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The Place for Connection
Welcome to The Place for Connection, where I believe that connection is the CURE – the podcast where soul meets science, and healing takes centre stage.
Hosted by psychologist, breathwork practitioner, and all-around vibe curator, Melissa Beaton, this podcast dives deep into the art and science of connection – to yourself, your community, and the big beautiful world around you.
Each episode is a juicy mix of expert wisdom and heartfelt stories from healers of ALL kinds: psychologists, bodyworkers, doulas, yogis, spiritual guides, and even the ones who heal with music, art, and a bit of magic. We’re here to inspire, uplift, and get real about what it takes to live a connected, purpose-driven life.
This isn’t your average self-help podcast. It’s a space where radical authenticity meets practical tools, where curiosity replaces judgment, and where the real work feels less like a chore and more like a calling.
Why listen?
Because you’ll leave every episode feeling seen, heard, and ready to take the next step in your own healing journey. Whether you’re a professional, a healer, someone seeking growth, or just here for the good vibes – this is the place for you.
Want to work with Melissa?
Reach out via the website contact page at www.zensohouse.com or instagram @zensohouse
The Place for Connection
Master Your Mind & Money: Finding Financial Freedom in Trading with SJ Chiovitti
Can Trading Be a Path to Holistic Growth and Wealth Creation?
What if trading wasn’t just about financial gains but a journey of deep personal transformation?
In this episode, we sit down with SJ Chiovitti, co-founder of Tradehouse Australia, whose unconventional path into trading was shaped by a complex personal history and a passion for supporting troubled youth. From learning alongside Jordan Belfort to building a thriving trading community, SJ shares how she transformed her experiences into a trading philosophy that blends financial success with emotional intelligence and ethical wealth-building.
We dive into:
✨ How “pips and pizza” nights evolved into a powerhouse education platform
✨ The hidden psychological challenges of prop firms and risk management
✨ Why emotional intelligence is a trader’s secret weapon
✨ The role of functional breathwork in preventing self-sabotage and mastering resilience
Trading is more than numbers—it’s about mindset, discipline, and self-awareness. Whether you’re an aspiring trader or simply interested in holistic success, this episode will leave you with practical tools to integrate financial growth with personal development.
🎧 Tune in and transform the way you think about trading and wealth!
Want to learn from SJ? Connect with her on Instagram: @sj.chiovitti
Interested in breathwork, therapy, or my group programs? Find me at www.zensohouse.com or on Instagram: @zensohouse
Welcome to the Place for Connection podcast. My name's Mel Beaton. I'm a psychologist, breathwork practitioner and university teacher. Today I'm joined by SJ Kiviti, who is a financial trader and co-founder of Tradehouse Australia Proprietary Limited. Sj is a financial coach and a somatic practitioner and a professional with a background and qualifications in trauma, psychology and behavioural, finance and business. So I've been following SJ on Insta for quite some time and been super excited about your work. So I'm just wondering if you could share a little bit about your background and what moved you towards specifically teaching people trading.
Speaker 2:Hello, good question. All right, so my I found trading, so my journey with this work started 2011, 2012, so quite a long time ago. I originally got into personal development because I just I wanted to understand my mother, um, so that's kind of where I started. Um, I had this vision that I wanted to somehow get into the system that helped kids, but in the way of um, you know, instead of sending children to juvie, I my, my full vision was actually to somehow create a facility where, um I would use. I wasn't even qualified then, I wasn't even at uni, but this is like where I wanted my vision to go.
Speaker 2:Um was like pull upon professionals that were in the healing world um, scientists, whatever I needed to basically create this facility that would help children, um and juvies, I suppose, break these cycles that keep them, you know, ending up in prisons and things like that, because our future relies on them. And so for me, it's like and coming from my own background, with my own, you know, childhood traumas and stuff like that, it could have been very easy for me to fall off and go down that route. I had a very like a horrific incident happened to me at 12 and I actually got sent to boarding school. Because of that, um, and I could, if my parents didn't do that, like my life would be completely different today. But anyway, that's kind of like. My journey with this started at 13, I, I suppose.
Speaker 2:And then I got into the work in when I was like 21 and I'm now 35 this year but I found trading in 2015 and how I found that was I just got really clear on my value system. I wasn't necessarily looking for a way to make money, but what I was looking for was I wanted to make money in a way that felt clean and really aligned right. I thought about how I wanted to spend my life like. I grew up with a family of um. You know, my parents were business owners. They never worked a job, um, they always had a business. I mean, before I was born, they had jobs and stuff, but they raised us. You know we weren't put in daycares and things like that because they had to. It was they chose to raise us and I'm forever grateful for that.
Speaker 2:But I started researching industries that could provide me a life where I could really live in alignment and then I went through all the industries and I kind of just ruled out anything that didn't sit right and, for example, I looked into dropshipping back in 2015. Dropshipping was kind of just like coming up. I heard about the girl who made the beauty blender, how she was at university and or college in America and started this drop shipping company and made all this money, and so drop shipping was an interest of mine and plenty of people were making money from it. But when I looked deeper, I couldn't ignore the reality of how many of those products were actually manufactured, meaning, like the low-cost labor, um, very questionable working conditions, and just the overall system of it is one that treats human beings as disposable to like to push profit margins, and that just gave me the instant ick like I stopped, uh, I stopped looking into that because I was like no, I didn't want to go down that route, because I wasn't willing to build wealth at the expense of people who had no choice but to then take those jobs. And so eventually, um, I started working for a guy called Jordan Belfort, who is the Wolf of Wall Street, and that was my entry into trading. I suppose I wasn't working with him for trading, but given that's what he's famous for, it really sparked my interest. Because, you know, every Monday we'd have these meetings and whatever else, but that's a whole other podcast. But when we are, this is what kind of made. What made trading make sense for me. It was me against me. It was about my skill, it was about my ability to manage risk. No one else was exploited for me to make money.
Speaker 2:Okay, so in 2015, I started learning online. I just literally YouTube university. I started learning for free. I was reading books and I really struggled because I then realized how much the psych work came to play and I just didn't have that help and support, I suppose. So then I found a mentor and then that's when everything kind of set out in motion.
Speaker 2:So, to talk about how I looped it all, I got deep into psych because of my turbulent relationship with my mother. I wanted to understand her. I wanted to understand human behavior, why people do what they do, and that curiosity then played a massive role in how I approached trading. And you know, you can just go to Google and look at the stats around trading, and one of the biggest statistics that people love to throw around when they are uneducated is 95% of traders fail. And I got that stat thrown at me. My dad threw it at me. He's like, oh, the failure rate is so low.
Speaker 2:And for me, like I never take anything as face value, I'll always be like well, why is that? Why is that? And I've always been a questioner, and so, instead of taking that statistic at face value. My immediate question was why and I think the issue with our society is a lot of people just accept information as fact and I've never been someone who just like follows the herd because someone said so. So I researched and it's not hard to find the answer, like Google will tell you.
Speaker 2:It's everything to do with the trader, not trading. Okay, it's the emotional intelligence, it's the risk management, it's psychological resilience, it's mindset work, it's thermostat work, it's nervous system work, and all of those things are actually within a trader's control. So that's what I did. So I think I saw very um, you know, I've seen firsthand that technical skill alone won't make a good trader, won't make anyone a good trader. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if your emotions and your nervous system and your mindset isn't in check, you're going to sabotage yourself, and whether that that's through over-trading or hesitating or revenge trading or FOMO or whatever, it is like trading's a mirror. It's going to expose all your stuff to you, and so, because of that, trading's been the biggest. Of all my degrees, of all my courses, of all the mentorship I've had, trading has been the biggest personal development journey that I've ever been on.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's so much to unpack. Even in what you've just said. I noticed that one of the things I've been most drawn to you by is your ethical practice and how you tend to speak out very openly and, I think, bravely, against other practitioners who don't operate with the same kind of ethical practices. In terms of, I guess, setting up Tradehouse Australia, which is your education business, I guess, for trading and for teaching people how to trade, how do your programs differ from traditional education in trading?
Speaker 2:So Tradehouse started out as a free community. So back in 2015, when I started I then I went on this rampage of like, if you want to learn to trade, come do it with me. Like just come, come learn, come learn, come learn. And I was actually a part of a bigger educational company back then and they're all just paying that company to learn. But I built this community. So, yeah, back then we were part of this big education community. But within that space, we become known for a particular strategy and that's smart money. Now, I didn't create that, it was. And that's smart money. Now, I didn't create that.
Speaker 2:Um, it was just the one strategy. After trying multiple and failing at that. Um, it was just the one strategy that made the most sense to me after years of testing and trialing different approaches. Um, so it was just me at first. So 2016, we I me, the collective, I suppose, of this community really ramped up and we had like really big trading events. We did like in-home trading nights. We'd call like pips and pizza and stuff like that and it was really cool, so it was fun, super fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was so nerdy so nerdy.
Speaker 2:Nerds unite in pizza party, yeah yeah, yeah, pizza and and pips like that's what we did and then it's so funny, um, all those people then dropped off right, so all the ogs are not around anymore, which I found so interesting, still do. But jenna, who's my co-founder, she found me just, I think, facebook or youtube or something in 2018 and she messaged me just word for word I want what you have, please teach me, um. And her story alone is so incredible. She's a single mother, two kids, ex severely abusive relationship. Um, corporate working, uh, full-time, and yet her success she achieved something very quickly that I haven't seen many people do since then and I believe for her like I won't speak for her, but I believe that came down to one thing is she just didn't give herself a way out. You know she would message me crying, be like when is this going to click? When am I going to get it? And then she just got it.
Speaker 2:It was so nuts, but I think for us, you know, was no backup plan there was. Our mindset was never I'll just try this and see it was this or this. Like, if all these other people can make this work, why them and not me? You know, like that's been my mindset. It's never been like oh what if I never don't? It's like why? Why can they do it and why can't I? So let me work on that, and I think that level of commitment changes everything. You know when, when you take quitting off the table and when quitting isn't an option, then you figure it out.
Speaker 2:And so over the years, our community grew and so did the company we were a part of, but I actually started to feel a really big misalignment in values with myself and the company that we were learning from and the people that were evolved in that. And what started out as an as a trading education platform was then expanding into all these things like travel and just all these things. That just wasn't trading okay, and it felt like a ship that had drifted a couple of degrees off course. And now we're headed in a completely different direction and I stayed for years and years because I was so loyal to my mentors and I guess at some point I had to ask myself was I being loyal to them at the expense of myself? And the answer was yes, because they were fine. You know, they didn't need me as much as I ran all these calls and whatever else. They didn't need me.
Speaker 2:For me, it was a sense of belonging and that's something I'd never felt or experienced in my life before and that being a core human need, I really just stayed in a place where that I had outgrown for the principle of just I belong there. And you know, I see it, I see this in a lot of people, even just with their own jobs. You know, they stay loyal to employees, they give years of their life and they never take a chance on their own dreams and that's just, it's just never something I wanted to look back on and regret. And so Jenna had been pushing me for years and years, for probably I would say two years, and she's like come on, let's go out on their own. Like she was not loyal to them, like learned lots from them.
Speaker 2:But Jenna was loyal to herself and her family. You know she had two kids in that defeat. So she with me, I'm just like no, it's just me. Like I'm fine staying um. And she was like pestering me. She's like let's go out on our own. And in my heart I knew she was right, but my heart also kept me in that space longer than I should have stayed and eventually I just had to balls up and have that conversation with my mentors and they. They were so chill about it like I even have some of them educating for me in my own company now um which is so cool.
Speaker 2:So their response was just you've got to do what's best for you, and so that we did. So. We we spent months and months and months building out our education, refining everything that we knew, taking the gaps from the other company, and then, um october 2023, we launched and on day one, we had 100 people sign up and we still, to this day, our like customer retention is exceptionally high. Um, it's an application only process, like we don't just allow anyone to come in because it's trading and finance is just such an interesting space. Um, but, yeah, we, to this day, still have over 100 members in the trenches with us learning this skill set, and that's when we really saw the depth of the community that we had built. We had, you know, we had a lot. We had all these people that were with us.
Speaker 2:Like we'll general and I were mentoring for free for nine years, for free yeah and like everyone was paying the company for their education, but we were still doing the calls. We weren't getting paid for them, and so it's like far out, like there was a big part of me that were like, oh, what are these people that are only with me because I've been doing this for free for so long? Like what if I went out on my own and then they didn't come because now they had to pay me and so there was like this little bit of doubt, but the community that really proved to me how strong and the depth of what we had built was.
Speaker 2:You know, the people that had been learning and growing with us for years wanted to be a part of something that we were creating. Next, and in our own company as well, we only like, promote or bring on educators from within our own community, people who have been with us for years, who have, you know, truly understand trading, and I think that's what keeps our quality and culture strong. Um, but yeah, like I said, trading has this and finances have this weird reputation because of the finance bro culture. You know, the wall street bros and our community isn't built like that. We have so many parents. We have people who want to become parents and they're just using this as a skill to um support themselves when they're a stay-at-home mom, for example, so they can still contribute to the household.
Speaker 2:Um, we have people learning this skill to create financial stability so they're not just dependent on government support or daycares or other people raising their kids, because that's a really big deal for some people, but most. I think what makes it different is most education focuses and stops on the how to trade, whereas we go deeper. We're not just teaching people how to make money, we teach people how to handle it, because trading success is not about the skill. It's about what happens to you in your body once money starts coming in. And this is the you've heard of the financial thermostat. Yes, yeah.
Speaker 1:I experienced it, SJ. I experienced the lived experience of the financial thermostat.
Speaker 2:So I'm all ears, tell me, me tell me your wisdoms.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, this is.
Speaker 2:I just see this all the time with traders, right. So there's this thing in trading called um you know, funding challenges, which is basically, I don't want anyone using their own personal money to fund their trading account. So instead, um, you can go for these prop firm challenges where you stick by the rules, do all these things, and then they give you access to funds. Okay, very, and then it's a. It's a profit split. So initially it's an 80, 20 profit split, so you take 80%, they take 20, and then you can scale it and that is the best way to make money, because now you're not risking your own money.
Speaker 2:But what happens is you have all these people wanting to come into trading who way to make money? Because now you're not risking your own money. But what happens is you have all these people wanting to come into trading who want to make six figures, multiple six figures, but they've probably never even seen five or six figures in their bank account, or, if they have, because of tax time, they were so quick to spend it, um, and so they're getting access to all this funding like they pass the challenges on the technical level, you know how to read a chart, but then their nervous system would take over. And so if your nervous system isn't wired to hire to hold all these higher amounts of money, you're going to sabotage it. You're going to make impulsive trades over risk, you know, cash out too early because your body isn't comfortable with the numbers you're seeing, and this is why so many traders blow their account.
Speaker 2:So it's not just a strategy issue, it's a nervous system issue, and to me that is what makes Tradehouse so different from any other company. Like I go into other trading companies and educate on this because I don't have someone who's trained or knowledgeable on it. We're not just teaching people how to trade. We help them develop the emotional intelligence, the risk management, the, the financial mindset to keep what they earn and then scale beyond that, because it's it's one thing to make money, it's another to know what to do with it, and we just cover all bases.
Speaker 1:So I like to think of trade house as that one-stop shop yeah, in my own um mastermind that I was in recently, we had a participant and she was starting to make big money from her employment and it was really interesting to see her chat about that very experience where you know, money comes in and then it's as though I need to spend it all. And I've certainly had that experience myself and I'm just refining that set of skills. I wondered you referred to your business partner and you referred to this moment when the penny just dropped, and I see this in my own training as a therapist. There's been a recent time when, as I've become more regulated, more self-aware, holding more capacity inside of me for myself and for others, my clinical skills have like improved quite rapidly. Clinical skills have like improved quite rapidly. Do you see a similar relationship between trading and and self-regulation skills, or self-awareness skills, self-love skills, in terms of people's capacity to hold and and and build um cash reserves?
Speaker 2:yeah, absolutely so. Trading is one of the most emotionally charged skills a person can learn. Right. Like I said before, it's the biggest personal development journey you'll ever go on. It forces you to confront your deepest patterns around money control and self-worth in real time. Right, the market's not just testing your strategy skills, it's testing you, it's mirroring you and so, from a psychological perspective, emotions like fear, greed, frustrations they are natural survival responses. Right, fear is the brain's way of protecting you from loss. Greed comes from scarcity and desire for more Frustration is a sign that expectations aren't being met.
Speaker 2:Right and these aren't just bad habits that traders need to break. They are deeply wired emotional responses that stem from both past and you know, personal experiences, but then also the collective conditioning around money too. So you know, I think a lot of trading programs they fail because they assume even traders too, I suppose, would fail because they assume more knowledge will fix these issues right. But you can't outthink a dysregulated nervous system, and this is like overthinking is under feeling, overworking is under feeling. I truly believe this and this is why we take a bit of a different approach. Like we integrate the psychological principles, the nervous system, regulation, breath work, um, so more of the functional breath work than, say, like, transformational breath work, um, just so that they're grounded, because the other thing as well. Like we do, we do both in terms of the functional, because, yes, we want to be relaxed on the charts, but then we also need a state of arousal too, so we're alert, and so we have various types of different breathwork practices that traders can do, depending on the state that they're in. Um, yeah, but we we bring all this in, so then traders can actually retrain their emotional responses and in trading, your nervous system dictates how you respond to uncertainty, and trading is.
Speaker 2:There is nothing certain about it. Nothing certain about it, and every trade is an unknown outcome. Right, and if your body perceives risk as a threat, which most do then it's going to trigger some type of nervous system response. So if we have fight that's going to then you know you're going to be forcing trades, you're going to be revenge trading, you're going to be trying to make back your losses immediately. If we have flight, then you're going to be hesitating, you're going to be avoiding pulling the trigger on the good setup. You're going to be not taking trades because maybe you've just taken three losses and now your fear of losing more and freeze this is a big one is it's the over analyzing? It's it's um, something I always say is trade what you see, not what you think you see or want to see yeah um, we're just looking at chart like we're looking at little candlesticks on the charts.
Speaker 2:You know, trading is the skill of trading is not difficult. The chart goes up down sideways. You got to figure out where to get in. It's us us that makes it so complicated and this is why you can know better, but you still make the same mistake. So this is not a knowledge issue, right, it's a nervous system issue.
Speaker 2:And one thing we're really big on is teaching traders how to recognize when they are in a dysregulated state, and we use breathwork and other types of somatic tools and, um, I guess kind of structured debriefs to to shift back into a neutral state before making trading decisions, because that's then going to prevent emotional decision making and it builds resilience over time. So, yeah, we definitely use like breathwork as a tool. We do other somatic work, um, but it's been a game changer for traders because it's giving them direct access to their nervous system. And I mean, you're trained in this as well, so you know exactly what I'm talking about. But yeah, I guess beyond in the moment, regulation, um, this is why I've brought out my program resolution regulation, because regulation people are just taking that too far and there's so much noise with nervous system regulation on the online space at the moment and there's actually a lot of harm being done because, you know, nervous system regulation that's the buzzword, trauma new buzzword, and it's there's a lot of untrained people contributing to this noise and they're actually doing a lot of harm, whereas, with my background, regulation is about in the moment.
Speaker 2:What we do with Tradehouse, even just in my coaching in general, is we're working on the deeper shit, the deeper beliefs, the deeper patterns that then create all these emotional swings in the first place. And a lot of traders come in with deeply ingrained scarcity mindsets. They do have a lot of poverty mindset. I don't do money mindset. I don't believe in money mindset because because it's a body thing, right. We we want to address the systemic issues, um, the financial trauma, the subconscious fears around money, and none of that is mindset, um. So, yeah, I think working on money psychology alongside trading skills, that's where we create some type of stability, not just these short-term wins.
Speaker 1:So yeah, yeah, I appreciate your focus on the unconscious. So, for listeners who are like, what's? What's the unconscious? It's essentially, you know, the 99.9 percent of stuff that occurs under the surface that we're not conscious of. And and I think you're right, there are a lot of people you know working in coaching online that perhaps don't have a really good sense of what feelings are, how they operate in the body, what their function is, and and there's a lot of misinformation around that.
Speaker 1:And I think you know, alongside many other things, as to why I really resonate with your content, it's because often you'll call out that kind of thing and I noticed this impulse inside of me to want to do that. And yet, at the same time, I get I get a lot of anxiety about being that, that person you know, being that person who's brave to, and you know, and that's my own conflict avoidance, which is why, when you were talking about the trading freeze response, that's often me I'm like OK, how much more can I learn, how much more can I understand? I certainly have a curious mindset, I guess, for people like me who perhaps have the aptitude to learn. So can you know, enrolling courses, taking a lot of of data, make sense of it and yet still have this internal experience around money and finances. Where would you recommend starting in terms of learning trading?
Speaker 1:um, as in like coming to me, or yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah um coming to you and or like any kind of internal work that people can be doing you know, in that process to perhaps prepare them even for learning something like trading um learning, financial literacy, building, building capacities yeah, where would you invite people to focus initially?
Speaker 2:yeah, gotcha um, well, I'll give you a tool, a book to read first, um, and then I'll talk about, like, some body stuff that I think will help. There's a really good book called trading in the zone and it's by mark douglas. It's a very famous book and it really hones in on the like. You will learn something from it even if you're not trading right. There's gonna be language that you don't quite understand, but the reason I'm saying and recommending this is a good starting point. Like one, if you want to come and learn, talk to me and we'll put you through the education and things like that.
Speaker 2:But there's a there's a common belief that trading is purely numbers. So the biggest, I think, limiting belief people come is oh, I'm not good with numbers, I'm. You know, I'm not smart, I'm not this, I'm too dumb for that, and that's actually nothing to do with it. Like, trading is a learnable skill. Like I literally sing the alphabet, I use a calculator for everything and I'm not, and I manage multiple seven figures, right. So that's proof that if I can do it, you can do it. That's literally my motto if I can do it, you can do it.
Speaker 2:Because I was not the academic kid, right, I was that arty, farty, I'm a high school dropout, okay, so, and I believe anyone can learn this if they truly want to. But when you look at it to like, when you look at trading, and it like, yes, it's data, yes, it's strategy, yes, it's probability and, um, yes, it's built on logic, right, it's about executing a plan with precision, it's managing risk, it's following a system and with that, what I like, say men, for example, right, and many men will, disc will, will dismiss things like intuition, self-connection, body awareness, because they just assume those things don't belong in a field that's based on patterns and probability and numbers and data.
Speaker 2:Okay Women make better traders than men purely because of how connected they are to self. Right, because the reality is in trading, you're the one executing it, you're the one executing the plan. And if you're disconnected from yourself, your emotions, your body, then you're making decisions with blind spots, right? And so the first thing I would do is know yourself, know your patterns, right? A lot of traders don't fail because they lack strategy. They fail because they can't execute something consistently, because their emotional patterns take over. And if you aren't deeply aware of your own tendencies, your fears, your impulses, your avoidance patterns, then you're not trading the market, you're trading your emotions.
Speaker 2:So, self-connection what that does is it allows you to notice when you're making a decision from a place of logic versus a place of reaction. Right, and you've got to think about the society we live in. We live in such a mindset dominated world, whereas the thing that helped my trading and that was me, like I was all mindset, mindset, mindset. And this is why, like most trading companies, I'll be like uh, you've got to work on your mindset and it's like what?
Speaker 1:does that even mean like what does that even does my head in, honestly, yeah, yeah mindset.
Speaker 2:So I'm. What part? Where do I where?
Speaker 1:do I start? Yeah, yeah, like what even?
Speaker 2:it's just, I don't like that. It's too vague. This is why we go so much deeper, whereas my approach to all my work is a bottom-up approach, right. Whereas we live in a society where it's like top down, whereas I'm bottom up. So we actually start with the body. We have a self like.
Speaker 2:I believe in, um, you know, self-connection. Like I just said before, it allows you to know or just notice when you're making a decision or a choice, from a place of logic versus reaction. So in trading it's like do I feel the need to jump into a trade because I'm now frustrated after a loss, or I've got to make rent next week, so now I've got to hurry up and trade, right. Whereas the other thing with trading, too, is we do not trade to pay our bills, right, trading is a wealth creation tool. Okay, it's not like if, if, if, someone is in trading just for the money I know I'm going off topic here, but it's important. If someone is in trading just to make money, then what's the difference between you learning to trade and you working a job at Maccas? Right, this is, this is the hardest way of making easy money, and when you get it, the money is incredible, right, but you have to have full body awareness. You have to understand how you, how you, participate in high pressure environments. Participate in high pressure environments, right, even if you don't feel anxious in high pressure environments.
Speaker 2:Maybe your nervous system is responding to risk with other little you know, subtle physiological changes like maybe, uh, your your palms get sweaty, maybe your heart rate shifts, maybe your breath becomes shallow, maybe you're like, really tense. A lot of traders ignore these signs and then they spiral into that fight or flight decision making, whereas I want to build connected traders, right, and a connected trader understands how their body reacts to risk and then they can regulate themselves before they self-sabotage. But if you're completely disconnected from your body, you're not even going to realize that you're making decisions from a dysregulated state. Right, and that's where the breath work, that's where the nervous system training becomes very useful. So I think yeah, I think start with the self-awareness piece.
Speaker 2:It's get to know yourself, figure out you know work on your money stuff. I always suggest that if someone's never done money work before, then we actually start there, because otherwise trading will just expose that. So I like to. I've got a program called Rebel With Wealth that traders. It's part of our system and a lot of traders will actually go through Rebel With Wealth first to then and then transition into the trading education because we've got to get our money shit sorted.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, okay. So that'd would be kind of the first, I guess, point of working with you, perhaps to look at doing Rebel with Wealth prior to doing the Tradehouse education. I really appreciate your focus on this kind of like bottom-up experience of our internal system and self-awareness, because I think even psychologists will often promote this notion that the mind or brain is like is the king right, that that's full of all of the data and and all the juice, when in reality and I think this is through my own journey of healing and in supporting other people to heal it's actually quite the opposite you know, like, until you process the physiological component, then any of the mindset stuff is not really going to work.
Speaker 1:It's just going to create more confusion for people. Like, if you were to kind of talk to some of the perhaps misunderstandings around how the body operates and how that influences trading, like what are some of perhaps the most common um, I guess, yeah, myths, that that you see around around, that you know whether that's online or amongst your own core cohort of students?
Speaker 2:um, great question. I think a lot of people think money is going to solve all their problems. I think this isn't just trading related, right, this is business related too, and this is one of the biggest lies that people really believe about wealth that more money doesn't fix your problems. It actually amplifies them, you know, and if you struggle with money management now, then you're going to struggle with it at a higher level when there's more of it. And I've worked with traders who have scaled their accounts really quickly, but because their financial thermostat was so low, they then found ways to blow the challenge. Now they have to go through that whole entire process again because they were reckless or they thought, oh, I've got it, now I'm going to go try something new. You know, it's just, it's so unsafe in their body to hold this money.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, when you think about wealth like, wealth isn't about making money, it's learning how to grow, how to, how to um hold it, and that requires a high level of emotional intelligence. It requires a a solid relationship with money and the ability to operate beyond survival mode. Right, but I think with society as it is, everyone's just so in survival mode. They're just trying to get by and so they'll look for the quickest things to to make that money. Um, I think another one would be that you need a lot to start. I think that stops people because they think, oh, you know, you need so much money to start. You know they think they need like 20, 30, 50k to get started, when in reality, I started myself with 250 dollars and I scaled that to 187k in just over two years.
Speaker 2:Um, that was back in 2016 and I built, I bought my land with my first ever trading account you know, and so yeah yeah, yeah and so yeah, in trading it's not, it's never about how much you have, it's never about how much you start with, it's how you manage it.
Speaker 2:Like if you can't manage 100 with emotions, in tech, in check, risk management, then you've no right managing 10 000. You know, and I've seen a lot of traders turn small accounts into something substantial with patience, with consistency, and I've seen people start with you know, miners I have a lot of miners and just because they've got cash, they're like I'm gonna open with 10k and they blow it because they've got no discipline, no emotional intelligence. They've got. They may not have an issue with scarcity, but they they don't respect money. You know, and that's a really big thing I see with men who are in like mining jobs is they don't have their relationship with money isn't in the traditional sense of, you know, scarcity or things like that. It's just they don't respect it. They just and you've got to respect money, right, I think of money as you're in a relationship with it, and if you were to treat money like you do, your relationships like hot, cold, avoidant, what do you think money is going to do?
Speaker 2:It's going to be mirrored that exact same way, and so, yeah, I would say that I would say bring taking back to, like the smartness people think they have to have. You know, if you've ever learned a skill before you can learn trading, like, think of, think about something you're good at now that you once had no idea how to do. You know, like, using a computer, driving a car, cooking, right, all the basic things, um, learning a language at one point, everything is hard until it isn't you know at one point, all of these things seem like holy shit, overwhelmed. They seem overwhelming, um, but the only reason things get easier is because of repetition. Right, you do it enough times. You learn what works, you learn what doesn't.
Speaker 2:Trading is no different, and so the only reason it seems hard is because you're new, and new doesn't mean you won't ever figure it out. Um, you know that the brain learns by doing, not by being smart. Right, your brain isn't wired to instantly understand something new. And, yes, there are personalities that are probably built better for trading. Um, nerd alerts. Looking at you, um, a lot of people, a lot of people are like borderline on the spectrum and they just get it, and I'm just like, wow, probably.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, depending on people like me who sing the alphabet um but, I think, you might be minimizing your capacity, the sj, but um, yeah, we're not psychoanalyzing you um, but yeah I I see you as incredibly gifted and talented, and also that perhaps you've worked really hard at that and and perhaps that's also important, learning for people that you know.
Speaker 1:Skill development, um and I relate this to my own therapy skills isn't always intuitive for people. Sometimes it does take a lot of work, and yet you can also do that. You can work at it and become exceptional at something right and just to that as well, sorry, it's.
Speaker 2:Think about the system we live in. We're not actually taught how to learn from school. You're taught to memorize, study for this test on friday, and so, as an adult learning, you do have to have a different approach because you're not taught how to learn, and so what I feel like is is where our ego gets us. When people say something oh, it's too hard, what they're actually meaning is I don't like feeling like a beginner. You know that's it's it's. You know the frustration of learning isn't a sign that you're not smart enough. It's a sign that your brain is forming new neural connections, and this is literally how learning works, and the key is pushing through that discomfort long enough for those connections to actually solidify and this is probably where the internal work comes in, because I can imagine, amongst traders, you know you will experience um failure and then what?
Speaker 1:what your physiology does with that experience of and I guess I use failure loosely, you know it might be financial losses, um, it could be, you know, um being too slow on a decision and and also accepting that that's part of of trading, I imagine, as it is life right, that you might do everything perfectly and things may not and I say also loosely, I don't know what that even means, but that things may just play out in certain ways, and so, accepting that at times perhaps, you know, even your best efforts may go, you know, unrewarded. In terms of supporting traders to do that mindset work, I've seen that you offer like a whole variety of different programs, from retreats to breathwork experiences. Would you mind giving the listeners a bit of, I guess, a sense of where they can find you, what they could start to look into if they wanted to do this work with you? Sj, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:So my Instagram would be the best protocol. Initially, in the, I have a free trading masterclass you can actually go. It's 90 minutes. It's long on purpose, um, if you can't spend 90 minutes listening to a basic trading masterclass, then you're not going to stick it out, period. So it's long by design because it gives you literally everything you would need to know to make a educated decision on whether or not you want to do this. So my Instagram we do have Tradehouse Australia as an Instagram as well and, honestly, like that has always been second to say my Instagram. Because like that has always been second to say my Instagram because people want to know who they're learning from, and so I really like my I've built my entire business since before social media, but people want to know who they're buying from, so the emphasis is really on like my own social media, which is just sjkyoviti. So go there, have a stalk. Um, get that book I mentioned, watch the masterclass.
Speaker 2:I have a youtube that has a gazillion free mindset uh videos that I've done since 2016. There's a plethora of information that you can just binge and listen to when you're driving, and that's actually how many people get started with me is. They've started there they understand what's kind of required and they're like oh, I've been watching your YouTube, like how do I get started? And then if someone did want to eventually get started, then it's a simple DM, it's an email, it's an application form in my bio because, like I said, we don't just have a sign up here button, because I really do want the person coming in knowing that I'm aligned with them, knowing I can actually serve them, help them what their intentions are, and I really do keep our spaces quite sacred for a better word, by design. So, yeah, that's kind of it's not the most complicated process. It's just, if you like me, come and learn with me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, awesome and in terms of the commitment like, if people are wanting to do this kind of work, what kinds of time commitments should they be making to um, to learning, trading?
Speaker 2:so how our education is structured. It's like jibbo lingo. So you've got phases. We've got five phases, one being the beginner, five being advanced. So we really take you from knowing absolutely nothing to you know zero, to hero type style. We have a playbook that we recommend you follow in. We have a learning lesson planner as well, because, like I said before, we're not taught how to learn, but I have incorporated a lesson planner that really does help someone understand, integrate and then implement what it is they're watching.
Speaker 2:So, in terms of commitment, I would say if you could do like I'm not the biggest believer in a daily checklist with education, like I come from someone. I come from someone, I am someone who used to suffer severe migraines, and so to have like a daily to-do list would actually induce a bit of shame in me because I'm like wiped out for 24, 48 hours and then I feel so behind, whereas what I find works best especially with parents, families, university kids, people working is if you can get through four to five videos a week, you're going to be on track. And some of these videos it's not just about consuming it, you watch it, you go and implement it right away, like how can I make this fit immediately and then you just keep refining that rather than just consume, consume, consume and there's no implementation. Like your journey is actually going to be longer, whereas if you were to follow my session planner, you're going to be getting results probably a lot quicker than someone who's just watching everything and not doing it right. This is the skill that learns from doing so. I would say, um, if you could do four to five videos a week, you would be through the education demo trading by about three months from demo trading to live trading. Like we do not touch live money until you've consistently profited in your demo account and you understand what it is that you're doing. But we also don't want to stay on demo for too long, because I want you feeling those visceral responses when real money's on the line, right. So then we transition to live, and that could be however long, like that's on you, but we work together to kind of guide, right, you're stalling a little bit.
Speaker 2:Where are you at? Some people like, for example example, I had one guy. He took him eight months to be 100k funded, but he was obsessed, you know, like every living moment he poured into it. I've had some people that have been with me for three years and they're just cruising, you know, like they. They're making some money, but they really love their job. I've got a woman who is one of my beginners educators. She works full time, she's got two young kids, she's married, she knows her shit and she does beginners calls for me and she's doing her own thing as well. So everyone's journey looks very different. So I can never answer how long will it take me to make money, because it really depends on you.
Speaker 2:Jenna is a perfect example as well. It took her 12 months from starting to finish and she quit her job and she hasn't had a job since 2018. Right, that's my co-founder, single mother, two kids. So, yeah, it's it's very situational dependent, but we do have a system that's like a 12 month kind of tracking. Um, by no means is this quick. This is a skill like any other, like I need you to treat it like an apprenticeship.
Speaker 1:I really like the focus on, I guess, people's capacities and how much they're willing to put in, and also just noticing that each of us are going to have different things click at different times. I think it's really helpful for listeners to give them a sense of what they're committing to when they're trading Cause. I think one of perhaps and I don't know if this is a myth, so I'm going to ask you cause I imagine other people might might wonder this too. You know, do you have to sit online all day watching you know things live to be able to make a good trade Cause? That's kind of like the visual snapshot that I have in my mind, like someone just sitting there and watching you know the lines, you know move up and down. Um, in terms of being able to to do well in this kind of space, yeah, very good question.
Speaker 2:So our strategy is based around day intraday swing trading. Now what that means is so what you're talking about is am I sitting on a laptop all the time? That's called scalping, where you're using lower timeframes. We don't do that. Okay, we don't do that. Got to remember why did we get into this and I didn't get into trading to replace my job and be owned by a laptop. So I am what's called a swing trader, which means I, like last year, for example, I took eight trades.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, right, the average person, um, what I think is healthy, is anywhere from for day intraday trading. Where, say you know, london session for us is 5 pm in the afternoon, thereabouts, okay, depending on daylight savings and things like that. Um, so we have four trading sessions each like 24, 7, five and a half days a week. So 5 pm is london, say. It's a very active trading session. We then have new york around 10 11 pm, very active through the night.
Speaker 2:For the most part, you're not on there going boom, boom, boom, boom trading. Right, you've already done your, your markups, probably on a monday or a tuesday, and now you're just waiting until price comes to your entry and then you're in the trade but the. To answer your question, like we believe in a set and forget type model, right? So you've already marked up your, your charts, your trades. You set alerts for where price can you know, depending on. You can set alerts for many different things, but for me, I do not open or touch my chart unless one of those alerts go off. I don't need to like I've marked up my levels, everything is set and forget. You set these things called pending orders, which is where you can set your entry at a specific price and if price gets there, then it's activated. Like I'm not manually there going bye, bye, bye, sell, sell, sell.
Speaker 2:In the initial phases of your learning, you will be required to have more chart time because you're training your eye, right, you're training your eye for pattern recognition and just understanding the language of the charts. But once you've got that, you know, I would say, the average day intraday trader, you should be averaging around maybe five to eleven trades a month, right, which isn't that much either. But you will get traders that will do like a hundred and I'm like what are you doing? Like, this is not the type of trader we are.
Speaker 2:Um, but trading is very personality dependent, like some people love the thrill, so scalping is really for them and they can absolutely apply the concepts to that. But for the most part, our community is here to learn how to day intraday and then eventually work their way up to say what I do with swing trading. Where it's you make the money and then you go live your life. You know the the money is made when you sit on your hands, basically so, for example, in europe, when I was there for four months last year I took two trades.
Speaker 2:Multi six figure multi six figure, two months. So it's more, it's not always best.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I guess that's for listeners you know, really understanding that this doesn't have to fully consume your life, and I think what your messaging that I really resonate with is this idea that then learning this skill can free you up for all of these other creative endeavors that perhaps, maybe don't make you so much money but really help you operate a life, you know, in alignment, really connected to the people who you love, doing things that you love like traveling, like running these incredible breath work workshops around the country, which you know I'm also like really passionate about um. I'm just thoughtful around time and I um yeah, is there anything else that you think you know listeners should really know in terms of you trading, um, or how they can use trading to build you, you know, better connection to themselves, better connection to others, better connection to, kind of, their internal states of being?
Speaker 2:Look, trading is like I said before, it's not always about the strategy, it's about connection to self, and if people don't have that, then what else do we have? Like, that applies to, honestly, any industry, and I think a lot of people stay stagnant in life, stay stagnant in careers, because they actually don't even know their value system. So I would say, first off, get really clear on what your values are, and a really good way to do that is the um Dr John Martini. Is it John D Martini? Yes, john D Martini's website. He has a value assessment.
Speaker 2:So what I would recommend you do is actually just like write down what you think you value and then go and do this quiz and actually see if you actually you're living a life according to that, because that's how I found trading right. But to me, I'm not passionate about charts and candlesticks and getting on my laptop like I'm genuinely not passionate about that. I was passionate about the process, because I really loved who I became as a trader. That trading has allowed me to live the most authentic life and there, like with trading, the amount of times people would message me be like oh, trading can't be going too good for you if you've got to be selling courses and it's like how narrow-minded.
Speaker 2:Do you have to be like? This is also just society's way of thinking, right? It's you have to do one thing forever or you don't love it, and it's just like. No, I am a multi-passionate human being and I actually only found what I was good at because of trading, because of the money I made with trading.
Speaker 2:Because you can't be creative, you can't be your authentic self when you are so living in scarcity and survival, right, all you're doing is you're just eating and existing and your focus is to get your needs met, not on well, where am I going to be five years from now? You know, like, you don't have that luxury. But when you actually have a skill of life trading where you can make incredible money it's like this creative door just unlocks and then you go down all these other rabbit holes where you're like oh, I now have the money to explore what that could look like. I now have the money to explore that. I now have the money and the time to do that, whereas when you're just working a job, day in, day out, to pay the bills, because that's what you have to do, this is why people are so depressed, right, they're living a life that is so unaligned.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, fully. I think our society almost breeds us to operate in such a way that we're totally disconnected from self and, just like you know, on the hamster wheel just paying mortgages and bills. And I think you've got some incredible content around Bitcoin and, yeah, holding other financial resources other than real estate too, which, if you ever want to come back on, I would love to also pick your brains around. But, in the interest of time, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate all of your insight and knowledge around finance, trading and the psychology of money, because I think you know, just for myself, I know that I'm a pretty intelligent human and then also rat shit with money. So just you know really interesting how we can have these polarities in us too. You know interesting, how we can have these polarities in us to, you know, be really good at some things and be absolutely, um, hopeless at others. And, and also in saying that that's, you know, something that I can learn um and something that perhaps listeners can learn too.
Speaker 1:so, um, I'll put all of sj's contact details in the bio below the episode. Um, if you'd like to work with me, you can find me on Instagram and at wwwzensohousecom. Thank you so much, sj. You're a powerhouse of knowledge and wisdom, and I'm just so grateful to have had you on the.
Speaker 2:Place for Connection. Thanks for having me on. It's been fun and I would love to come back and talk about Bitcoin and all other things monetary.
Speaker 1:Awesome, awesome, awesome, so looking forward to it. Thank you so much, pleasure.
