also sort of highlighted that bad habits can come from it. Um, but I will remind you of that sound bite that uh I used at some of our big corporate presentations of this. There was this corporate of like 200,000 people, and they they tried to analyse where the uh the the less stress was in their business, and it was the people that were smoking because they, without permission, stepped up, went for a break outside, had a social chat, had a smoke, you know, connected with people for normally non-business communication, then went back to their desk. I know that obviously smoke smoking is is is hugely dangerous, but they, from a stress point of view, were the least stressed people. Um, and you mentioned about the fact that we do need to make sure we have that social connection um and make use of it because it's important that we um you know maintain our sense of self and maintain our sense of controlling our amygdala by you know, I think it enjoys the fact that we're sat in a social chat, it's reducing stress, it's making us a bit calmer, and then we go back to the fight. So, yeah, so social connectivity is super important, and you know, my my my warning would be for people just make sure you're in the right trader social group that you choose carefully what channel you listen to, you know, rat rather than believe in someone that's been in the market for five years talking about you know being experts in their field, give you a clue. I don't even think COVID was five years ago now, was it? It's now six years ago, the start of COVID. Um, you know, choose who you liaise with in your journey for you know building your trading experience and being guided.
SPEAKER_01And often have a partner. I think that's why a lot of people come to coaching. You know, a lot of my clients I've worked with are, you know, interestingly, a lot of them are solo traders um come to me, and you know, some of them have been with me five, six, seven years now.
SPEAKER_00Well, same with me, you guys think you just need this they appreciate the sounding board, they appreciate uh, I guess also an off-ramp, you know, for maybe someone to talk through a difficulty to let go of it appropriately.
SPEAKER_01I hear them saying it out loud, it changes everything, or even that someone's just listening to them. Yeah, well, a trader alone with their PL and in their own head is often the worst resource that being alone in your orders, the worst resource environment for recalibrating after a hit.
SPEAKER_00The relief of having a discussion about it. I'm okay now. I've talked it through with whoever, you know, Steve with Mark. Um, and of course, that's almost an indirect service, isn't it, that we're that we're providing as part of the of that relationship.
SPEAKER_01But it's not you alone against the world anymore, it's you and a supporter, yeah, someone with you on the journey. In fact, you often see this with high performers, you know. For the Beatles, the Beatles, it was Epstein's. I just saw the Sinatra show a few weeks ago. It was George Evans, his promoter. Yeah, and I was Billy Holiday was featured in that, and for her, it was Joe Glazer. And a lot of these people kind of almost fall apart after they lose this support person because they're they're doing high-level performance. Okay. So, you know, this is so key. But you know, so so you know, real really, you know, this is the takeaway, and it's this is where you know, we I I know people feel we sometimes push coaching. We don't push coaching at all on these calls, but we try not to, we try not to sell ourselves. But you know, we're big believers in this, obviously, because we see the impact it has to people. We've been through it ourselves, we've been coached, and uh we know the positive effect it has. Any any thoughts about that?
SPEAKER_00No, you've summed it up very, very well. It's um if you don't have a partner, go find one. Uh, you know, if you feel that you're alone, go find the appropriate community. Um, it's part of you know, psychologically, it's nice to guess feel that you're talking it through with other people of the experiencing similar things, and you can share and at least talk about it, and you know, people will listen. Um, it's really important because ultimately you're guess trying to feel, oh, it's okay to be the this way because you know, other people are feeling this way, and this is how they've um you know, in their own journeys have dealt dealt with it and sharing experience is and you're gonna get the here shared experience by being part of a group that you can trust, yeah. So choose carefully, you've and I guess evaluate if you're on in a community at the moment, guess evaluate is this the right community for me? And you know, do I feel comfortable in even sharing my experiences? If you don't, then change community.
SPEAKER_01And certainly do not get stuck inside your own head. And here's the one here's the one problem with that just when we're stuck inside our own head, we don't have the clarity unless we are forced to to start thinking like that. It's uh we're in a trap, that's why we go into these doom loops. We retreat, we do the very thing that we shouldn't be doing. Just a green-eyed monster takes over. Yeah. So listen, any any thoughts to just bring this to a close, Mark?
SPEAKER_00No, I think it's a worthwhile subject. I think we uh we did our typical tube blokes down the pub talking about it, which you know, we we we talk from experience and we've shared some things I think that are going to be quite important for people to take away and uh you know apply to their own journey. We we've you know we we know that the soft stuff is important, most people ignore it. So don't ignore it because you're ignoring something that's your underlying physiology. Um it's actually the hard stuff.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it and this time we call it the soft stuff, it's the hard stuff. Yeah, a bit that people find a really hard to do, and b, even though they know it's important, they'll go, I'll deal with it later. I've got I've got fires to fight before I go there. Yeah, I've gotta I've got to put my energy into technical analysis, maybe attending another technical analysis conference, maybe see some speakers on the oil market talking. That's more important. I've got to know where the market's going now. That feels urgent. I've got to deal with with everything that's happening in the next uh 24 hours, seven days. I've got to be ahead of it. Okay, I've got to make sure that I'm constantly got my eye on truth social at the moment or whatever it is, you know. Um, I've got I've got everything is geared towards that short moment. So that we're dealing with the urgent at the expense of the important, and we're putting all our energy into the urgent at the expense of the important. And it's the important that actually, you know, a few years down the line, if you've changed and move forward that you've dealt with, and if you haven't dealt with it, it's a few years down the line. You're looking back and going, I haven't grown at all, I haven't moved on, I haven't. I'm just constantly fighting um however many trading days are a year, 220 chase of short-term uh noise, and not working on myself becoming a better trader, transforming, growing. Not not about me because I'm the person. And here's the thing is that the market doesn't care about your story, but your body is keeping the score whether you're listening to it or not. That's what's hurting you.
SPEAKER_00Brilliant, what a lovely chat.
SPEAKER_01Great. Well, listen, it's great to be back. We're gonna be back quite a bit more over the next uh few months. We've got some great guests already being lined up and uh subjects to talk about. Um, do feel free to send us an email if any of this resonates with you. Info at alpha-mind dot net is uh is no it's the place to go. You can go to um our website page, alpha-mind.net, to find out more about how to contact us as well. Um and uh yeah, it's been great being back out here talking to you, the audience on the uh subjects we know that matter to you and that we love you.
