Quiet your mind and remove self-doubt

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• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, Michael Martin, the number one, this is number two, one. Question I get is, Mike, I can't sit still, I'm too fidgety, I can't quiet my mind, I'm not flexible, I can't do yoga, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I look at that as all one kind of question about meditation. Yet you read, you know, about all these people who do transcendental meditation and how beneficial it's been, how it's changed their life, this and that, and you can't find a way to make it work for you. So I liken this to trading larger, right? When you think about, you know, the monks who can sit there for hours, they didn't start that way.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  They started small and then they trained their mind to quiet down. Now, I promise you, Dalai Lama has monkey mind every once in a while. It's the nature of things. We're picking up stimulus, things we can smell, hear, see, we can feel heat, we can feel humidity, can feel coldness, you can feel other people's energy, right? So my intro to quieting my mind came through Hathi Yoga. Going through, you know, what my teacher Eric Schiffman would say, yoga is a moving meditation. At the beginning, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know how to move my body through space.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  I didn't know how to do it in Jiu-Jitsu either, but you take it a day at a time and you learn. You learn a little more. So when you wanna learn to quiet your mind, I think of it as a way of managing your focus. Now, I have to go, I can't go from night to day, back to night, in one gigantic leap. I've got to prepare. I kind of dim the lights. Here I have lights on, you can't see them, but I have those, I have lights that aren't so bright but are soft for recording, even though it's daylight, I have a backlight

• 2:14Speaker 00

  so they don't cast a shadow for the other lights. So when you're thinking about trying to settle down and quiet the mind, think about a couple of things that might help. One is, if there's a lot of outside noise, it's hard to try to be quiet when something like that is annoying you. If you can dim the lights, you know, put on the kitchen light or the oven light, the stove light, quiet everything down, and sit still. You don't even have to close your eyes, just sit still for like a minute, gather your thoughts. From there, if you still have trouble, what I often do is I'll start to pull out one of

• 2:59Speaker 00

  my notebooks, and I still have these ones from Moleskine, these are Moleskine from Columbus Circle, they have a little store there. I actually have this one too, which is like a daily planner for 2026 that I bought at the same store last November. Then I have this big one, this one says Portfolio Accelerator, thanks to J.C. Peretz and Mary. So what I'll do is I'll say, okay, let me dive into my meditation, but where's a good place to start? Okay, let me just take a little bit of an inventory about what I can be grateful for today. Now, some people call this gratuity, a grateful list, what am I grateful for?

• 3:45Speaker 00

  What I try to do is just one or two sentences of like, here's what really worked today, here's what I'm excited about, here's what I want to pick up tomorrow, right? And it already starts to change my energy when I talk about things that way. Why do I bring this up? Because it's important that you do this. Every champion in any endeavor, okay, started with a vision before they had a damn bit of skill. They were lucky, many of them, to find really good coaches, right? Who showed up in the right place at the right time. To me, that's also God talking to you, that's, that's the universe conspiring to help you out.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  They also worked hard, they worked, they outworked everybody, right? Working hard in this business might not get you really good results, you have to also use your brain and work smartly. So what I tried to do when I was younger, realizing I had about 13K in today's dollars, I just always said, you know, I wrote it out in the positive, like I'm a great trading success, and at the beginning, admittedly, they were vague. And then I would add, you know, like, you know, I'm grateful now that I've achieved 10 million in net worth, that my drawdowns are below 10%, this, that, or the other thing. And a lot of this stuff came true.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Not necessarily overnight, but when you act intentionally and you marry it with your goal and then you take the steps, in my humble opinion, you need to have the vision for yourself of what it is that you want to become in and around, through and for your trading, right? You have to see yourself as a success, even if you don't know how you're gonna be a success. You have to envision yourself at the end result. I think Stephen Covey says something along the lines of, begin with the end in mind, or something like that. And if it's not him, it's somebody else, right? But you get the point. So this way, your, your, your mind is always in preparation mode. We talked about that yesterday. Preparation is how winners win.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  They see themselves being great successes, they see themselves, you know, making the winning pass, making the winning shot. You know, you can see yourself following your model, entering protective stops, keeping your losses, knowing when to size up. By the way, tomorrow, we're gonna talk about, I'm gonna take out the iPad again tomorrow, and do the next iteration of that lesson that I did last Friday. I don't know if it was a lesson, but it, you know, it talked about how, how if you think asymmetric payoffs, it can take away or lessen the need for accuracy. I'm gonna do a second part to that tomorrow.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  So, you know, please like and subscribe, you'll get all the updates, you'll see when it's posted. So just like I never gave negativity a voice, and I never came, became like a complainer, I always envisioned myself being a great success. Then as I was meditating or closing my eyes, because meditation can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, I would sit there and just be grateful for all that abundance, because I knew it was coming. I didn't know when, and I didn't know how. Most people were like, I don't know how to do that, I can't do, I can't set that as a goal. If that was the case, nothing would be achieved, right? President Kennedy said, in whatever it was, 61, 63, I think it was May of 61, that, you

• 7:23Speaker 00

  know, by the end of the decade, we're gonna put a man on the moon. They had no way of knowing how they were gonna do it. Right? They had to get through Gemini before they could get to Apollo. So there was a lot of trial and error, and it cost a lot of money. But they started with the goal, they started with the intention, and then they built towards it. So I believe you can do that. Even if you're really feeling like you're struggling, as long as you could eventually see yourself as a success, that future vision of yourself is gonna pull you towards it. It's cosmic, I can't explain how it happens. A lot of it has to do with energy. That's why you have to stay out of the negativity, you can't complain, you can't bellyache and bitch.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Everything that we do is in a paradigm of personal responsibility, and if you can admit that and adopt that as your, as a mantra or as an ethos at least, I think there's great things for you in your future. Because I didn't know my ass from a hole in the ground when I was starting these types of things, and I had no idea, because most everybody in the office that I was in, they were financial advisors, and they were, you know, saying the party line stuff that is kind of banal and stupid, they don't, they don't even know what they're saying, right? Forgive them, Lord, they don't know what they're saying. Like, you know, you can't time the market, you have to buy and hold, yet in, and when you look at their behavior, they're all walking around to each other's desks, going, hey,

• 8:51Speaker 00

  what do you like here? It's amazing. So complete, you know, contradiction.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  So I just thought that, you know, God had a different path for me. I wasn't gonna make it as a financial advisor because I didn't want to be in consultative sales, which is largely what that business is. They fancy themselves as portfolio managers. That's not what they do. They're not trained for it. They don't have CFAs. And they understand asset allocation, i.e. diversification, which admittedly is risk reduction. It is not risk management by any stretch of the imagination. And that's really what traders are. They're risk managers. So you don't have to sit in absolute stillness and meditate in what you might think is in a quintessential way how to meditate.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  But I think there is great benefit to quieting your mind and to focusing your energy on the things that are working because that is what you can build on. If you bitch and bellyache and complain, well, that leads to further negativity and it keeps you in negative energy. No one wants to be around you and certainly no one wants to hear you bellyache. There's nothing sexy about it. There's nothing I could do to try to help you. And the last thing I would ever do is enable you. I would cut you off, perhaps, perhaps in what you might consider a curt manner. I just don't want to hear it. I can't, I can't help you if you don't have a vision for success, you know? If you have the vision for success, then, then there's great opportunity, there's great potential. But if all you see is the negativity in things, I would just let you sit with that until,

• 10:27Speaker 00

  like Anais Nin said, well, how'd she say it? She said, "And then the day came when the pain it took to remain tight in the ball was greater than the pain it took to flourish." So you gotta decide like what kind of, you know, what kind of adult you want to be. And think about the people that you looked up to in sports or, or in theater, right? Or in acting or anything like that. The greats found ways to overcome their shortcomings and they found, they found ways to persevere, right? They found ways to persevere when they were broke and they had no money. And when they really didn't have anyone believing in them, they had to do it and believe in themselves.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  That belief in myself is probably the single most important thing of why you might be here watching me today or that I have any type of success. Yes, I built off of it and I branched out. I did other things with my money, you know, besides trading. But it was the belief that I could do it in the first place was really what kind of pulled me into my future self, if you will. Now, as, as you do it more and more, try to do it for 30 seconds to a minute. Thought comes up, you gotta let it go. Another thought comes in your mind, let it kinda, kinda go and come into your breath. Oftentimes meditation teachers, yoga teachers, or some of the monks that I would study

• 11:50Speaker 00

  with at like, you know, the Lake Shrine, where Paramahansa Yogananda had spent some time at self-realization fellowship in the Pacific Palisades. Every Thursday night, there'd be a long meditation, three-hour meditation. That'll change your life. You come out of three hours of meditation and you're out of this world. And they would do like 15 minutes of chanting or kirtan and then 45 minutes of stillness. Now you have to have balance in your life, okay? To try to sit still for 45 minutes, lose track of time, lose track of everything. And to do, like I said in, in the book, chapter two is surrender.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Right? Surrender. Then you come back and do some light chanting and kirtan and then there'd be another 45 minutes and then they would repeat that. So it's technically not three hours, but you're sitting for three 45-minute sessions completely still. What I used to do, when thoughts would come into my mind, I would just say, okay, inhale and exhale. In energy, out with the bad energy. In with the good, out with the bad. And that would kind of lull me like a lullaby into this kind of stillness where five minutes would go by or 40 minutes would go by and I wouldn't know the damn difference.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  And I'd kind of joke myself like, shit, was I sleeping? No, I wasn't sleeping, I was awake. But then you have mala beads, you can bring those if you need something tactile. The point being is that when you quiet your mind, it can help you release what you think is negative, right? Because it's really you that's putting the label on it. You think losing is bad. I don't know that it's bad. Obviously, you're in the game to make money, but you can't make money without taking risk. And there's a correlation, you know, between risk and reward. That's why we try to think asymmetry from the get-go so that even if the markets turn and/or you don't exactly know your strategic plan, you put yourself in a great spot, you

• 14:01Speaker 00

  know, to eventually win because the odds get skewed in your favor. But I don't know anyone who has ever said, "I feel like a failure because I learned how to meditate." It was a complete waste of time. Like, those are words that have never been spoken. Now, some of you need the action and you're in constant motion, you have a lot of kinetic energy, so it might not be a great fit for you. I'm not here to try to convert you. What I do know, though, is that for people who try it, they do it little at a time. Try 30 seconds at a clip. Not with your headphones on, listening to Kodak Black or whatever you're doing. I'm talking stillness, quiet, no music, you know, certainly nothing, you know, you could put that kind of spa music on in the background if you need that to kind of drown out the

• 14:45Speaker 00

  ambient noise that might be in your neighborhood or this and that. But the best thing to do is kind of sit. I remember reading Eric's book called, I think it was called Moving Into Stillness. He would teach a class on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 15th and Montana and I was always there. He was actually, I interviewed him for my book. And he talked about when he was learning how to meditate, he couldn't find a quiet spot. So what he actually did was he built his own meditation chamber. And what he did was he found a way to move stuff out of the closet, which is interesting, right? Because the clothes kind of act as a sound muffler.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  And so you can sit there with a small light and I used to put on the, the, the noise-canceling headphones, light a candle and sit in the darkness of that closet. Then no noise would get in and I could just drop out. And my mind's very, very active. And what you find is that if you can learn to meditate and quiet your mind, it actually has compounding effects for your brain and it gives you the upside of, of napping, but without having to take the nap. Now, there's nothing wrong with taking a good nap. I've done it a million times myself, especially since I get up at like four or five o'clock local time because I gotta be on, you know, New York and Chicago hours.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  So there'll be a time, you know, between one and maybe three or so, four o'clock Pacific time where I'll need a quick little 30-minute power nap. But the meditation can refresh you like a good cup of coffee. And so it might be something to do because you can start it by like using these types of positive affirmations, like what's two, three things that I've learned today? Could you just one? That really are gonna help impact. I'm really excited about this new thing that I learned. And stay in that positive energy and then if you can, stay in that energy, quiet your mind and give yourself a bit of a mental break. There's too much evidence out there on how powerful this, this is and I don't talk about it enough because I don't want to get all granola bar on you.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  But you should definitely look into finding a way to quiet your mind without listening to your headphones and your, your, you know, your, whatever these things are called, earbuds anymore. Like, you don't need, you don't need to have constant stimulation. Weaning yourself off of that can actually make you maybe more acutely aware of the things that you need to be aware of when you're trading. So, anyway, please like and subscribe. Get your free copy of the audiobook version of my book at tradermindset.com. And come back tomorrow, I'm gonna do another lesson on the risk management stuff. Thanks for being here. I'll see you tomorrow.