Attack with the Stack - Part 3

My name is Chuck Whitman and I build great traders that lead great lives. Traders I've trained have generated in excess of $1 billion in trading revenue and are found at some of the largest hedge funds and proprietary trading firms in the United States. Attack with the stack part three, the lift. 

We've been talking about the tool called the stack. In part one, we talked about the drift, we talked about the importance of being able to identify and express our emotions. In part two, we talked about the shift and the shift was being able then to look at our emotions and find a story that we were telling ourselves and get clear about what we want, and then change the story so that it actually gives us what we want. Today we're going to talk about the lift. In the draft, we release the rage, we got clear about what we want, what happened, and we expressed our emotions. By doing so we created space to examine what triggered you. In the shift by creating space, you allowed yourself to be able to examine your story and to choose a more empowering story to give you what you really want. Today in the lift, we're going to apply what we learned and we're going to apply our new story across all four domains of our life. The fastest path to expansion in your life, the fastest path to getting what you really want, the fastest path of being able to realize your true potential is to be able to learn from your life. Most people don't learn from their own life and they just keep repeating the same things again and again and again, in the same pattern. The stack is allowing you to identify the pattern, break the pattern, and then apply a new story across all four domains. In this way, you actually start to become your own guru, because you are learning from yourself. 

In the lift, we're going to have a new series of questions. First of all, question one is what happened? You're gonna describe the facts what happened? In our examples of the stack, we've been working through this example of Steve in the stinky situation, essentially where the office smells like shit and my frustration about the fact that the office continues to smell like shit. Okay, so in question one, what happened? Well, I walked into the office and it smelled again. I've done all this work, now I've walked in and it smelled again. Question two is why is that positive? And see this is a powerful point here because essentially what we're doing is we're taking all our adversity, all our frustrations, and we're turning it into something positive, something useful. The answer here we're going to use is we're going to answer what happened was positive because of blank and you're going to describe why it was positive. What happened was positive because walking into a stinky office showed me how big of a wuss I can sometimes be was shit, I make the biggest fucking deal about the stupidest shit sometimes. The government could freeze my assets and I would be less stressed than I get about stupid shit like the smell of my office. Okay, now I'm analyzing I'm realizing that I get anal, I get too caught up in this little stuff that doesn't really matter, it's a distraction. This brings me to question three. Question three is what is the lesson learned? Well, I learned that blank and describe the lesson learned and one or two sentences. Ah, look at this, when I think about it, the lesson learned is what I bitch about is never the issue. It is the trigger of the real issue underneath. This is applicable for you, the thing that you bitch about is never the issue, it's always something else. Something deeper, something different. When we understand this, this puts us in a powerful frame. This takes us to Question four, it's actually questions four through seven, which is how does this lesson apply to the core four? 

I've done other stacks on core four, but the core four are the four domains of your life. Body, which is how does it affect your your physical body? How you feel how you look, your health. Being, which is your spiritual frame. How do you what are your beliefs about spirituality? What are your beliefs about your soul? When we're in the being domain, this is about our connection with God. This is about our ability to separate ourselves from the body and see ourselves outside of just the limitations of the physical body. Again, it's like expressing your soul. Then we move to balance. Balance is about your relationships, your relationship with your wife, or your relationship with your kids, your relationship with your friends. It's also about fun, what is the balance in your life? How much does work, how much is fun? Then we come to the last one which is business, which is of course is everything about your trading, everything about running your business. We're going to take this lesson and the lesson being what I bitch about is never the issue, it is a trigger to the real issue underneath. We're going to take this lesson into each of those four domains and see how we could apply that lesson. Okay, so first we go to the body. How does this lesson apply to my body? Well, when I complain about my food schedule, or lack thereof in my house and my family, which I do a lot. It's never about the food choice of the healthy options for the kids, for me, my wife, it's always something more. When a bitching about there's no food in the house when bitching about the quality of the food in the house. It's about something else. I get pissed about the shitty snacks in our house because in the end, the stress of raising kids is real and I'll get pissed at Cheetos while I'm still on my frickin cell phone. Here's the fun part, I become a victim to food! I become a victim to the lack of food, I become a victim to the quality of the food in my house and I'm upset that my six year old is eating Cheetos while I'm ignoring her and on my phone, thinking that the gateway to my greatest parenting breakthrough is to make sure that my daughter is eating organic chips instead of Cheetos, instead of worrying getting off my damn phone and connecting with my child. See like my priorities are out of whack, I'm getting freaked out about what she's eating while I'm ignoring her, well that's a really fucked up right So this I'm using this lesson the trigger being the Cheetos is not what the real issue is. The real issue is I'm feeling guilty that I'm not doing enough for her, I'm not being present enough with her as a dad.

Which takes us now to question five how does this lesson apply to being? I always collide with my family about God, who God is and what God means. I will argue with my dad over stupid belief systems about what happens after we die when the real issue is that I'm scared to approach them. Sometimes these kinds of conversations with my dad are painful, instead I at least some bullshit that means nothing instead of dealing with the shit beneath the trigger. I make it a big deal about certain things with God when it's not really the issue. The issue is that I'm feeling in this case disconnected to my my dad or disconnected with God and have the story about why that is. I could just be focused on connecting with God rather than being attached to the story. This is what you're gonna see your attachments, the things that you attach to, the things that your beliefs that are so strong you will not examine them you will not let them go, are actually the things that hold you back. Alright, now we go to question six how does this lesson apply to my balance my marriage? Wow, don't get me started here. My wife and I get angry at each other all the time about shit that doesn't even matter. We argue about bedtimes with the kids, we argue about money. We argue about sex, when in the end, what we're really saying is I love you and want to connect with you. We have a ton of shit going on. We're both stressed out about it and it makes it difficult to connect. We just want to connect. What do we do? Instead of connecting we argue with each other about shit that we blame for not being connected instead of just being connected. Rather than bicker back and forth, rather than bitch and argue, but the fact that we're not connecting, why don't we just connect. When we're when we're getting in arguments, or when we're separating, and we just don't talk to each other. That's not the real issue. The real issue is we have this strong desire to connect, be connected, and we're not. 

Alright, it takes us to question seven, how does this lesson apply to business? I can focus on all the wrong numbers in my business. Every time I get pissed about how much we're spending on journals, or software or the internet. It's never why I'm pissed. I'm pissed because I feel out of control and I have lost my focus. Instead of just focusing on creation and just focusing on how do I create more revenue, how do I give a better experience to my students, I lose focus, and I focus on contraction. Contraction is not expansion and it never will be. I get angry at shit that doesn't matter. Because underneath it all, I feel scared, worried or stressed. One of the things you'll find is you want to keep your expenses under control, you want to be a good steward. But if you spend all your time focusing on expenses, you're never going to make any revenue and when you really get down to it, it takes a lot of time and effort to be able to reduce expenses, a lot of pain to reduce expenses, even to 20%, 25%, 30%, where it's actually easier to go find new ways of generating revenue. I can go shop and get my internet costs reduced by 80 bucks a month, or I can go launch a new workshop that makes 50 grand Where's the place to put my focus? I can go spend a bunch of time looking at how to optimize their data feeds, this might save me 500 bucks a month, or I can go identify a new trading idea and make 20 30,000 on it just doesn't make any sense. Again, the trigger being pissed off about my expenses is not the real issue. The real issue is I'm feeling stressed. Every person when they're stressed, they go look at their costs. When things are great, they never look at their costs. What's the lesson there? All right. 

This introduces this concept called the false lift. The lift is where we take a lesson and we apply it to all four domains. Now a lot of people what they do is they don't they just apply everything into one domain, they just focus on one domain. The whole concept of the lift is the ability to lift the quality of your life, to be able to realize the potential in your entire life. A false lift is when we put all of our focus into one domain, we take the lesson and we only learn it in one domain. For us, particularly men, so many of us as men, everything is about business, business, business. That's why you'll notice in these domains that business is always last, not first. Part of this is we operate on this belief that if business is great, everything else will be great, it doesn't work that way. We see lots of men that are rich, that are alone, that are rich that have broken marriages and no relationship with their kids. They're rich, and they can't connect with God. They're rich, but they're fat. They're unhealthy. They're having heart attacks. The false lift is when we rise and only one domain. Maybe you put all your focus into business and you start working 80 hours a week and you're making all these breakthroughs that give you a lift, you're starting to make more money, you're starting to have more clients, you're starting to trade better. However, having all our focus on business will cause stress in our marriage, it'll distance us from our kids, it'll disconnect us with God because we don't have time to seek him or to seek time with him. We put on a bunch of weight, and we can find ourselves and we're just out of shape. We're going we're just we're out of breath, just going for a walk. I remember in 2016, I've always been pretty healthy, sometimes really, really healthy, I would yo yo. I'd be in phenomenal shape, I'd be 10% body fat or less. I'd be ripped, I'd have great cardio, I'd be very strong, all these things to be great and then I'd get stressed or all into work and then I crash. And I put everything into work and then pretty soon I put on 20 pounds, and I get out of shape and I didn't feel good and I remember 2016 I got to a point I was 224 pounds. That was a heaviest I'd ever been and my wife and my two daughters and I we were on a trip in new buffalo Michigan, summer vacation and we went for a walk by the dunes. We went up, we walked, we hiked up a path in the woods and I remember like, I was so exhausted, I could barely finish the hike. We're talking about walking, we're not even talking about running, I was 224 pounds, I was eating like crap, so much sugars, so much sugar and alcohol, and then adding to that lots of carbs, pizza, burgers, fries. I was fat, and I was out of shape and I was miserable. Never ever, ever want to go back to that point again. If we don't address all four domains, it's only a matter of time until everything starts to fall apart, we take our focus, and we focus on application on breakthrough and application in all four domains. It gives us a true lift. The true lift is when we raise the quality of our life and all four domains. 

This leads us into the application piece. What is the one revelation that you are leaving the stack with? My most significant revelation is blank, right? What is the one revelation you're leaving the stack with? I must eliminate all the small bullshit stories that burn up my bandwidth, that ruin my focus, not get tied up in these little things about the smell my office and go focus on generating revenue through trading and education. Question Nine, what do you committed to doing about it in the next 48 hours? And now is better answer is I'm committed to blank and you listen to action you'll take. A key, key element is whenever you have a breakthrough, you need to take action on it as fast as possible. We say 48 hours but doing something right now, before you leave the desk, before you leave the house, before you leave work. It's really important because you're communicating to your brains, your subconscious mind that what you just learned really, really matters and by taking action, it sets in place a process that's integrating it into the brain and now starts to make sure that we are encoding it, we're encoding it in our brain. We have 48 hours, sometimes you can't get to it, but you can get it done in 48 hours. But now is better, today is better, within an hour is better. This case, what am I committed to doing about it in the next 48 hours, I will fix the problem in the office with or without Steve in the next 48 hours, regardless period. That's it, I'm going to fix it. That's it. Steve might show up. He might not either way, it doesn't matter. I am fixing this situation. 

As we wrap this one really key element of the stack is ownership. You hear me talk about being a creator, not a responder, being somebody who's empowered, not a victim. Most of the things you're upset about in life, you have made yourself the victim. That's why you're upset, you're never upset when you're in a place of power, you're upset when you're in a place of weakness, you're upset when you are a victim. What's so interesting is that we can get clear that we're a victim and we can get clear about what we actually want. Because so many times the things that we're pursuing as a victim are not actually what we want. I'm pissed at my wife and I want to show her I'm pissed off, so I'm going to yell at her or I'm going to threaten to leave or things like this and these have these negative feedback loops. What I really want is to have great connection with my wife. Was yelling at my wife gonna give it to me? No. Is threatening to leave my wife gonna give it to me? No, it's going to have all these other unintended consequences. This is what happens when we're a victim. If I'm able to see I'm being a victim, I'm able to flip it then I can focus on what I want, which is to have deep connection with her,  this to lead me down to a different series of choices. Another great aspect of the stack is your greatest adversities, your greatest frustrations, your most negative emotions all become incredible assets through the stack because now you can analyze these frustrations, you can shift them to a more empowering story and then you can apply them in all areas of your life. This allows you, the stack allows you to gain clarity about what you genuinely want and then proactively integrate it in all areas of your life. This is where you become the creator, not the victim. Every situation the other things that people crumble, the other thing is that people get depressed, the other thing is that people disappear, the things that they View is the worst thing that could happen to you actually view as a situation for growth, an opportunity to take this, learn from it, apply it and take your life to the next level. 

When you operate from this frame, there's nothing, there is nothing that can hold you back. How powerful would you be in your life if you knew you could never be stopped? How powerful could you be in your life, if you knew that nothing could hold you back, nothing could stop you? That's why the stack is so powerful and the great thing is, we're not even done because next week, we're going to go to part four, we're going to talk about the light. For now, remember, there's this link here, you can see it in the comments below as well that you can go do your own stack and we're adding these questions to the stack each week as we go so you can answer all of them. Remember, if you complete your stack, we will give you free access to the how little money trades webinar, which is a phenomenal webinar. It talks about why stocks exploded during the meme stock craze and 2021 and why they won't go up this time. You're gonna learn about gamma, you're gonna learn about how big money trades affects the stock price action, you're gonna learn the six rules for Korea market, you'll never see that anywhere. You'll learn the seven edges of big money traders, and you'll learn the aspects of trading to avoid failure. Click on that link below (in the youtube video description), fill out your stack and get this webinar and what day is it? That's right. It's Tuesday and what's Tuesday, it's Trader Tip Tuesday where I come to you with different tactics, different frames, different applications, different mindsets for you to use to take your trading to an elite level. I'll see you next Tuesday.