The Secret to Happiness

Every Tuesday Chuck releases a new Trader Tip video on YouTube. This week we will discuss how people pursue happiness, but they can actually have happiness right now in this moment. If we just have the awareness of how to do it, and have the strategies, we can make it happen. Watch the Trader Tip Episode for more information!

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

My parents put me in a Jose Silva mind control class when I was 13 years old, and that began my journey into self-awareness, self-improvement, self-motivation. I've worked with some amazing coaches, and I've studied under some amazing teachers over the years, and it's been interesting to look at what really drives happiness. It's interesting because people pursue happiness, but they can actually have happiness right now in this moment. If we just have the awareness of how to do it, and have the strategies, we can make it happen. So today, I'm going to share with you the secret to happiness.

The secret to happiness is to live with an attitude of gratitude,
and to focus on being present in this day.

Let's talk about the attitude of gratitude.

We want to cultivate an attitude of gratitude. One of the things I want to share with you is, in spite of doing all of this work over the years, I came to a point in 2017, 2018, where I started to become really depressed, really angry. I actually started to suffer from anxiety attacks and panic attacks. I had been working on building out my fund, and I was really close to having my fund really take off and hit it big. I had two years of really good track record, my assets under management were growing, I was nominated for several awards, and everything was kind of moving according to plan. I was very close to raising $500 million to come into my fund. So close that we actually had the documents done, we were working on terms, trying to wrap up all the details, with a couple of different large investors. All of a sudden, I just stopped making money. It wasn't that I was losing money. I just wasn't making any, and I had a high burn rate in my business because I had a team of software developers, team of engineers, and a lot of overhead to support this technological platform I was building.

I had built a very successful prop trading firm, but I made several mistakes in how I built the firm. As a result of some of the mistakes I made, I ended up in a situation where a big chunk of my net worth was tied up in the prop firm, and after I left the prop firm went bankrupt. When it happened, all my net worth was trapped in the business, and I could not get it out. So, when I launched my fund, I had to watch my fund with money I had outside of the prop firm. The prop firm was supposed to give me a bunch of resources to help me build my fund, but that didn't happen because they went bankrupt. So, I was paying, I was covering all the overhead myself with money I had outside of my trading firm, and I was basically burning through it.

I got to a point where I started having anxiety attacks, where I actually went to the hospital thinking I might be having a heart attack. I had panic attacks. If you're familiar with particularly panic attacks, you don't know where they come from. So, it's much harder to get them to go away. I share all this with you because I got to a point where I was just full of anxiety all the time, and really angry. This is in spite of all the work I did. I had lots of strategies, lots of things I was aware of, but they weren't working. One of the reasons I had loved Van Tharp so much was Van was he was almost like a spiritual advisor to me. It was interesting that so many things he taught me brought me closer to God than anything I got in church. I went and talked to Van and Van said, you know, one of your issues is that you're not grateful. You're so focused on what you don't have, and all your anxiety is coming from what you don't have. You need to shift your focus and focus on what you do have.

He had me read a book called The Magic by Rhonda Byrne. She's the author who wrote the book The Secret. In the magic, one of the things it asks you to do was to every day for 30 days, lists 10 blessings every day that you are grateful for in your life. So over 30 days, you would list 300 blessings. Now, one of the interesting things is in our life, we have so much to be grateful for every day. But our human minds always quickly discount and accept the blessings and move on to what we need to do next, rather than taking time to appreciate and be grateful for the blessings that we do have. When we take this inventory of blessings every day, we are buried in blessings. We literally have millions of blessings every single day. We just don't pay attention to them.

We are focusing creatures; we get what we focus on. So if we focus on lack, all we see is the lack if we focus on abundance, all we see is the abundance. So if our happiness is driven by our gratitude, by feeling grateful by feeling blessed, then we need to focus on our blessings. If we focus on our blessings, it increases our feelings of abundance. If we increase our feelings of abundance, it increases our levels of happiness. Our blessings can be blessings from the past. They can be blessings from the present. They can be blessings from the future. They can be big They can be small. Let's just go through some examples.

Blessings from the past, could be the first date you had with your spouse, it could be the day that you asked her to marry you. It could be your wedding, could be the birth of your child, could be the day your daughter rode her bike for the first day. It could be the charity that you served in that you saw that you made a difference. It could be having won a state championship, It could have been playing in a concert in front of 3000 people and nailing it. It could be a bachelor party you went on with your best friend, and you'll just never forget it. All of these memories are blessings that sit inside us every single day. In this day, right here today, we have so much to be grateful for.

We have electricity. We have natural gas. We have the ability to heat our homes and run our air conditioning. Imagine being in some places like Ukraine right now where people don't have that. It's been blown up in some places. We have food to eat. Do you go to your fridge and worry there's no food in your fridge? For most of you. That's not the case. You get to eat whatever you want. Some of us eat too much.

That's a blessing. Did you get to sleep in a bed this morning? Did you get to shower? Do you get to go to the bathroom on a toilet with indoor plumbing? Do you get to wear cool clothes? Do you have supplements and medications you take that help you feel better? Do you have your family? Do you live with your spouse? Do you live with your kids? Is the weather beautiful today? Do you have a car? Do you have freedoms? Can you do whatever you want today? You can go on and on and on. There are so many blessings.

Did you go to the store and somebody opens the door for you? Did somebody send you a nice text? Did you learn something today that you never learned before? These are all blessings.

Then we go to the future, we can give thanks in advance for what we do not have yet. By giving things in advance, we actually play a trick on our subconscious mind. When you give thanks for something in advance as if it's already occurred, you're telling your subconscious mind it's already happened. Your subconscious mind accepts what you tell it. When you tell your subconscious mind that something's already happened, your subconscious mind is in a state where it says well, he said it happened I need to go get it done. If he said it happened then it needs to happen.

You can feel incredible gratitude for what is to come. For the baby on the way, for your grandchild, for the vacation you're going to take this summer, for the business that you're building and what it could be, for how your body's going to look 60 days from now as you follow through on a plan to improve your fitness and reduce your body fat and increase your muscle. Whatever it is, it's a blessing

When you get going on this, you're going to get into what we call gratitude grant. Where you're just going to give gratitude for thing after thing after thing after thing, and they're just going to start pouring out of you. Gratitude is going to pour out of you, and you're going to notice that every time you do this, your mood is going to lift. Your spirit is going to lift, and you are going to feel joy. So, if you want to change your life, list 10 blessings every single day in the morning, write them down, don't just list them, write them down, of 10 things you're grateful for every day and do it in this format.

There's power in threes. In Christianity of the Trinity, you have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There is power, there is power in threes. Threes, when we say thank you, thank you, thank you, we make a more powerful imprint upon the subconscious than when we just say thank you. I'm a Christian. So, you can see I've structured this, but notice I say thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord, for the blessing of and then I list the blessing. In this case, thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord, for the blessing of being able to play basketball with my friends again, today, because I love seeing my friends and staying in shape. And then thank you, thank you, thank you for the blessing of Brynn improving every day, because I'm slowly seeing her getting her independence back. My wife had two strokes last summer. At one point, I didn't know if she was going to make it. She was paralyzed on one side of her body. I had to help her, I had to help dress her, feed her, bathe her, all of these things every single day. I got to see her come back, I was incredibly grateful that my wife got to come back from her stroke. Then it was Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord, for the blessing of Dominic's help, because he helped Sharpecoach keep humming along while I manage my wife, Brynn. So Dominic is my partner in my education company. When I had to go take care of my wife, he took care of everything. So I was incredibly grateful to him for all the help that he gave me. Okay, these are just three examples. But when we do these 10 blessings, we list them in this format:

thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord, for the blessing of _____ (blessing from the past, blessing from the present, blessing from the future, big blessing, small blessings). It could be a $5 coupon somebody opening the door for, you a $50,000 trade whatever it is, be grateful for little and big. Then I keep a blessings list in my journal. Every night when I go to bed, I make a list of the blessings I received that day, and then I can go back and I can look at the month of June and I can see it's June 14, and in my journal or we already have 71 blessings I've inventoried. When I go back and review this, I'm like, Oh my gosh, this is amazing how many great things have happened to me. So this attitude of gratitude will change your life. Going through this exercise and inventorying your blessings every day, 10 of them for 30 days, 300 blessings will change your life.

The second thing I have is being focused on this day. I want you to remember that anxiety doesn't live here in this space, anxiety lives in the future. When we struggle with anxiety, we are fighting a fight that has yet to happen. We're fighting a fight in our mind. Not that is in front of us. The reality is we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. We don't know what's going to happen next year. I'm big on visualization, manifestation, goal setting. I believe in the power of that, but the reality is I don't even know if I'm going to be here. I don't want to fight battles from the future when God has given us the blessing of today. Are we going to waste today thinking about tomorrow? Are we going to joy today? Because this day right here is amazing. If you focus in this moment, if you take on attitude of gratitude, and you focus on this moment, your anxiety will go away. If you feel anxious, do a check in what are you focusing on? You're focusing on a problem that exists in the future. You're not focusing on this moment.

I live in Chicago today the weather's amazing. Seeing my wife and my, my wife and I drove my daughter off to summer camp. I've already met with my team, which I love my team. I'm about to go downtown, I'm going to get basically a health treatment, which is kind of like a massage to improve my body. I'm flying to California today. There are just amazing things going on, and I am going to love this day. That's what I want for you. I want you to live in happiness and joy. I want you to live with an attitude of gratitude, and I want you to live today, in this day. If the 10 Things seem overwhelming, just start with three. List three things right now that you're grateful for, and write them down. Don't think them. Write them down because when we write them down, we imprint them upon our subconscious mind. What's three things you're grateful for, and what are you going to do today that is going to bring you joy? Make today an amazing day.

I will see all of you next week for our next Trader Tip Tuesday, which I'll continue to bring amazing information to help you take your trading performance to an elite level. Have a great week. God bless. I will see you next week. Bye.