How to Stop Sabotaging Your Own Life With Joe Hudson

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The more I dive into your world, the more fascinated I'm becoming with you. Businesses that you just can't bullshit yourself. Can we actually allow the emotional experience of our body to be there without thinking that it's wrong or bad or shameful?

“How do I feel loved? How do I feel valuable? How do I not feel like a loser? How do I not feel stressed? That's what we're making our decisions based on.”

And all of us have some emotions that we're just not allowed to feel, which ends up making us make incredibly horrible decisions which create more stress.

The thought that you're broken creates most of the brokenness that you're trying to solve for, and so don't try to improve yourself trying to understand yourself. Joe, delighted to meet you. Thank you for doing this. You've canonized your core philosophy around how you coach people into this thing called the art of accomplishment. So what is that? What are the principles behind this? And what is the architecture around how you work with people?

“There's a lot of ways to describe what we do. I would say the best way to describe what we do is people are stressed out to just not happy in their lives.”

And they're very stressed out. And we think that's because we've got too much to do, or we think because we don't have enough money or something like that. And what I notice is that people are stressed out because they have a lot of negative self-talk so they're constantly under attack. You're constantly beating yourself up. That's stressful. That's like, did I do that right? You mess that up? Why don't you do that? How could you, you mess up that words? You're saying the thing, you need to work out. Why aren't you working out more? All that kind of recursive self-talk is incredibly stressful, psychologically, extremely stressful.

So right now, if I said to you, stop feeling all of your emotions, it is a stressful experience. You have to constrict muscles, you have to tighten up, you have to stop things.

“And almost all of us have some emotions that we're just not allowed to feel, which ends up making us make incredibly horrible decisions, which create more stress.”

Because neurologically speaking, if I went into the emotional center of your brain and I took it out, your IQ would stay the same. But it would take you half an hour and decide what color pen to use. It would take hours to decide where to have lunch, because the way the human brain works is we use logic. And there's a great book on this called, "Decarts Air," and you can look it up, but we use logic to decide how we're going to feel. And so what we're really doing is we're deciding how, like, how do I feel loved? How do I feel valuable? How do I not feel like a loser? How do I not feel stress?

And that's what we're making our decisions based on. And when you're like, "I'm happy to feel scared, I'm happy to feel angry," because I know the gifts of all these emotional experiences, then you have this incredible ability to make great decisions for yourself.

“It seems self-evident that this is the way to be, but it is interesting. We're sort of hardwired to believe that our stress is a function of external circumstances.”

Things weren't so crazy. I just have to get over this hump, and then it's going to be fine. And life has been just didn't, if my wife does it. It's all kind of lodged outside of the self, but that's kind of an epiphany to understand that like stress is a function of repressed emotions or feeling like you're not permitted to feel yourself in certain circumstances.

It's like I never thought of it in that context before. And so to me, that's a lot of the core of our work is emotional fluidity, learning to.

What I mean emotional fluidity, I don't mean like you go around getting angry at anybody every time. It means that you can feel all of your emotions. You're not being emotionally abusive, which means I'm going to throw my emotion at you. In our world, the easy one that everybody recognizes is so I get angry at you. Everybody knows what that person got angry at me, but you can get sad at somebody too, right? You can say, "Ah, for me, this is all." To manipulate somebody or to control somebody. You can get scared. Oh, I'm really worried about you. I'm really worried. So there's lots of ways of getting emotional at somebody that controls them. So we're not speaking about that.

We're speaking about, "Oh, can we actually allow the emotional experience of our body to be there without thinking that it's wrong or bad or shameful?"

And I mean, you just see people's life. You know, we get to see people's life change. That is like one of the biggest change agents on the planet because if you think about it this way, how many people know they should exercise and they don't. How many people know that they should be nicer and they aren't. How many people know that they should eat one way and they don't. So that means intellectually they get it. There's nothing more that you can do intellectually to change the situation. But they don't get it on some other level, right? Because if you got it, you would do it.

Instead of I'm bad because I don't do it, there's this other option which is you actually don't get it yet. And where people typically don't get the transformation is with the emotions in our society. And so what I notice is that when people get it in the head, which I would call like the human prefrontal cortex brain, if they get it in the heart, which is what I would call the emotional intelligence, the mammalian brain, and they get it in the nervous system, the gut, then transformation happens. It can't not. So part of what we do at art of accomplishment is work on all three of those levels. We don't work on one of them. We work on all of them.

It's counter programming for kind of our cultural prerogative. You know, it's an antidote to this hustle culture that we're in right now. Repress your emotions, barrel forward, you know, just, you know, get it done and it doesn't matter how you feel about it.

“But these are short term strategies, you know, like that that always, you know, end up in some kind of worse scenario down the line inevitably, right?”

So the emotional fluidity is the opposite of emotional repression. Basically, can you be with your emotions? And, you know, I'm somebody who's who I'm in addiction recovery, been an A forever. And one of the annoying catchphrases, there's many in those rooms. I mean, you know, feelings are just feelings, you know, and we're so afraid of our feelings. Like we do so much to avoid any kind of discomfort. I mean, all addiction is, you know, stems from an avoidance strategy of like just not being able to tolerate some kind of emotional situation and being willing to do anything to avoid it.

Yeah, it's incredible. Like it's emotion you're trying to avoid. Yeah, and emotion that, you know, and you can say another annoying thing in it is like self awareness will avail you nothing. Like I have a lot of self awareness, but it doesn't mean that I'm doing anything about it necessarily.

“You know what I mean? Yeah, you can talk about it and form a whole narrative and a story around it, but that is very different from being in the solution. Yeah.”

So yeah, so if you put together that thing that I said about emotion making good choices, you want to have a drink. There's an emotion that arises that makes it that you want to have a drink. If you're like, oh, cool. That emotion. I can't wait to feel that emotion. There's no need for the drink. And you know, and you're going to have all the self awareness that I'm an alcoholic, but if you can't sit with that emotion, you're going to have the drink. So how does one go from a conscious or even an unconscious a version to experiencing a certain emotion to curiosity and welcoming of that experience? Yeah.

The first one's the hardest. The first one is like, why would I ever want to feel this thing is kind of where you'll hear people on the first emotion that they're going for.

And one of the things I like using is like, well, why would you ever want to work out? Like that sucks. You know, like it burns, it's like you're getting exhausted. Like what would make you ever want to do it.

“And the answer is always, well, because the next day I or the weeks I feel better. So it's like a very similar thing is so that's what you can help people get to.”

You say curiosity curiosity is the right way to approach it. It's a deep wonder. So it's not just a feeling it's just a feeling. It's like, well, where is that feeling in your body? How does it move? How does it sit? Because it feeling. Don't stay still. It's not like I have a feeling of anger and it's just a sudden carry thing in my system, right? There's like there is even the most, even the feeling of stuckness has some movement. And it like, what is the somatic experience of that in your body?

And starting to have curiosity and understanding, but then what happens is once you can welcome that first emotion patterns start changing.

So I have this thing that we call it the golden algorithm. The golden algorithm is the feeling that I'm trying to avoid. I'm going to invite and the exact way that I'm trying to avoid it. So for me, emotional abandonment was huge. My dad became an alcoholic. I felt very emotionally abandoned. So every time anybody would. I would smell emotional abandonment even when it wasn't there. I would do one of two things. I wouldn't be. I would like to talk to you. I don't need you anyhow, which makes people emotionally abandoned you or, oh, okay, what can I do to which makes people emotionally abandoned you, right, needing this and getting hard both cause that.

And so this thing that I was trying to avoid the feeling of abandonment. I was creating in the exact way I was trying to.

Once I'm like, oh, cool, I'm being abandoned. I can't wait to feel that. Like, I can sit with that. I can be there with that. I've done that before. And when I do, I learn something. So I'm going to do that again. Then all of a sudden, I don't do those two things. I don't get hard. I don't. And then the pattern starts to dissipate. So as soon as people start to say, see, like, oh, here's the pattern in my life. Here's the emotions I'm avoiding. If I can look forward to them, the pattern changes. And then people just, what's the next emotion? Let's do the next thing. Let's go. Let's go.

“And it falls away. I've heard you talk about like the conundrum of letting go. Like letting go is sort of this active like verb, right?”

Like you're like willing something to go away as opposed to, I don't know if there's a word in the English language to represent what you're talking about. Maybe surrender is a little bit closer to it. But like you're in this allowing space. Like it just falls away. Yeah, it's really. Yeah, what I noticed is the best word in the English language for our society today is receiving. Well, if you and I just hear right now, just receive life, it's called life energy or life and we just receive. It's the way that your brain can construct the least amount to do.

Like letting go surrender, all that stuff is like, I have to do something to let go. But you know, the Zen say, how do you let go of a hot frying pan? And so receiving, I find is the one that works for people the best. In reflecting on your golden algorithm, I was thinking about my mother and you know, she somebody who suffered quite a bit of loss and never really got help for, you know, kind of healing the trauma of that her brother and her father both passed away.

Yeah, and I've spent decades resenting her and have a very challenging relationship with her and now she has dementia. So there's no kind of like reconciliation between us possible.

“But I'm on the precipice of like recognizing not only the fact that like she's been my greatest teacher.”

But that kind of the love and emotional needs that I didn't receive were a reflection of her on some level like loving me too much, you know, and it's given me this this like portal to. Empathy for her that I always lacked, but downstream of that I've been challenged in my in my capacity for intimacy, you know, it's like I don't like leave me alone, you know, like I got I can't have anyone like smothering me and so. Yeah, this is impacted my marriage and I'm on this journey to like kind of move towards the discomfort of intimacy. Yeah, and so your words around like curiosity or just like, you know, that on the other side of that experiment is a new freedom.

I have like 20 things that I see and what what you just said. So that pattern is very like you clearly know that pattern of if I feel smothered or dominated in that way by a mom avoidances kind of the natural thing because that was the only way you could get a sense of self as a kid. So it's like if I allow it, there won't be a me left. So I have to rebel and the way that I can rebel is to avoid because it's a sense of me and so intimacy is hard typically in that situation because this is like this is the emotional stance that you learn to take because your mom was this way right that you weren't like this so you went this way because that's how you got to keep yourself.

And if you do this, the fear is that you're going to lose yourself again. So the protection is to actually keep yourself which is when you see it that way, you know, like, oh, the job is actually to like be in myself in the intimacy. It's not to lose myself in the intimacy. It's actually to be fully 100% myself in the intimacy that that changes for me. I've seen that change a lot of folks. The other thing that's like useful to see with your mom is that like all that fear that she had was in a weird sense devotion not not like you don't you don't we're not scared of what we're not devoted to.

And just like so for me, one of the ways that I learned to forgive my mother who had a different pattern, but by the way, also lost a father to young age is to just see that fear as devotion and that that helped me have a lot of empathy. But that's not like a step you take right away. You also have to get angry and pissed and you have to do all the things to get to a place where forgiveness like to jump to forgiveness doesn't really work. I mean, I'm dancing around it right now, but it's still a leap.

Yeah, yeah. Is there any other kind of like practice or like sort of daily ritual or anything like that? Yeah, so that's just the best one is it's the same practice that you have in A rooms that but it's in the marriage.

“Right, if you remember like in 12 step, the first time you came up and said something, it felt really really vulnerable. The hundredth time you said that same thing, probably that vulnerability feeling wasn't particularly there.”

I say that because it's important that to come into your marriage every day and say one vulnerable thing, one thing that makes you pucker, that makes you go.

That is like a tremendously important. Yeah, just like recoiling, you know, it's like I'd rather run an ultra marathon, you know, and you know, on that kind of avoidance. So make it make it really small, just like you don't run your ultra marathon the first day, you know, just like it doesn't have to be big. It could just be as simple as like I don't want pasta tonight, right. That is that one thing that makes you just pucker a little bit that changes it very quickly. That's helpful. Thank you. Yeah.

Then there's the pesky inner monologue that has something to say about all of this that runs interference on everything that you're sharing.

Yeah, I mean, there's two forms of it. There's like the inner monologue that's self abusive and then there's the story that like you're telling, which is like at one point was clearly a healing story for you, but now maybe holding you back. There's, there's just two forms of inner monologue. There's the, the inner monologue of belief in the inner monologue of like daily recursive.

“Why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why are you doing, why didn't you, you should have done better.”

You've got these sex other things to do. Have you done them yet? All that. So there's just two levels of that recursive. The limiting belief and the negative self talk. That's the situation in which self awareness definitely evils you nothing like we're all, we all have our inner monologue, you know, like I just assume everyone's as negative.

Doesn't do much to derail it or to control it, I suppose. I mean, you have a whole thing about like, you're not trying to shut it down or mute it like you kind of have to dance with it, right? You have to humor it and I have like 10 tools like our week long that we do that's like, you know, under our under the table. The thing we go through like 10 tools to work with the with the negative self talk and and the studies that we've been doing on that as like a reducer, we can reduce on average negative self talk by a standard deviation. So there's a lot of tools that are used, but you're right.

“Just awareness of it doesn't typically do much and fighting against it and trenches it, you know, that which we resist, persist, I think is one of the.”

But there's lots of tools and one of the simplest ones to access is to.

Right now what happens for most people is they have an inner dialogue is like, you're not good enough for X, Y and Z purpose and this one's like, yeah, right, but fuck you. So yeah, right, okay, fine, and then I'm going to undermine by not doing the thing. So you should eat differently, you're right, but I'm not going to. You know, that's like the typical dialogue. Everybody's like, worried about this, how do I change this, but the more the more flexible option is to change the response and what would be an example of that.

“Well, the best way to do it in my experience is experiment. So because if I could tell you, but it's then it becomes something that you have to do, why aren't you responding to yourself in this way, I don't know fuck you, right.”

If I tell people how to, what's the most effective response, then it'll become a should, which will be this person, the upper dog's voice, and then they'll rebel against it. So that doesn't work so well. So instead what I say is experiment.

So one day respond to it with, oh, aren't you cute? And the next day respond to it by singing a musical and the next day respond to it with I see how scared you are and I'm right here with you.

And then the next day respond to it with like shut the fuck up and then the next day respond like right a list of 20 ways that you could be fun and enjoyable to respond to that negative self talk and respond that way for a day, like do the experiment.

“The dilemma with the striver is of course this notion that whether it's that internal monologue or that quest for specialness, these are defense mechanisms born of childhood trauma or just you know experiences when we were young.”

That highly capable people figure out how to turn into superpowers. So this is what you know creates you know successful companies or you know you name any kind of successful person out in the world.

You have this unhealthy relationship with some kind of strategy that was born out of you know something dysfunctional early in life that has fueled their success and here comes Joe you know when these people reach that they climbed to the highest mountain and they're they look around and they're like how come I'm unhappy or like how come I don't feel fulfilled or I can't be present my life like this is something that you know I've struggled with. I'm just saying well you know these strategies that served you so well are not serving you and it's time for something better and you that's a threat like well if I if I don't have those then my whole thing is going to like fall apart or cave in on top of itself.

I my message is a little bit different which is this strategy has always been 30 fuel right so you if you take right now I did to little videos on this one was like the this woman who's Chinese American great skier got won the gold medal another one is a the best call for in the world right now and what they'll tell you like you'll hear in both of the interviews they'll just talk about. I love skiing I love playing golf I love practicing. They're not grinding because they love the thing that they're doing if they were grinding they wouldn't.

Still be doing it after decades right or whatever it is like process or it's like there's something that they love about the thing that they do and so that's not dirty fuel and that makes champions. It makes the best if you go to great jazz players they're like you got to fall in love with practicing like I love practicing I love. There's this great thing on the internet about this guy and he's just like yeah I love it every note like I'm just long love with every note and.

You're not trying to get anywhere with it and that is what you see makes excellence in every field and then there's also obsession that I see all like. And you don't get obsessed over something you don't love that you you know. I'm totally obsessed with whatever the thing is for me it's the work that I do in the world. If I didn't love it I couldn't stay obsessed with it. And so I think that those are actually the clean fuels and the thing is that anybody has been that successful has those two things somewhere so they can recognize them.

They can see them they can say oh I I can acknowledge that that fuel is cleaner than this other thing and so to recognize that the thing that you thought was.

“Driving you is actually been putting the brakes on is often the first step to being able to have the courage to think this might not be the only way to get it done.”

So this is a long way of saying the critical inner voice is a dirty fuel in that it may have catapulted you to a certain you know kind of plateau but essentially.

You're on a crash course with burnout anxiety perhaps depression like there will be a reckoning at some point. Yeah, it's not it's not sustainable correct there's three ways it's not sustainable there's like I'm going to like get like blind drunk every weekend not sustainable. There's and so some people can do that for like you know into their 60s there's the not sustainable like I sold my company and I'm depressed in my house and I like I don't know what I want to do and I'm second guessing myself all the time unsustainable.

And then there's the unsustainable in the fact that I just constantly sabotage myself and I never get to the thing that I want to do those are the ways that it typically.

“He's unsustainable talk more about the self sabotage instinct on some level where all getting in our way all the time in various ways.”

Yeah, so what you learn when you start welcoming your emotions is that the negative emotions are the ones that you learn to welcome first and they're the easiest to welcome and the positive emotion.

Why is that? Is that as the hardest to emotion as art is like why are we so welcoming to the negative emotions and so yeah you know some of us aren't even welcoming to that but yeah that. They somehow are easier than like the love that like we earlier in the podcast like that's the one that's actually scarier for people and if you just think about. It's very rare to find somebody fall in love and they're not scared when they're like romantic love or they're just that. And so a lot of what's happening is what I would call like pleasure anxiety or love anxiety where like oh I and the reason that that is we'll call the loving anxiety one is because for most of us love was married to something that was destructive love was married in your in my case to criticism in my case to abuse in your case it was to.

“To smothering and so if I'm going to accept love then I have to accept the smothering they're like wired together in our heads and until we can separate.”

Them until you can separate oh I can have love without transaction. I can have love without being smothered I can have love and have my own self possession. You have a fear relationship with love and instinctually correctly so because you needed to separate yourself from a mother who is doing that or you'd have no sense of self. So that's typically why it happens is because we actually have to distinguish it and there's somehow or another having a negative emotion is less is more comfortable than having a really great emotion that turns negative.

You know that's like I don't want that I don't want to lose that thing and you always lose it like you don't stay blissfully in love forever.

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You're a very curious figure to me. The more I dive into your world, the more fascinated I'm becoming with you. Like a bit of a conundrum this guy with a venture capital background who is coaching some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, people at SpaceX and Google and OpenAI. But also this person who is steeped in spirituality and spiritual inquiry. And as much as that might strike people as counter-intuitive, it's obviously like a cohesive philosophy and a foundational aspect of how you interact with people and interface with them and coach them.

How do these two co-habitate in your mind? Yeah, that's a great question. One thing to think about is, you know, in 1970s there was an environmentalist or a business man and you couldn't be both. I don't even think there was a business woman in 1970 right.

“And then now you can be an environmentalist and a business person or an artist and an athlete and an artist and an athlete, right?”

That that apparent separation of identity collapsed somewhere along the lines of 1990s mostly when clean tech came in. And so to me, it's the same thing. It's being deeply committed to self-discovery, only service business, right? You can make a lot of money, planting trees, you can make a lot of money cutting trees down. You can be a very successful in business in a way that allows you to understand yourself and get to know yourself better. And you can do it in a way that doesn't do any of that and leaves you miserable, even if you've had all the success in the world.

“That was one kind of recognition that allowed for it, but I think the deeper recognition for me was, I spent ten years mostly meditating.”

And business is, you just can't bullshit yourself. You can bullshit yourself on a pillow pretty easily. You can sit down and convince yourself that you're happy. But then you can get in a car with a screaming kid for five hour road trip and see how you're doing. So to me, business was this thing where kid I maintain and open loving heart, could I maintain a sense of self and self possession when one of the companies I loved was failing. And that became a much better ground for me to discover myself at that moment in my journey than sitting and meditating.

At some point in your venture capital career, you realize that it's really an education in human psychology and human behavior, right. And you're starting to realize like these worlds are congealing like your effectiveness as a venture capitalist is correlated heavily with your ability to understand people and kind of solve their blocks and help them kind of actualize their

And I invested in people who needed me. I invested in not people who I thought would be able to take care of everything. It was like people have potential. They had a good idea. And I had a personal part of myself that was still trying to save my alcoholic dad. So I was like finding people to save. And so my portfolio did not do as well as if you would have hired a whole bunch of people who don't need you. And so then my only way to save the portfolio was to coach, was to coach them and to coach them and to coach them into being successful.

“So with this awareness, like how does the idea of coaching come to pass? Like how did you kind of square that equation?”

I didn't. I just started helping out some entrepreneurs who I had invested in and that we're got out. And I just took all those years of stuff that I had done and applied it to apply it to business. And something intractable in the human mind about the idea of kind of transcending the daily pain of living. Like if we can just outpace it, if we can.

It's always around the bend or the promotion or the next thing. And then there will be that opportunity where we won't have to deal with uncertainty and pain.

I think that's a sort of a driving force behind. So many of us. And that's, you know, that's a denial of reality on some level.

“Yeah, I have a phrase that says a joy is a matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome.”

And so not only is it a denial of reality, it is the exact opposite direction which you have a joyful life. I'll elaborate on that because there's a lot packed into that. That was one of your kind of 30 in that viral tweet or you had those 30 point, you know, 30 points. But this is like a portal into, you know, a deeper conversation around how we manage our emotions. Yeah, so if you look at kids, they're just joyful a lot of the time. Like you little kids, they just have a tremendous amount of joy. And the more they get told not to be happy, not to be don't be so excited, don't be so sad, don't get angry, don't be mean, don't have a temper tantrum, don't.

Right, like, which is basically sending them the signal, you are not enough. You are not like something wrong with you, your anger is wrong, your sadness is wrong, your, right.

These, these emotions that you have are wrong emotions and the more that those happen, you can just watch it in children, the less joy they have. And the more that they open up if somebody starts feeling them, the more joy they have, because it's like we're a dock with like one place for the boat to sit. And then the, like, the anger is not moving because you're not allowed to get angry, so there it is, and there's no place for joy to park. And that messaging from parent to child is really about the parent's discomfort, correct. It has nothing to do with the child correct. Yeah, I can, it's very cool. Like if you ever get on an airplane and a kid starts crying and you're in the front of the airplane, you just get up and you look around it all the faces and you can like point to who wasn't allowed to cry as a kid.

Because they're just, they're just so uncomfortable with it. That's right. And so in your own parent that you have two daughters, two daughters. How old are they now? 20 and 17 today. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, she's she's like for people who are listening and not watching your whole like composure just change like you just lit up like. Yeah, I'm so in love with my daughters.

“The story about your experience, you know, kind of parenting them through this kind of total self acceptance of their emotional states, because I think that's, yeah, this is how we're full. Yeah, this is my wife again.”

My wife is the, is the creator of all good things in our life.

She found this thing called hand in hand parenting. I cannot recommend it enough. It is without a doubt, the most powerful spiritual work I've ever done was,

was parenting in the way of hand in hand parenting. It's like five very simple easy tools. It's a beautiful process. But part of it is that you not only allow your kids to have whatever emotion they have, you actually encourage it. So if like they're like, I want a cookie. I want a cookie. You're like, yeah, I really hear that you want a cookie. I'm sorry that you can't have a cookie. Like you just like really allow them to have like this full thing. And what you'll notice is that kids. They're, they're disconnected. They're out of themselves. They'll have this big emotion and then they'll be like a connected loving kid again.

Well, connected. They're just like, they're kind of always on an edge. And so my wife at this point in our marriage, my wife had a whole bunch of weird ideas in my mind to how we're going to raise our kids.

“And I said, no, she would have to fight and then I would say, okay, and then she would be right. And so by this point in the marriage and she brings hand to hand home, I'm like, okay,”

you're the CEO of the house and you're just right most of the time. So I'm going to agree to whatever you tell me to do for three months. And if after three months, it doesn't feel right.

We'll change course. We'll have to talk about it. And so she brought hand in hand. And I just saw the change and we have a two and a half year old at the time as man. I just saw the change. It was just like unbelievable and she just, and I also noticed, oh, I don't want to sit with that temperature. I don't want to sit with. I, like, because I wasn't allowed to have them as children. And so in the process of learning how to sit in unconditional love with my daughters. I learned to sit in unconditional love with my own.

So your daughters become your teachers.

Because they're reflecting that discomfort back onto you for yourself and query.

Yeah. And so just a couple of stories to make it. Like, I was once with my eldest. She's like three and a half years old. She wanted something at the whole foods. I was like, no, she just goes for it. She starts a tear. And I was committed at this point. So I'm like, right now, let's go. And I like get on the floor. I contain her. So she can't like pull stuff off the shelves. And she's just yelling screaming in this store. And I live in this kind of hippie town in this old hippie woman came by and she's like,

“are you okay? You know, looking at me like, you must be screwed up somehow. I know how to raise kids.”

Are you okay? My daughter's like, ah, I'm just having my emotions. And then we're back into it.

I was like, okay, like, like, even on some level, she's consciously proud knowing what's going on. She sees that she knows that there's really fun the other side of this.

And to this day, she'll call me up and, you know, two days ago, she'll call me up. She goes, oh, I really need an anger release. I really need to move some anger. And because she'll notice, oh, I'm starting to feel stuck. I'm starting to feel resentful. That means I have anger that needs to move. And so because of that, she also deeply learned how to listen to herself. So I can give you countless stories of both of my daughters, where their friends got into trouble. They didn't, you know, not trouble like from a parent, but got in trouble in real life because they were listening to themselves.

So I'm not doing that thing because they didn't have any message that you shouldn't listen to yourself like that. Whatever this is, it's true for you in this moment and you can move and live in that. Yeah, that's a tremendous amount of emotional maturity for a young person and a capacity for emotional self regulation through just permission to feel however you feel.

“So you're, you're not repressing anything and I think the key piece there from the, the parent perspective is the non-judgment piece, like allow them to do that.”

So when you're in the whole foods and that woman's judging you, like I just felt myself like judging my, yeah, she's right. I'm a bad parent. I should be doing something. This public display of, you know, chaos. Yeah. So much. I thought that too. So much gets like per vote. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Like deep old stuff. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And, and so the, the kind of cool experiment with my daughters is both of them are really good at receiving love. Both of them are really good at like expressing and sharing love and like, yeah, I mean my daughter.

She just was in, uh, she was just in, like a spring break scenario. Her friends were out. She had the intuition not to do what they were doing. They got massive accident. She was the only one who spoke English. She went to the hospital, translated. And like was there for them and translated for the doctors translated. She just like did this whole thing. Yeah. It gets on the phone with me and just starts bawling and just cries and I'm like, oh, it's so great. I'm right there with you.

And, and then she's like, okay, I got to pull it together. I'm going to do some stuff. She goes, you know, calls me back to the next day. Balls for a while and she's like, I just miss you and I love you. And I, I at the end of this thing, I want to spend a day with you. Can we make that happen? Yeah. It's just a way in which like, and when I'm with her and both daughters, there's just so much love that, and there's nobody trying to avoid it because it didn't come with like a caustic thing. Or we got better at making it less and less caustic. I think it's more accurate, but yeah. That's really beautiful.

Into adulthood.

Whatever emotional problems that they may have later in life are going to be knots that are easier to untie than, you know, the typical person that you work with who comes in with all kinds of things.

You know, it's like you're trying to untie like a massive knot at that point, right. When someone comes to you and they say, you work with all these successful people like, you know, I've done all these things. I don't know. I just can't like, I'm unhappy or I'm, you know, unable to be present my life or I'm dealing with depression.

“What is that process by which you begin to understand what their core malfunction is and how to address it?”

Yeah, I don't ever see it as a malfunction and the way my approach is a little bit different is that my job in that conversation is to speak to the part of them that knows. And to like have a dialogue with that. So I don't really listen to the story very much. I don't really listen to the thing that they've told themselves that doesn't times like that's all clearly not helping. You've told yourself that it doesn't times nothing's changed. That's not going to do us any good.

And so my job is to like really connect with the part of them that knows that has that clear understanding because we all have it. We all have our true north.

Just like I trusted it in my daughters, right? I trusted in my clients and my job is to potentially, you know, do be a road sign every once in a while and to ask questions that allowed them to see it themselves. So what would be an example of one of those questions?

“Everything is usually pretty specific to the person in the moment. So if you go online in the and they have all these YouTube videos and me coaching people live in front of like audiences and online audiences.”

And you'll notice I hardly ever ask the same question. But generally one type of question that I would ask is they would tell me a story about themselves. And then I would show like direct evidence that that isn't true from the conversation that we've just had. And then ask them to fill in the gap for me. So for instance, you're scared of the intimacy. However, you share your entire life story with an audience of people. How do you make sense of those two things would be the type of question that I might ask or I might ask.

You say you're scared of intimacy, but you're sharing this with a whole bunch of people that you don't know in extremely large audience. If it's not intimacy, what do you think you're actually scared of? So it would be something like that that would be like a typical way that I would do it because I'm getting the wisdom from them even though their story doesn't correlate. So to start showing them this distinction between that. The story that I manufacture around my life or the people that you work with. It's just a narrative spun by my brain that's attempting to overlay it with some kind of rational logic.

Like that's an obstacle to the solution. The solution is really like forget about all of that.

“Like you have to transcend that and start to like on a somatic level like feel into yourself.”

And these are, you know, skills that we weren't taught and certainly aren't emphasized or prioritized in modern develop society. Yeah, there's also the weird thing about our stories is that every epiphany is a rut waiting to happen. So like every epiphany is a rut waiting to happen. So let's say I'm 18 and I feel powerless, right? It's really important for me to have this epiphany of I have choice. I can choose and I can make my life what I want it to be. That's a really important epiphany to have that like, oh, like I get to make my life.

At some point that epiphany stops serving. It becomes control freaky. It becomes like stressful. It becomes and a new epiphany is required at that moment of, wow, I can't even control the thoughts that I'm having. Because this is, this is all a gift. Every thought I've ever had is like one that I can't control. This must be a gift that becomes a new epiphany that serves for the next part of the journey.

But the idea that creates a lot of relief in our system will at some point limit us. And so, that's the limitation of whatever story we tell ourselves. And oftentimes, because it created so much relief, we start identifying with, and say, no, this thing is really important. Instead of being able to see the truth in different sides of things, which is where the freedom comes.

“And there's this, I think it's a Tibetan saying, it says, why a sky as wide as the mind and action as fine as barley flour.”

And what it's pointing to is that can you see, can your mind be so wide that you can see the truth in every perspective? But that doesn't change how you do things. There's only one thing you could possibly do. Yeah, that's a lot to do. Yeah, I'm just trying to let that settle. In your case, an example of that would be self-reliance, initially, you know, this is a lever for growth and perhaps you even self-identified with it at some point.

And then it runs its course and it becomes an impediment to your growth.

Yes, because it's cutting you off from connection and community and depriving you of that, which is, you know, basically required in order to feel whole.

And to be more self-actualized.

“And to take whatever mission I have in the world to another level as well.”

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All of these kind of wounds that turn into superpowers ultimately become Achilles heels.

And the identity piece is huge when we identify with them, it becomes this, that's like the meta story of who we are. And in order to grow, we have to just abuse ourselves or detach from that identity, like shed a skin. Yes. And you know, kind of wander in the desert until we find, you know, a more fitting skin for the next gross spur. Yeah, that's exactly how I see it working.

Yeah. And then there's another piece to it, too, is like, there's a question that you can get into,

There's a question that I got into, which I've now refined to.

The question is like, what am I essentially, which in the reason I use the word essentially is like, it would have to be something that I've been since the moment I was born till this moment. So I'm not angry because anger is coming gone. I'm not my thoughts because my thoughts come and go.

“I didn't even think for the first couple, three years potentially, right?”

So what am I essentially? Because if you identify with that, it's a whole different thing than identifying with the person in recovery or identifying as the husband or identifying as the capable person or the self-reliant person, all those have limitations. But if you can identify with what you are essentially, then you don't give yourself that limitation. And you become far more effective.

And the answer to that question is not an intellectual one.

It's something that has to be discovered.

I asked myself that question 10 times a day for, like, a decade. Yeah. And it is not an intellectual answer. Is there a way to put words to it? Yeah.

I mean, in La Cache, like, and I think is like the one that they use in the, like the part of me that sees you as a part of you that sees me loosely translated, like the thing that that which is behind your eyes looking out, that which is aware is a lot of people who have tried to point to it. That I am that idea and the, I mean, it conjures the notions of oneness.

And, you know, questions the notion of identity itself or individuation. Correct.

I'm that becomes a deeper, right?

“You know, probing of what is consciousness and what is reality, right?”

Fundamentally, right? But what it does on the effect, on the effectiveness level. Like on the just like art of accomplishment level. What that does is if you're not identified, I'll give you an example of what this does. Let's say you are a programmer right now.

You're a computer programmer. AI has just absolutely changed your world. Half the companies that are there today won't be there in six months. I work inside of companies like Open AI where it's a different company. Every three months, everything is changing so rapidly.

If you're identified as anything, you're screwed. Like if you don't have the emotional fluidity to grieve and move and change your identity from programmer to software conductor or from, you know, inspire of other people or whatever, like if you can't change that identity, you're in a certain situation.

And then they kind of high changing environment. It's like an accelerated crash course in the notion that anything you would, you know, attachment is suffering, right? Yeah. You know, on a kind of like hyper intense scale.

And I guess the silver lining in that is it's compelling people to, you know, confront surrender without having to, you know, become an alcoholic or have some other kind of like rational crisis. Because the sort of landscape or the tectonic plates under our feet are shifting so quickly

“that you have no choice if you want to sort of survive and be able to get up in the morning and function.”

Yeah. Yes. And so that's one way that it helps the other way that it helps is like, okay, now I'm going to do emotional fluidity. I'm going to like learn my emotions. I can see that I'm not those. So all of a sudden they become less scary. Or when you realize like, Oh, today's not like yesterday,

I feel all this fear like to just be like, Oh, that's interesting. I feel afraid. What is it? What is that telling me or like, what kind of, what can I learn about myself? Like having a healthy relationship with your own shifting emotional state. Yeah. And I mean, and that's the kind of cool thing is when you start having that emotional fluidity,

those signals become incredibly clear. So the anger tells you, I'm not holding a boundary. There's a determination and/or there's a determination in my life that I want that I don't have. You know, the fear is telling me that I'm either trying to move into a, into a bigger room that there's, there's something called into something bigger or

that there's some way I'm not taking care of myself. There's an action I'm taking that I want to be taking that I'm not taking. These are like, everyone of these emotions actually has a really direct signal. Once, once a not fluidity is there that you can start, you start getting excited for the emotions. You're like, Oh, cool. I'm angry. Where's the boundary I need to draw?

On this subject of improvement versus understanding. Like, this gets at the crux of kind of the personal development industrial complex.

Yeah. It's kind of premised on this notion of brokenness, this sort of shame,

written, you know, guilt-provoking idea that there's something wrong with us. And, you know, we need to read these books or listen to these people and go on a spiritual, you know, Odyssey to, you know, quote-unquote, "fix ourselves." So talk a little bit about how you think about this. Makes me sad.

Yeah, I think that there's an interesting thing. It's like the thought that your broken creates most of the brokenness that you're trying to solve for. Say that again. The thought that your broken creates most of the brokenness that you're trying to solve for.

Right? So if I took somebody who's deeply ashamed of something,

like just shame in itself creates like massive stagnation. So, for everybody in the audience, as an example, here's something I can tell you about yourself.

“I can tell you that there's something that you've been telling yourself that you should”

or shouldn't have been doing for the last decade if you're 30 years old. And I can tell you that thing hasn't changed. And the reason that the thing hasn't changed is because you're telling yourself you should be different because that should is a form of shame. Shame creates stagnation.

It's not a way to actually create transformation. Nobody has like shamed themselves into like any kind of lasting transformation. And as a matter of fact, the quote I love on this is shame is that locks the chains of bad habits in place. And so, so there is a certain level of shame that is I need to fix myself.

I am broken. The avoidance of that shame is the cause of a lot of the behaviors that people are. Right? I should stop. I should stop using porn. That's shame.

If you didn't have that shame, probably porn would not be as useful or as attractive to you. Like what you worked in the run the 12 step brims is you're like working through that shame that came with the alcoholism. That really leaves the alcoholism. So, the idea that you're broken and need to be fixed is often the biggest issue that is creating the things that you that you look for. Look at its evidence that you're broken.

“The thing I like pointing to people is like if you can't go into the past and you can't go into the future, you have to be right here in this moment.”

Please tell me what's wrong with you. Like what's the problem with you right now? There's no problem right now. So, how the fuck could you be broken? Like it requires a false, it requires a memory or a false future to be broken.

And so, just the self-awareness and the other thing that's interesting is like, well, let's look at a oak tree. There's an acorn in terms into a sapling, in terms into a young oak, in terms into a senior old oak. Like which one's the perfect oak, which one's the broken oak, which one's the not complete oak. And so, we look at ourselves like we're not the 100 year old oak tree, so there must be something wrong with us as if evolution ends. As if evolution can be complete. Okay, I am now complete and fixed.

There will be no more evolution in me. The ridiculous. Nor does the oak tree compare itself to other oak trees. Correct.

“I mean, this is the root of much of our suffering, right?”

And the brokenness becomes this identity that calcifies us. Correct. But we convince ourselves that it is a kind of launch pad for growth. Like, oh, I'm on the, you know, I'm going to fix this thing. And this is worthy of my time and attention so that I can become better.

Like it can come from a place. But the underlying premise you're saying is not just flawed. It's completely incorrect. Yeah, it's also just dirty fuel. It's just a very inefficient way to get to where you want to go.

Like, if you are on a transformational journey, that's, that's like effective.

You're never going to end up where you think you want to go.

You're always going to end up someplace far better than that. Because as you transform your idea of what's possible will transform. As you transform your idea of what's great and good, you will transform. As you transform your ability to love will transform. So your idea of what perfection is today is like a shadow of what is actually available to somebody.

To my life, I went through a long stage of constantly trying to better myself.

I could have possibly imagined when I was like 25 years old beating the shit out of myself. I had no idea what was available. I had no idea that I could love my daughters the way that I love my daughters. I couldn't even conceive of that reality. But it's a function of surrender as opposed to some kind of pursuit.

Is this what you're saying? Because I'm thinking about this notion of brokenness as being motivation for transformation. And if you disabuse somebody of that and say, there's nothing wrong with it. Now everything's perfect right now. Everything is exactly as it should be.

“Like how does someone engage with transformation from that perspective?”

Why transform? If everything is just perfect. Yeah that's fine right now. That assumes you have a choice. Like that's like the oak tree like why grow? Why put it out some more leaves?

Why stretch to the sun? It's our nature. Like a three year old isn't like I need to improve. And yet they improve. You know like there's more transformation from zero to seven years old than there is in any other time in our life.

And there's never the thought I have to improve myself.

“I have this thing that I believe which is that you know we're here to grow and evolve.”

Like this is this is our kind of like blueprint and mandate. And that everything that happens that our small brains label is good or bad. You know without any really any kind of you know data points like we just decide this is good and this is bad totally. Every single thing is an opportunity for transformation. Yeah for growth for evolution.

If we can perceive it as such you know instead of saying well this is terrible and you know I hope that never happens again. And you're saying the way in is through like trying to find a way to suspend your judgment and approach with curiosity and understand that like it's it's always gross for growth. Yeah. Yeah. It's there for the taking.

Yeah. I use the word wonder over curiosity just because curiosity is like you're looking for an answer and wonder you can be in the awe of it a while. And I find that wonder is a more effective, efficient modality than curiosity.

“Curiosity means that there's a you need to figure it out instead of just like whoa check that out.”

Yeah.

The curiosity feels more accessible to me than wonder like I'm intimidated by wonder like I'm like I'm the guy who's like you know all of my wounds engineered this incredible life that I have right.

And here I am unable to like be present for it or actually enjoy it thinking well what was the point of that and now I'm like I want to experience joy. I want to experience awe and wonder and be present with the people that I care about and really invest in my relationships and instead of just being you know captured by the next you know responsibility or just being anxious and feeling urgent all the time about the next thing that I have to do because so and so is way above all right. Yeah. And wonder comes up a lot like on wonder and I'm like you know when was when was less time I like how do I how do I access that.

Yeah. And a very practical level like curiosity is like I can make a choice. Yeah. But wonder feels like something I have to really I guess I would have to inhabit a certain state to make it possible. But I can't just decide to be an on wonder.

But there's like a super easy practical way to like get into wonder really easily if you'd like to know it it require like a two person thing please. So give me any is like just like a simple game. Give me any question that you're in in your life and it needs to be in the form of a how or what question. Wait say again what kind of question any question you have in your life right now like what makes it that I have a hard time with intimacy what makes me scared of love. So it just needs to be an actual question that you have in your life.

And then I'm going to respond with a how a question and then you're going to respond with a how a question and then I'm going to respond with a how a question and then you're going to respond with a how a question we're just going to go back and forth for a couple minutes and just see what happens.

So okay, so I present you with a question struggling with basically about my life.

Yeah, whatever question you come up with I'm going to what's the question that that brings up in me and then you're going to be like what's the question that that brings up in me we're not answering each other's questions we're just yeah. And then they all have to start with how or what. How or what okay. And if your brain does that that's fantastic. Me what does that mean when you kind of do your 404 we're like.

Yeah, that's great. What is. Interfeering with my ability to actually enjoy.

How would you know if you were enjoying your amazing life.

This is fucking me up.

“That that yeah that that because I know what I want to say, but it doesn't fall into that.”

How structure. Yeah, yeah. How can I return to the experience of feeling joy that used to come easy when I was younger. What makes joy need to be easy. I'm just trying to understand the question. What makes joy. Wait, what makes joy need to be easy.

What are you doing? I don't even know what's happening. That's what I know that's wonderful. That's wonderful. That is fucked up that you just did.

That's some kind of weird sorcery. That's that's wonder. Yeah, you were playing by a holder for a rulebook with that. I was assuming I was assuming the ground rules here. And you were like you were playing like four dimensional chess with like my.

I we've had literally hundreds thousands of people run that exercise on all groups and one on one. It consistently. If people do it, they think they see their whole problem differently. They see a set of solutions differently.

And they've never tried to get to a solution.

They've only been trying to ask how the questions. Because wonder is far more efficient than curiosity or driving to an answer. That's super interesting. Because it requires you to go outside of your normal pattern of thinking.

“That's by the way, that's how our work is.”

When we do courses, it's not me sitting there talking. It's people doing exercises like that to learn how to it's all experiments. It's what we do. It's a pattern in a route to me. Basically, to experience our wonder, you have to transcend your intellectual mind.

And I'm living in my head all the time. And so that's like a leap. Right. And so the only way you can do that is to like, you know, like, shoot an arrow into like my whole like rubric, right?

To like be like wait, what is happening? Yeah, to like shake it up. One of the transformations that I'm trying to make right now. Is to live with a little bit more ease. Like I have this thing around suffering.

Like if I, if I'm not like bleeding out on the table. Yeah. You know, like I just didn't work hard enough. And you know, it could have been better. And then the inner monologue, et cetera.

And so I've constructed a life in which I sort of volunteer for suffering. And suffering is grist for growth.

And it's been this, you know, powerful lever for transformation in my life.

But, you know, I've, I'm the hermit crab is how grown that shell right now. And it's very uncomfortable for me to be like, well, what would it be like to create something right a book, do a podcast and not have that heaviness or that burden or that like imperative that it must that it must be like hard. And I have to like push and push and push otherwise it lacks value.

Yeah. So I'm a little confused by that because seems like being vulnerable. And receiving love or hard. So it seems like your natural disposition should be to put that like go after that. What I'm confused.

Meaning, say, soon more about that. I'm confused now. I, I, my work here is done. Yeah. You said being doing one act of vulnerability every day sounds like absolute hell.

Some version of that bad, but like yeah uncomfortable. Great. Well, you're the guy who suffers. So go do it. Right.

And I should say like, I actually have, it's, you know, I haven't mastered this. But I've come a long way. Like I have, you know, like I have a far healthy relationship with all of these things. But I'm recognizing that there's still growth for me there. And I want, and I want to grow that way.

Yeah. And I can see the light at the end of the, at the end of the tunnel.

“And, you know, life is, life is better there.”

What stops you from trusting that it'll just be there. If anything. You've already made it halfway. Yeah. It's, it's fear of rejection or, you know, a sense of imposter syndrome probably.

Yeah. I can, I could coach you, but we're not going to go. Yeah, we're not doing that. This, this became way too indulgent for, you know, self indulgent. I promise I wouldn't do this.

And there we go. Anyway. It's some point if you ever want to do a coach. Yeah. I'm happy to do that.

You believe me. You're, you're, you're the guy. You're the guy for me.

What is a common misconception around those ideas that you would like to correct the record on?

Yeah.

“We've said it, but I'll say it again, which is understanding yourself as a far more efficient path and fixing yourself.”

And just notice, I would say, like, for most people, you can do this, not everybody, but most people you can do this. You do a hundred things a day and you pick three that make you bad.

But like, take a look at the other 97 and just notice the inherent goodness in it.

I can notice, like, how inherently good it is to, like, dedicate to this podcast to bring this out into the world too. Treat me with kindness and connection when I get here to operate with curiosity towards me to bring people who could change lives and to people's lives. Like, notice all the other things.

“Like, that's what I would say to a lot of people.”

It's just like, you notice those three or four things a day.

See what it's like to put your attention for a week or two on all the things that prove you're inherently good rather than prove that there must be. Something wrong with you. I appreciate you. Thanks for coming. I appreciate you to what a pleasure to be here is great.

“If people want to learn more, where is the best place to direct their time?”

I'm told I'm supposed to know. I would say this is your self-promotion. Good. Good. Art of accomplishment.com or go to the podcast, out of accomplishment.

That's a great way to get to know us. All right, man. Well, please come back and share more. I would love to just tiptoed around the surface of this. Okay. I really got a lot out of that.

Thank you, Joe. Pleasure. Pleasure to be here.