#1045 - Joe Hudson - How to Take Control of Your Emotions | Modern Wisdom

Joe hudson.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks chris, good to see you.

Man feels different to speak to you now.

Yeah, i bet it feels different.

Uh, the audience will know that i spent a long week with you uh, at your intensive retreat yeah, um.

So yeah, to now sit down back in my domain after having spent a week desperately trying to survive in yours feels feels somewhat different.

Yeah, it was great to have you there.

It was a very strange, very meaningful experience uh, especially given that it's completely sober.

You know there's a lot of talk of how important it is to, how popular it is at least to do the psychedelic trip down to Costa Rica or the ayahuasca DMT thing.

You can get pretty far without having to add anything in except for a morning coffee, if you've got the right container and practices.

Yeah.

I don't know if you've ever seen the data on the work, but we change negative self-talk by a standard deviation across all the participants and And the neuroses drops by a little less than a standard deviation.

So yeah, cool stuff can happen.

Harvard, who's doing the study?

There's a researcher who worked at Harvard.

She no longer does.

And then we had somebody at Columbia who's doing it.

And we just now have another person doing another research project on us.

That doesn't surprise me.

Quantum physics from Oxford.

There's a new person who's at least talking to us about it.

We haven't figured out what we're doing yet.

One of the questions that came up after we spent a week together was is it hard to live in the real world with an open heart?

That was one of the first questions that I thought of.

It's hard not to, is my experience.

I don't know anything that feels better with a closed heart.

So we have this thing that our brain does that tells us that oh, I'm going to get hurt or I'm going to get in trouble, or I'm going to get taken advantage of if I close my heart, or if I don't close my heart, if I don't protect myself.

But there's not a tremendous amount of evidence for that.

Gandhi didn't get taken advantage of or Martin Luther King didn't get taken advantage of.

A really open-hearted mother doesn't particularly get taken advantage of.

Some might, some might not, but they're not really correlated.

And so my experience is that if you close your heart down, it hurts.

It's just painful.

And we talk about it a lot in our society is like if you don't forgive, then you're punishing yourself.

That would be like the typical way to say it.

But my experience is just any time that my heart starts closing down, it hurts.

Why do we do it were scared of love.

I mean, that's one of the things that i think you must have noticed in the in groundbreakers is that on some level, you could say almost everybody there was had been entrained in love in some way.

That was not useful, and so now they're scared of it.

So like love came with guilt, and therefore love isn't safe, or love came with getting smothered, or love came with criticism, or love obligation, and therefore love is scary, not for what it, but at the same time, we definitely want love.

We're born wanting love, like little kids are like give me attention, give me love.

That's what they want, and so we have this desire for it.

But then it, when we get it, it comes with this, something that's toxic or not good, or and then we're oh shoot, we're scared of love and so, and to some degree, that's all of it.

It's like like i can see almost all humans kind of doing this with love.

You know, the most pronounced one is jealousy.

You know, like if i'm in a relationship and a person with me is and i'm jealous, on one level i'm like i want you, i want you, i want you, and on one level i'm like i'm gonna like criticize you and and make you feel wrong and bad and i'm pushing you away.

And this is what I see almost everybody's doing with love in their life, with themselves as well.

I mean, even in loving themselves, they're doing that.

So we have that pattern.

I think, is it hard to live in the real world with an open heart?

It came to me as a question because it was pretty easy to do it within the container of this. very gentle very understanding very um oh but check it out you just said it's like gentle and understanding but right before that you said intense like hard core like it like you're you're the way you said it wasn't like everyone wasn't going to be like yeah i want to go do that that sounds like fun it was like no that shit's intense so how do you how do you put those two things together well the dauntingness i think of fully being seen uh is to do with it being alien yeah it's to do with it being unfamiliar yeah um it's to do with a level of transparency and openness uh that isn't you're not used to and it's it must be like being a for want of a better example, like a mistreated puppy or something.

And this puppy has been taught that every time somebody raises a hand at it, it should cower awake.

It's going to get hit.

But this time the hand gets raised and it gets a pat on the head and it needs to learn over time.

It cowers less and less and less.

And then it actually learns to love the hand that comes down toward it.

Yes, that's exactly what it is.

That's so cool.

Depatterning that response takes time.

So that's the daunting side, the daunting and intense side.

The reason that I said the real world.

There was a story the first day that we came out, me and one of the other guys went for a massage.

She said body work would be a really good idea.

This beautiful peaceful, very calm reception waiting area of the Thai massage parlor in a sleepy village in Sonoma County was too intense that we had to leave and go outside.

Like this is, and you know, there's like a little usb plugged in waterfall and like plink, plonk music playing in the background, like we, we're gonna, we're gonna go stand in the courtyard because we're like i kind of i don't know what the fuck's good, what did you call it?

Uh, not spirit sick, not dope sick, like something hangover spirit hangover.

Oh uh, vulnerability hangover.

Maybe i use that word a lot.

I feel it was something else thick as well.

Anyway um, we go outside.

What it made me realize is that there's one level of difficulty which is uh, within a safe container, learning that the hand is going to come and pat you, not not beat you.

Yeah.

The next one is now going out into a world filled with hands.

Yes.

And those are two different skills or it's the same skill, but a very different kind of skill set.

Does this make sense?

That totally makes sense to me.

Can you dig into that?

Yeah.

So, There's so much there.

So if I look at a pattern that I'm holding in my life, I have three ways that I hold that pattern in my life.

One of the ways is that I attract it.

So let's say I have a pattern of feeling highly criticized.

One of the ways that I'm going to attract it is I'm going to be attracted to and want critical women in my life, or critical bosses in my life, or So I'm going to be.

I'm just going to notice wow, all my girlfriends criticize me all the time, just like my mom did or some version of.

But I'm attracted to it.

One way is that I manipulate people into doing it, right?

So some way in which somebody is not criticizing me, I am going to like fish for the criticism.

Or I'm going to do something that I know is going to make them criticize me, or I'm going to be a little needy about something that's going to make them push me away and criticize it.

You know.

And then the last one is I'm going to prove somebody's criticizing me, even when I'm not being criticized.

So you might say, oh, hey, you're not parked straight.

But for me, that means I parked all fucked up and you criticized me.

I've never been a good parker.

Exactly.

I'm going to make meaning out of that.

I call that mapping.

So you're manipulating people to do it.

You're attracting it.

And you are proving it because you're looking at the cases where it's true.

You're not looking at the cases that aren't true.

And so we go out into the world.

And so you go into for a week long with us and all of a sudden the patterns don't work anymore.

And then you go out into the world and but you're used to doing a particular thing in the world which is mapping this pattern.

And so all of a sudden you're like, wait, how do I, how do I interact with the world?

And so we've had people come out.

Like you said, like I have a hard time sitting in this massage parlor.

We've had people come out and literally call us from a grocery store and say I don't know what to buy anymore.

Whole Foods was the tip of the spear of difficulty for people.

Exactly.

And so it's just like, oh, I'm not in my pattern.

So how do I operate anymore?

It's a little bit like shaking the Etch-a-Sketch, I think.

And it's sort of, it's more blank.

One of the other things I think.

I noticed that, like I'm thinking about your audience for a minute and I'm thinking like they might have no idea what we're talking about because there's no, there's not a lot of experience of oh I, I saw the world one way in a week later.

I see the world a different way.

It's like you have to assume that to understand the conversation that we're having, that all of a sudden,

I thought that I had to be protected, but I realized that life is a lot better if I'm not protected.

Now I have to learn how to do that in the real world.

That's it.

That's it right there.

And yeah, it's so funny when you hear people talk about a religious experience or a transformational experience or a near-death experience or whatever it is that they've done.

And from the outside, because you don't have that frame of reference, it's confusing, it's easy to mark.

He's like what the fuck is this person talking about?

I have no frame or context or whatever.

Uh, it's a bit of me that, because i'm inside of that, i'm taking for granted.

I'm like i might just sound so mental.

I think this is, you know, relatively mild.

I think in the world of like, i saw a thing and this thing and whatever it's like, i realized that i didn't need to be as stiff and spiky as i used to and that the sensitivity that is always inside of me is something that i don't need to necessarily hide and actually might make my world and other people's worlds a better place, and the very thing i wanted, which was for people to like me, might occur more.

The more that i show that yeah, the less so.

I wanted to show you this.

So i just like total tingles in my whole body because i'm like that.

That's that's why i love my work is to hear that exact thing.

So thanks for sharing that.

Okay, so i'm uh, I have this episode that I recorded in New York a couple of weeks ago.

A guy called John Bellion.

One of the most legendary producers of our era.

He's done billions of streams.

Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran.

He's a solo artist himself.

He released an album called Father Figure.

It's about him becoming a dad.

It's about his reflections on his relationship with his dad, who was a super father.

This sort of very strange relationship um, almost role model you know people talk about i have a super successful father and i need to be as powerful as him.

Yeah, this was different.

This was.

I had a really amazing dad and i have to live up to being like as attuned and supportive and this sort of other type of intimidation.

I suppose oh wow uh, and i was in the shower this morning.

I played this song in the car yesterday, but i didn't listen to the lyrics.

It's a song that just passed me by when i was doing my prep for the episode.

Yeah, and i knew i wanted to talk about living with an open heart.

Yeah, and in this song.

So i'm in the shower this morning.

I cried at this.

I cried at this song every single time i've heard it, so we'll see if it happens again now okay, but i wanted you to.

I'm going to spin the lyrics around and uh, we'll play the song.

It's also going to get popped on youtube, but i don't give a fuck because it's sufficiently important that i think it.

It matters.

So I'm scared to meet you, cause then I might know you And then, once I know you, I might fall in love.

And once I'm in love, then my heart is wide open For you to walk in, drop the bomb, blow it up.

So why love anything anything, anything at all?

Why love anything at all?

If the higher I fly is the further I fall Then why love anything at all?

Stressed and strung out about things that could happen And I can move mountains with a worry.

I've done So.

I called my father and he started laughing.

So you think it's bad now, until you have a son?

Oh yeah, Anything at all.

If the higher I fly Is, the farther I fall, My love, Anything at all.

My love, My love, My love.

Um, give me your thoughts on that.

Well yeah, my thoughts are that somehow or another, the the heartbreak is bad.

Like that's the assumption in the song, that like, somehow the heartbreak is bad, but like heartbreak is something i look forward to.

It's a bold claim.

Uh, it is.

Until you realize that Every time your heart breaks open, it increases your capacity to love.

Do people not get their hearts broken so badly that they close off?

Is that not what trauma is?

Do people get their hearts broken so badly that they?

Yes, that happens, but I think that's more because they're avoiding the pain, not because their heart's broken.

We're wired there's like some pretty good studies about this like we're, we're wired to find awakening for lack of a better word or enlightenment or peace through going into the pain.

So if you look at what we did through ground, you know in the week long we're constantly going into the thing that we think that we're scared of, that is the pain, the thing that we've been avoiding, And the more you go into it, the better you feel, the more open you are, the less weight you're carrying around with you, the less worry you have, the less anxiety, the less anger.

That's what we're wired for.

And if you look at the studies on people who go into their depression instead of avoiding it and make through, they're far less likely to ever get depressed again.

And so we're designed for that.

That's how human beings operate.

If you go into the pain, it's the same as if you're working out.

To me, the question is like, why work out?

Why work out?

Why work out at all?

It hurts when I work out.

Why work out at all?

That's what I'm hearing when I see that thing.

It makes no sense.

Once you realize that, that that pain is the most direct path to your freedom when it's accepted and loved.

When it's avoided, it's absolute hell.

When it's resisted, it's absolute hell.

So I get it.

I get why people are like, I don't want to feel that.

And then they can avoid it.

And then it just sits in the background and rips you apart.

So that's how I think about it.

And it's, by the way, for that man, it's the same thing for parenting.

The thing about parenting that's really cool for me is like, it's a deep tissue massage.

Parenting is like a deep tissue massage.

If you resist, you're fucked.

It teaches you, you do not have control.

The thing that you think you are is not what you are.

Your sense of identity is going to be crushed.

That's the good news about parenting.

That's the thing I'm so incredibly grateful for as my kids now are.

16 and 20.

I'm just like, oh man, i got, i got crushed.

Like that's the amazing thing.

All that stuff that i thought i was, that was that was actually just this cause of pain, long-term pain just got annihilated so that i could find out what i truly am the thing that couldn't be annihilated.

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The word resistance is sort of coming up for me like that the pain is in the resistance of that, the fleeing of it.

You said somebody that goes into their depression as opposed to away from it.

Yes.

Can you talk about the distinction between the two approaches there, the going into versus the going away from or the resisting versus the going into?

Yeah.

So when I hit my depression, I think it was like in around 35 or something like that, And the way I think about depression is on the intellectual level it's just extreme negative self-talk.

And on an emotional level, it's repression of anger and sadness, typically.

A lot of it anger.

And then there's a lack of connection that's happening.

And, like with interpersonal connection, that happens, you don't feel that depth of connection that occurs.

And on a nervous system level, you're just constantly under attack.

And so eventually your adrenal glands give up and the attack is coming from within.

So when that happens for a prolonged period of time, that's the way I see depression.

So then you're there.

And and when you're there, you have some symptoms, and the symptoms are this is never going to go away.

I'm horrible.

Like there's just all this doom and gloom, and why even try and life has no meaning and all that's the symptoms of the depression.

And so what some people do is they're like, how do I avoid myself?

And the other way to do it is to say, well, what's actually really going on here?

Who am I really?

What really makes me depressed?

What are those thoughts really?

Are they true?

Where do they come from?

What do they sound like?

It's like a deep wondering, a curiosity.

And so, to some degree, that depression is.

There's this great saying that I've heard recently which is the best gift we can give to our kids is making them feel like it's safe to be themselves.

The depression is all the places you weren't safe to be yourself that you are currently judging.

So what is it?

To lean in and understand those things, those things that you never got to express, that you never got to explore, that you never got to go into, that wasn't safe to be, those emotions, those thoughts, and then see what it's like to actually reparent yourself in that way?

That's what's going.

That's what I mean by going into it.

Would you say to somebody who thinks okay, I believe you.

I am convinced that this is the route to go into.

I'm sick of abandoning myself.

Yeah.

But I'm scared.

Yeah, that fear which I think is much of what we were dealing with in the week that we spent together which is you're scared of doing this thing and you will find out that if you do it on the other side of it, is nothing to fear nothing nothing, maybe bliss, maybe you know connection, maybe wonder, or maybe actually just oh, there was nothing there.

Um, but even now, having had the week intense 12 hours a day da da da da, like it's not, as if that lesson has been permanently locked into my brain yeah, that fear is continuing every single time to come up.

I'm like fuck, i'm gonna play this song.

It's gonna make me tear up and i'm like what people are gonna say on the internet?

I'm gonna look silly and it's gonna be blah, blah and like right, but you're doing it, that fear.

What would you say to somebody who is currently paralyzed by by that fear of?

I say, of course you're scared, it's okay, I'm right here with you.

The thing about somebody who's depressed in that way is they're constantly being told that they're not okay the way they are.

You know their friends are coming to them and saying you should do this and this and this and you should, you should go.

And now, now you could listen to what I'm saying and say, God damn it.

Why don't I just stop avoiding myself?

I'm fucking up.

Like, and, but what's not happening is no one's just saying you're cool the way you are.

I got you.

Like, This is it.

I don't need you to be different.

There's a really cool story, and I think I shared it at the retreat, but I can't remember.

But there was this Quaker guy who had this really strong sense of community, went into a depression and everybody came over to his house because he had this community and they would just tell him what he should do to get out of the depression and none of it helped.

Because he said they were just agreeing with the voice in my head that there's something wrong with me.

But one guy came in every Tuesday at noon and washed his feet.

And he was just giving this expression of like, I will go against the voice in your head.

I will go against what you think.

And I will show you that you're worthy just as you are.

And that's the... that's the journey.

The journey is going from.

I have to do something to be worthy and lovable to.

I am worthy and lovable.

And and when that journey happens, when you.

The weird part is is that everything that you tell yourself that you aren't worthy and lovable for changes when you think you're worthy and lovable that's the weird part, or at least 95 of it does you know, because you're doing all that stuff that you makes you unworthy, because you are trying to avoid that feeling in yourself in that moment.

Interesting.

You had that, I think the first ever episode we did.

It was um, like how to see the matrix?

Uh, look at the things that you don't want to happen in your life.

Realize that all of your patterns are creating that exact thing to occur.

Yes.

The thing that you're afraid of is the thing that you're manifesting, basically literally making happen.

Yes.

And um increasingly, when I look at anybody any, literally anybody, especially people that are proficient or specialized in a particular way, or extraordinary or hard charging in one particular way,

Yeah.

And, What they are is almost always the inversion of what they fear they're not.

So look at how beautiful this person is.

They feel so ugly on the inside.

Look at how successful this person is.

They feel like such a failure.

Look at how well-known and well-renowned this person is.

They're terrified of being abandoned.

Look at how competent this person is.

They feel useless.

It is just what you are not for everybody, but for a lot of people.

What you are is this huge, big compensatory mechanism for the lack that you feel on the inside.

This person's really clever or it's because they feel stupid.

Yeah.

And apparently almost a necessary step.

Maybe not to that degree, but almost a necessary step right.

On some level the mind starts off with Once you do this, it'll be once I make enough money, once I'm powerful enough, once enough people love me, once I'm famous enough, once I'm, and then you get there and there's no there, there.

And so for a lot of people, that step is necessary just so that they can actually do the real work.

This was this idea, unteachable lessons.

I mentioned it to you before.

Yeah.

Fame won't fix your self-worth.

Money won't make you happy.

You don't love that hot girl.

She's just good looking and difficult to get.

You should see your parents more.

You should spend more time in a hammock.

You will regret working so much.

You can cut toxic people out of your life.

All of these insights are cliche and people roll their eyes at how trite they are.

But that doesn't explain why anybody who's recently realized them proclaims them with sort of the renewed grandiose ceremony of someone who's gone through religious revelation.

It's like if it was so obvious, why does everybody proclaim it so ardently?

Unless there is some weird conspiracy to pull the ladder up after yourself.

Maybe you could make the claim of that around like fame and money, but like around dating the wrong person or around seeing your parents more or something.

It just it wouldn't make sense.

So I'm kind of fascinated by this question of can you. how much can you speed run this?

How much can you leapfrog going through the, I learned the hard lessons the hard way.

Like I disregarded the lessons of previous generations, but actually I'm going to take it this time, as opposed to believing you can dance through the minefield without kicking tripwire.

I, yeah, that's a great, I do think there are lessons that you just have to learn yourself.

Like you have to go through it for sure.

I think about like to some degree than when I think about what we're doing for that for the week long, or really any of our courses that are all equally intense.

What we're doing is we're showing what true north is.

We're like, oh, you've tasted it now.

You have the taste, so you know it's possible.

And we have total faith that you will slowly get there. or quickly get there.

But once you know it, you're like, Oh, I'm, I'm, I don't want to live a different way.

Right.

I, once I see it, I don't want to live a different way.

So to some degree, that's, that's the experience that we're, we're doing in, in those, like we're, we're giving that experience so people can know that it's possible for them.

But for that?

Because you can only learn a lesson by actually experiencing it.

At the same time, there is kind of a, there is a weird hack which is, if you've feel deeply loved and accepted it, like you don't have so many minds in the mind field right, whether you're loving yourself, or you happen to be one of those very lucky people with a great father who showed that unconditional love to to, to the person, or you happen to have a friend who gives you unconditional love, like that can speed run a whole bunch of stuff, because you see oh Oh, that's actually what I'm looking for.

The other thing I'm not really looking for.

I suppose if you've had a belongingness desert, if you've been sort of bereft of that.

Correct.

Most people.

You have no idea what North looks like.

Correct.

Yeah.

From my experience, I had a meditation retreat.

My wife required us to do a 10-day silent retreat to get married.

That was part of her like requirement.

She just didn't want to break from you.

She did it with me so probably also we get.

I mean, i'm with him, but thank god i have a good story about that.

I'm gonna divert and then i'll come back.

I took my.

My daughter wanted to do a meditation retreat and i kind of tried to tell her not to.

She was like 9, 10 at the time or something like that.

But she was hardcore, really wanted to three days it.

So we had a friend who had a retreat center.

They agreed.

We went and did it.

And we finished the whole thing.

And I was like, so what was your favorite part of the retreat?

And she said, it was the fact that you couldn't tell me what to do for three days.

Unreal.

Yes, let's go.

But in that retreat, that silent retreat, I had this eight seconds of awareness of who I was, like the truth of who I was.

It took me another 15 years to be living that way on a daily basis, to understand that as a way of being, rather than an eight-second experience.

But it was like my North Star and it pulled me through.

One of the things that would have made that a lot more efficient is to have experienced unconditional love.

But I had nothing around me that was that.

Tara hadn't learned it.

I hadn't learned it.

And so, you know, we just had to learn it step by step.

But that does a lot, because when you have unconditional love for yourself, there's no compulsion to get wealthy.

You might get wealthy, but there's no compulsion to get wealthier, to get famous.

Because I will, dot, dot, dot.

Because they're all surrogates for the thing that we actually want the uh just talking about stories about parents and kids.

Uh john, on the episode that we recorded uh was saying he refused to tour.

He doesn't tour anymore um, because he just wants to be with his kids.

You know he's he lives on long island and the the biggest recording artists in the world come to his house and like, sit in the studio and he just loves it.

But he did a couple of shows.

Two shows sold out back to back um, and it was at the stadium.

That's 15 minute drive from where his house is.

You know, you just totally optimized for minimum time away.

How can I play the largest show possible with the least amount of time away from my family?

It's only rehearsed for like three days, all this stuff.

One of the shows, uh, his son was backstage and they'd set up this little play pen area for him.

And you know, John is finally performing after a big hiatus and he gets to bring his son, who is of an age where he can start to work out what the fuck's going on he must be like five, something like that maybe and uh, he finishes up and you know he's sort of doing it for his family.

He's even done it in the manner that is most apt to facilitate his family, so he's really tried to warp himself to make this as like family friendly as possible.

Yeah, he finishes up and he gets off stage and he says to his son he's like what did you think?

What did you think?

This song goes.

I didn't like it.

And he's like, why?

That's what I mean.

That's why I love kids.

Why didn't you like it?

And he's like, well, the first song was okay.

But then you just kept singing.

And you kept singing and you kept singing.

And I just thought, When's dad going to be done singing so he can come play with me?

I was like, oh, so cool.

When's dad going to be done singing so he can come play with me?

Your son, you've just played.

20000, 25000 people sold out around the corner from your house, the hometown city, all of the thing.

Brought it back home, constructed it, got the van, brought the kids do playpen out back, do the thing.

Son was just like dad.

When are you going to be done?

So you can come back and play with me.

Yeah.

Don't give a fuck.

25,000 people couldn't care less orchestra world billions of straight.

No, go fuck yourself.

Like I got a power ranger here and he's waiting for you.

Like, ah, that's unconditional.

Yeah.

I want you.

Don't care about any of this.

I want you sick.

Yeah.

That's it.

I mean, that's yeah.

And and and and, if you feel that from somebody, if you and you and you let it in, which is also a trick to let that unconditional love in a lot of the things that we think we want.

So i want to be wealthy.

Well, what makes you?

What's the need behind being wealthy?

Well, it's security.

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Can you tell that story about?

One of your daughters was crying in the bathroom and you asked if she was pissed off.

Oh yeah.

This is, this fucking blew my head off.

And I think I really want you to tell it.

Yeah.

So my, my, so it's my youngest daughter.

She's in the bathroom.

She's crying.

I go in to hang out with her.

And at some point I'm like, I don't think you're sad.

I think you're pissed.

And she goes, I am.

I was like, well, how often when you're sad, are you really pissed?

She's like about half the time.

She's like nine.

And I was like, well, why?

Why don't you just be pissed?

And she said, because Esme, the older daughter, if I get pissed, she just hits me.

But if I get sad, she does what I want her to do.

Wow, i don't think i've i don't think i've ever heard a better explanation of why people transmute anger into sadness.

They don't get mad, they get sad.

They turn this displeasure outward to displeasure inward, because sadness is pro-social and it causes people to come and take care of you, whereas anger is anti-social it causes people to run away.

Yeah, fucking brilliant.

Which is strange because i think I'm sure a lot of your audience they are or they deal with somebody who is angry has like a temper on them.

And one of the things that I've noticed is that when somebody has that temper and then somebody gets scared of the anger, then the anger usually grows.

Mm-hmm, because what's happening there is, the person who's angry is like i'm out of control, i don't feel safe i i i, i feel helpless and i don't want to feel helpless, and so i'm getting angry, and then they're getting abandoned like oh, and then they get even more angry because they feel even more helpless.

I think there's a difference as well.

I had this.

I was telling about this conversation i had with charlie hooper, and he's talking about people that move from victimhood status to act action, agency status to emotionally in tune status, and It looks like you're actually going backward, because previously you were also kind of ruled by your emotions, but not through Transcending and including and alchemizing them, but through them just being the winds of the day that sort of blew you around without you being able to step into them, and I think maybe sort of raw, unaware anger is not too dissimilar to that.

Yeah, you know somebody who's raging and breaking things and unable to sort of hold themselves together.

Uh, i'm interested in the that arc between like instinctual anger and intuition, like intuitive anger perhaps.

Yeah, maybe that's the wrong terminology.

Yeah, so i, the way i think about it, is like we have these let's call it like a tube of an energy running through us.

And we'll call this one anger.

And then if you kind of kink it one way, it's nice dress.

Or if you kink it another way, it's I'm going to be late and I'm going to be passive aggressive.

You kink it another way, it's yelling, it's screaming.

But in any of the cases there's shame around the anger instead of what the anger actually it is, when you, when it starts moving fluidly in your system, is it's a cause for action and a cost for boundaries.

So when I notice that I'm angry now, I'm like, Oh, I'm angry.

I'm like, Oh, there's a boundary that needs to be drawn.

I know there's a boundary that needs to be drawn somewhere.

There's some way in which I am.

There's something I care about that I'm not standing for, and I need to stand for it.

Yeah.

I, let's talk about boundaries.

Um, pop psychology favorite word of the world people weaponizing it from their couples, counseling to that you've crossed about.

This is me holding a boundary?

No, it's not you being an asshole like yes.

Um, what do good, bad boundaries look like?

How do slippery malleable, pliable boundaries turn into anger?

Give me the, give me the equation, though.

Yeah, so uh boundaries, the.

The two easy ones to safer boundaries is.

The first one is that you're not ever telling somebody else what they're supposed to do.

That's a power struggle.

It's not a boundary.

It's you telling them what you're going to do.

Okay.

Can you give me an example of the former and the latter?

Yeah.

I'm going to draw what I would say is a power struggle boundary.

Not a real boundary would be.

Every time you get angry, I'm going to punch you in the face.

Or every time you get angry, you need to leave the house.

Every time you get angry, you need to apologize to me.

You need to stop yelling.

That's that.

Whereas the other one is every time you get angry, I'm going to leave the house.

Every time you get angry, I'm going to ask you to stop yelling at me.

And if you don't, I'm going to leave the house and I'm going to come back in 20 minutes, and then we can continue the conversation, unless you yell at me again.

And then I'm going to do the same thing.

So one is, this is what I'm going to do.

I'm the one that gets to choose for me.

I'm not choosing for you.

So that would be one really good thing about a boundary.

If you're doing anything where you're telling somebody else what they have to do, it's not a boundary.

It's a power struggle.

And it just shows that you're in fear and shame.

You're basically passing fear and shame back and forth in the relationship.

The second one is and this is the one that will bend people's minds when they try it is Whatever the boundary is.

It makes it that I'm more capable of loving you, no matter what your response.

So it opens my heart to you.

A great boundary opens my heart to you.

Because it's very, very hard for us to love anything that we think oppresses us.

So if I draw a boundary that opens my heart, it means that I no longer see you as the oppressor.

It's oh, i have the capacity to do what i need to do here and take care of myself, which means that you you, can't oppress me.

So that's how i, that's how i i, that's how i teach how to draw boundaries.

And what happens when you don't enforce the boundaries?

Well, there's nothing to enforce, because it's just what you're doing, okay.

Well, what happens if you don't Do what your boundary would suggest that you're supposed to do, or don't say that that's going to happen.

What happens when they're too pliable?

So that's a cool thing about boundaries.

So what happens is, if somebody is scared that they're not going to maintain their boundary, what typically they'll do is they'll either do it really really harsh.

They'll be like, I'm going to leave you every single time.

You yell at me.

I'm out of the door.

They'll do something like that, which unfortunately makes it harder for the person who's hearing the boundary to hear the boundary and more of a resistance going on.

So you're saying, Oh, I'm scared.

I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to flake.

And therefore I have to be really, really strong about this.

And then, um, and so, so that's, so that's typically what's happening.

The reason that people are usually scared or, uh, I'm freezing.

Okay.

So I'm going to put a hoodie on, keep going.

Um, Whereas people are.

But if you really look at what the fear is underneath it, the fear is that I'm going to lose connection.

The reason that I'm not going to draw the boundary is because I think that you won't love me if I hold the boundary.

And so that's usually why people are scared of... They aren't consistent with the boundary.

The other thing that happens is that the boundary will change over time.

Naturally, if you're doing them right, because

Once you realize that you're not oppressed, you don't need the same kind of boundaries.

So if I think about my father, who was an alcoholic, my first boundary with him was like I'm not going to be around you if you are drinking.

And then it was, I'm not going to be around you if you're drunk or hungover.

And then it was oh, I'm not going to be around you if you treat me like this, this or this, whether you're drunk or hungover or not.

And I can be around you if you're drunk, hungover.

But if you treat me like this i'm, i'm out.

Oh interesting.

So the so once you start learning that oh, i actually am the one, i get to control my own destiny.

I get to control whether i'm cared for, i get to control if i'm, if i'm loving myself, then then, all of a sudden, the boundaries become less necessary or they become softer more, more open-hearted.

How much of this is a fear of being seen Being sort of truly.

This is me, this is what I want, this is my desires are legitimate.

Yeah, I would, yeah, yes, yes.

I think some of it is maybe more accurately put as a shame of.

This is who I am.

This is what I want and this is how I actually want to live my life.

Like, I'm not allowed to do that.

Hmm. it's like, it's a weird thing that our mind will do.

And it'll be like, no, I actually need to bend to get this kind of love.

I need to, I need to be different.

I need to not want that much attention.

I need to not be angry.

I need to not like, we have this whole list of things that we have to do.

And and it's like it's a process of realizing that all of those things that are actually okay And we can be loved for them as well.

Why are people more comfortable with silently suffering than being seen sometimes?

It's shame.

It's the general thought process that there's something wrong with you.

That's the...

That's the thing.

And vulnerability is the cure for that.

Whether you think about it as 12-step programs where the whole thing is.

I'm going to say all the things that I'm ashamed about and I'm going to be able to be loved in that shame.

And I'm going to see that other people are going through that and have done that.

And I can see that they're good, lovely people who've made a mistake.

And so I can also be a good, lovely person who made a mistake.

Right.

That's the antidote for the shame.

So the biggest issue is that when people keep all that to themselves, there's no real air for the shame to decompose right.

So it never becomes the compost for a better life.

It just becomes this rancid thing that's buried deep.

Oh, that's interesting.

That's a cool analogy.

Yeah.

You've got this line, the strongest smoke signals that you're avoiding in emotions.

Number one, looping thoughts, endless overthinking.

Number two, binary decisions, feeling stuck between two options.

Number three, harsh judgments of others.

Yeah.

Most inner work fails because it's done from the same self-rejection it's trying to heal.

I feel like those are linked together.

Yeah.

The fear.

One's interesting because I said binary thinking there, that you think of things black or white.

Buy the car, don't buy the car.

Do the podcast, don't do the podcast.

Leave the girl, stay with the girl.

That's an immediate, that's fear unexpressed.

That's what that is.

So when we're scared, we go into binary thinking.

And it's why fear is really not a great ally for good problem solving or getting the most out of a situation, because you start limiting your perspective to binary.

And so that one's particularly binary, particularly fear the binary thinking one, the one on judgment.

That's really.

There's no time that we're judging somebody when what's actually happening is there's emotion we don't want to feel.

Could you give me an example?

Yeah, so I am judging uh, somebody for hawking lmnt on the thing.

Um, rightly so not, we love not, not at all.

Yeah um, uh uh.

What's actually happening?

There is i.

If i sit with it, i'm like oh, if i couldn't feel that judgment?

That's the question you ask if i couldn't feel that judgment, what would i have to feel?

And what I might feel is jealousy that you have a great sponsor who's aligned with you.

Or I might have this idea that anytime I'm trying to sell myself or make money, I'm bad.

And since I don't allow it in myself, I can't allow it in you.

So I'm feeling that because, of course, we're all selling ourselves on some level.

So, of course, I feel the shame of selling myself. so maybe it's the shame but there's always something underneath the judgment that we're not feeling and if you ask yourself that question it's like an immediate resolve what's the question again yeah it's uh if i couldn't feel that judgment what would i have to feel so you can literally just go into any judgment that you have and and just find it like And usually they're best for moms, dads, or girlfriends.

But you can say, or boyfriends, you can say, oh, I judge my girlfriend for this.

And then if I couldn't feel that judgment, what would I have to feel?

And you start seeing the parts of yourself that you're not allowing.

What about a practical way to break the loop of ruminations, looping thoughts, endless overthinking?

Express emotions.

Don't express them at people.

Don't go yelling at people or being sad at somebody or being scared at somebody.

It's typically what humans do, which is why we think that emotions are so bad.

It's like, I'm angry, so I'm going to get angry at you.

Or I'm scared, so I'm going to be really scared at you so that you take on my fear.

And so nobody wants that.

But we've mistaken the emotion for the aggression in the emotion, which is like you're doing it at somebody, instead of just having the emotion.

But if you're overthinking, I've seen this, you've seen this.

Like, we do this in that week long that you participated in and we do it in our other courses too, the longer ones.

Somebody has an emotional expression and immediate clarity on the other side of it.

I know what I need to do.

So that rumination is just, I'm trying, and the way to think about it intellectually is this.

I am trying to I'm trying to solve a problem.

The problem I'm trying to solve is I don't want to feel a certain way.

So should I take Element or should I not take Element as a sponsor?

So I'm in binary thinking, I'm in fear because of whatever, and I'm looping on it over and over and over again.

I don't want to feel like I'm wrong for having taken it and I don't want to feel like I don't have enough money or poverty if I don't take it.

I have these two feelings that I'm trying to avoid.

And so if you are good with any of the feelings, because you feel them, you're like oh well, I'm going to feel this.

I'm going to feel that.

I'm going to feel it all.

Then all of a sudden the decision is really easy to make.

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You have a decisions course.

Yeah, i haven't done it.

Uh, i've already heard you talk about you can't make a decision without emotions.

If you are some patient going through some weird like quasi lobotomy thing, it takes you half an hour to choose which crayon to write with or what sandwich you want, or etc.

I think people are usually pretty familiar with those sorts of experiments.

Um what, what is a little deeper about the relationship between making good decisions, or making any decision, and your relationship to yourself.

Voice in the head, your emotions yeah, So the emotion side of it is the easiest to think about.

So we are making decisions to feel a certain way.

How do I feel good?

How do I feel like a winner?

How do I not feel rejected?

This is what makes us make a decision.

We want to feel right or not wrong, whatever it is.

Safe.

And so that's what we're making decisions for.

And if you think about it in a very minute way, why am I doom scrolling?

Why did I decide to doom scroll?

I decided because I don't want to feel whatever angst that I'm having.

This is going to help me not feel that.

Blunderness, boredom.

Boredom, whatever it is.

So we're making our decisions to feel and to not feel certain ways.

If you start to learn to fall in love with all the emotions which basically means not resist them, which basically means accept all the parts of yourself that weren't accepted as a kid, so that you can actually be yourself, then decisions are just automatic.

They're simple because this is my truth.

I want to do this.

I'm okay if it means that I have to mourn something.

It's okay if people get upset at me.

It's okay.

And this is what creates like hyper success in people too, which is interesting.

If you look at the evidence, people who are okay being disagreeable, or disagreeable on the ocean scale meaning that they're not trying to make sure everybody's happy, they're okay if people are upset with them are far more likely to be successful in a hyper successful way than people who need everybody around them to be happy.

They're also going to get paid more money.

There's a whole bunch of like they'll ask for the raise.

They'll go up to the person at the meeting, exactly.

They'll do all the things because they're okay with somebody.

And so you can either do that by being like a stone-cold asshole, or you can do it by and that works, no doubt or you can do it by actually falling in love with all of your emotions, and then you're like oh cool, like this is my truth and i'm okay with whatever emotional consequence there is to it, And you can't do that without an open heart.

So you have a closed heart.

You have a closed heart.

You're trying not to feel.

Open heart basically just means I'm feeling everything.

That's what it means.

Yeah.

Everybody has recency bias.

I guess it's strange because my recency bias the order of things that I've learned on the show is not always the order of the way that they're published.

Yeah.

Yeah in uh, christopher nolan's tenet and i'm, like you know, looping back on something, but i i keep thinking about this charlie um conversation i had and he talks about congruence.

Just beautiful idea about congruence.

Yeah, you look at the person that's the victim.

Uh, their sort of head, heart and loins are kind of aligned, even if they're miserable and at the mercy of the world.

Yeah, because they're doing the thing that they feel it's rough hewn and uncrafted and unrefined, but it's happening.

Then you move into action and you're like what?

Head, heart and loins as well you would look at like a trump, a tate around this and you'd say what you want about them.

They're fucking fully incongruence.

Like there is no doubt i am doing the thing, i'm the best, the best ever, like you know, like fucking hardest guy in the plot, whatever it is like they're incongruence.

But then when you start to move into the open heart thing, the valley of despair at total white belts yeah, like speaking to the fucking you know teacher here.

But as far as i can see yeah, one of the pains that people feel when making that move into living with an open heart yeah, is the incongruence starts to come back in.

They, they are um, uncertain about the stuff that they used to do and it's like i used to get results right when i just was the asshole, when i was disagreeable without an open heart or as disagreeable.

What do you say?

Like from, from disposition, not from curation, or not from awareness perhaps?

Um, like like uh, unconsciously competent as opposed to consciously competent.

But to go through that, you go through consciously incompetent first, because you're like, Oh God, I used to have these patterns and these ways of operating.

And now I need to work out how to Like integrate, transcend and include all of this stuff to get back to the place that I was.

And it's like, yeah, but it's not the same as having never left.

Like to go on this big fuck-off journey.

This is the story of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, right?

Like the gold's in the backyard, but you've got to go on the fuck-off journey to come back around to land at the same place.

But that lack of congruence is where people go, oh, well, this is obviously wrong.

There's obviously something wrong because previously I was getting results.

Now I'm not even sure if I'm doing the right thing.

And I've lost the fucking results, at least in part, in this little valley bit in the middle before you get back to.

It's started to slot back together and I've got something appropriate in competence again.

Yeah, I think that there's a couple things that are missing from that story.

The first thing that I think is missing from the story is whatever you were getting wasn't good enough beer.

You wouldn't fucking be on the journey.

So yeah, you were getting results, but the results weren't what you wanted, or there'd be no impetus to go on the journey.

There's something missing.

And so yeah, maybe you're not getting results like you used to get, but the results you used to get weren't the results you wanted.

So I think that's one part that I think is missing in the journey.

The other thing that I don't really see it as you become less capable.

That's not my experience.

It sometimes happens.

It sometimes doesn't.

But the way I see it is that you no longer can deal with the lack of congruity that's there, meaning there's some sort of congruence that happens where the Andrew Tates of the world.

They are, they there.

It's like there's a deep authenticity, like there just is a deep authenticity.

You might not like it, you might not want it, but there's like this deep authenticity.

But there's not.

I wouldn't, i wouldn't call it a congruence, i wouldn't call it a deep alignment with because the there's still this big war inside of themselves, like you're what you're looking at their war.

So to some degree it's like yeah, they can get things done in the world, but what's the journey is?

I'm getting something done in the world, but i still feel this war inside of myself.

How do i, how do i get things done in the world and not be at war with myself?

That's the question.

And what happens on that journey is, at some point you're so sensitive that you know the war is going on in yourself, like you've gotten to the point where you're like i get it this, there's something going on that that sucks and i don't want it, which is what is the beginning of the journey.

So I think the words I would use but I get Charlie's words and I love Charlie um is that that I would call that there's a, there's a authenticity, but there's not like a that deep alignment.

There's still a war.

They're still in war with themselves.

Yeah.

They're still trying to prove something.

Well, I think they're still trying, like you're the most powerful man in the world and you still need X, Y and Z, or you're the media celebrity, but you still need X.

There's still something you're trying to prove.

And so that's what drops.

The thing that it makes me think about is someone, uh somebody, who goes from that authenticity to true congruence right,

Where the heart actually starts to align with the actions and sort of the desires being exposed to some or being seen by somebody who doesn't have that level of awareness.

I like having to dance around the words a little bit because i don't want it to sound like a value judgment for people who like, don't feel things so very deeply right, as if there's some sort of amount of worth that comes along with that, but there just are.

There's certain people who are going to question things more, feel things more uh, be more self-aware self-reflective ruminative, do the do the hyper vigilance obsessive thing uh, and just be like, pay attention to what's going on internally and externally a little bit more.

Yeah, and I think one of the challenges as a avatar for that type of person is you are seen by people for whom that is not going to be their future.

That is not going to be their path.

And they're just locked in in authenticity at action, action and results.

And, like the emotions piece, is not going to play a huge role, or as huge of a role perhaps, in their future.

Yeah. it's playing a huge role it's just they're not going to be aware that might be a better way to put it and uh you trying to have that conversation as somebody who's trying to take that step with somebody who isn't yeah now or maybe ever uh results in you looking kind of silly in some ways.

It takes a kind of bravery, I think, to avoid the social judgment of somebody who sees you as not evolving into your emotions but devolving back out of them into like, oh my God, you're just being driven around by your emotions.

Like how irrational, as opposed to, oh, how beautiful you're diving into them.

And that there's already enough self-doubt and uncertainty and fear and shame around now, like i'm starting to feel like i just teared up on the playing the song, like how silly.

Um, the i'm interested of how people navigate and i think this is what i said about living in the world with an open heart.

Yeah, is some of this different level communication thing and you're speaking in not only different dialects but totally different languages with people.

Yeah uh, and that can it can be easy to be mocked, to feel silly.

How do you, how do you think about navigating that?

Because it would be lovely to just have a perfect, beautiful supportive container or your own amount of self-belief so much that the container no longer matters.

But you're going to, you're going to interact with that.

Like you know, alpha Chad or alpha boss bitch lady or guy at work around the water cooler is like fucking gay, that dude like whatever.

Yeah.

How do you think about navigating that spikiness of the world with the sensitivity, open heart truth boundary, like all of that stuff?

Yeah.

So there's a couple of ways I think about it.

The first way I think about it is imagine you are.

I'm going to get in trouble for this, but you're an ISIS terrorist and you have a whole bunch of ISIS terrorist friends.

They're gone.

It's fucking Hezbollah now, right?

Hezbollah.

Yeah.

Hezbollah terrorists or whatever.

You're with a whole bunch of terrorist friends and one day you're like oh, I realize I probably shouldn't be blowing up innocent people.

Well, as it turns out.

And then you're asking me what do I do when all my friends are like no, you should blow up people, innocent people.

It's like yeah, to some degree.

What it is is that There's some people who judge you and who think you're dumb for working out.

There's some people who judge you, think you're dumb for needing as much of attention on a podcast.

Some people think you're dumb for being on a reality television show.

Some people think you're dumb for being a guru.

Point taken.

It's the problem with actually bringing someone on who really knows you.

Yeah, fine, fine, fine.

Or think you're dumb for like teaching the emotional stuff, like advertising about blah blah, exactly so.

So there's always going to be some people who do that, and so the question is, how do you handle that in all the places that it's already happening, and what makes this particular place being emotional, the sensitive place?

Because i see you do it and everybody do it on 20 other things.

But but then there's this one thing that it's like hard to do it on and it's usually an indication, that indication of that.

That's where you're judging yourself.

If you're not judging yourself, then they say that's like emotional blah blah, like you're just a pansy, and the response is yeah yeah, i'm emotional and i love myself yeah, and that's okay.

Yeah yeah, it's like like there's a.

There's this great term i heard recently called vagal authority.

Are you familiar with this term?

Vagal authority, authority?

So oh, that's sick, i like it already.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's basically my nervous system, the calmness of my nervous system, is going to have authority in the room.

So in Japan, the police are taught this and they're taught never to raise their voice.

A way that we learn it in the States is paramedics never run to the body.

They always walk to the body.

No way.

Because they don't want to amp up.

They don't want the other person to feel like scared and then it amps their adrenal system.

So it's like this vagal authority.

When somebody says that to you and you maintain vagal authority, it's over.

And you see this with like little kids bullying each other.

There's this great YouTube video and hopefully we can, I can send you the link about how to stop.

Like if you're being bullied as a kid, how to stop it.

And the whole thing is just maintaining vagal authority.

It's basically not reacting to the bullying.

If the bully bullies you and you don't react to it, they stop.

It's just, And you can watch it over and over and over again.

It's just like, you're an asshole.

Yeah, I'm an asshole.

What are you going to do?

You're a pansy.

Yeah, yeah, I'm a pansy.

It's like the Taoists have this great saying about it.

In a fight between a sword and the ocean, the ocean always wins.

What's that mean to you?

You have to have something to hit.

Oh yeah, if you, if you attack me and you hit me, i get really excited because it means there's some part of myself i'm not i'm still judging.

There's some part of myself i'm not allowing.

That means that there's more freedom, that i get to go and have right.

So if i get triggered, i'm excited because i'm like there's some something in me that is like that is still tight and solid and and and that that that is not true, that's not the ocean, it's not the ocean.

And so, for me, what I would say to somebody who is like yeah, what do I do with the hard person who's making fun of me for crying?

I'd say, great.

What's the part of you that's still having a problem with you crying?

Because that's where your freedom is.

Yeah.

Every judgment, every time we're triggered, every time we get defensive, it is a direct pointer for where we can get more freedom in our life.

Which is why kids are so awesome to go back to because kids will trigger the shit out of you.

That's another area.

Hey, dad, I don't care about all of your music.

I don't care about all those fans.

I don't care about all those things that you think make you a good person.

I've got a new Power Ranger and you didn't get to play with me.

Yeah, exactly.

Like boom, that's just your identity just, and then you get to find out what you really are.

Because you and I are both at a place where we're like special in society somehow.

We're famous for this or that or like we have this, like perch and says but you and i know we've like interacted with all those people.

It's not who any of us are like nobody's special.

Everybody, what they say, puts one pants, one leg on at a time.

But, you know, everybody feels angry and sad and everybody feels angst and like it's happening to all of us.

There's no, and so i can't remember who it is.

Some medieval philosopher that talks about.

Uh, From the king in his castle to the peasant in the street, everybody shits.

Everybody shits.

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Dude, you tried to fastball me that.

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Thank you.

I'm interested in the listening to yourself portion of this, to just harp a little bit more on the difference between irrational instinct being at the mercy of, and cultivated intuition yeah, listening to the fleeting thought, the quiet voice of because those two things can't be the same the person who is swept away by their anger and blows up and does all of this stuff.

Um, well seen yeah, do you get the, the tension that i'm talking about?

Yeah, and again, i'm really trying to drill into again my recency bias with charlie is The fear.

This is my journey.

This is my journey right now.

My journey right now is I've spent a long time in action.

I felt helpless for a lot of my life.

I then decided to step into no longer feeling helpless.

Yeah.

I'm now going from that to, okay, unteachable lessons.

You've butt fucked me enough.

Like I get it.

I get it.

Like there is more, there is deeper to go.

What's the next journey.

The next journey is to go into feeling everything as opposed to just acting everything.

Yeah.

Um, okay. there was a part of being swept away by emotion previously.

Yeah.

A lot of it was suppression for me, but for other people there may be tons and tons and tons of like emotion.

So irrational instinct to sort of cultivated intuition.

Yeah.

Talk to me about that.

Like, so it, it doesn't really matter in the long run.

So long run it the, the.

If you're aware and you're bringing awareness to the, to your actions um, you're going to very very very, very quickly realize that when you are swept away by emotions and you're in your pattern, it's going to be painful.

And in the long run, when you listen to that intuition, it's going to feel right.

It's going to be more right.

It's not going to bring all the drama.

So on some level you can listen to either one of them and do it because you immediately will realize or, within a week or two, realize that wasn't that.

Like there's a big distinction.

That being swept away by the emotion didn't actually serve me, and listening to that intuition, deep intuition, did.

And you'll start to make a distinction in your body.

So in the long run, it's like the way I would say it.

It's like if you're working out wrong, if you're working out in a way that hurts your body, your body's going to get hurt and you're going to realize that.

And you're going to then change the way that you work out as an example.

Right.

Um, but, That's not like the most efficient.

The most efficient thing is to have someone tell you okay, here's how you work that thing out, so that you don't hurt yourself.

And so.

So what I would say is that um, if you are triggered or in judgment, then it's not the, it's not the intuition.

If it's like a little bit scary, then it's far more likely to be the intuition.

Hmm.

Because if it's a little scary, it's out of your pattern.

Oh, that's cool.

That's cool.

Because it's the path of least resistance is likely to be more reactive, old pattern.

Exactly.

The one where you go.

Yeah.

Oh, am I going to do that?

Yeah.

And then you want to accelerate the curve.

You just go do that like immediately.

So a lot of times people will say to me I don't understand how you just Have a realization that immediately it's in your life.

Act on it.

Immediately act on it.

And the answer is probably unrewarding, but it's exactly that as I act on it.

So recently in business I had this recognition that I was not asking for what I wanted in a way that was clear.

And so I just announced to the whole business hey, here's this way in which I'm not clear in what I'm at for, the way that I'm asking for what I want.

I apologize.

I'm sorry that I did that.

That's not fair to any of you.

I take full ownership of it.

And I am going to start doing it more directly.

If I mess up, please let me know.

Just directly come to me and say, this isn't working.

And I will start making adjustments.

And then I found six different ways to ask for directly what I wanted, how I wanted it.

And I did it.

And was it scary?

Yeah, of course it was scary, but it's like immediately doing the thing as many reps as i can possibly do it.

That's how.

That's how you change it.

Alex homos, he's got this idea which i think is on the outside he might not seem like a compatriot of your uh world, but he very much is in his own flavor and he he has this idea where the life that you want is on the other side of a few hard decisions.

And the reason that you're not living is because you're too afraid to have them.

And when you have the first one, what he's noticed is you got to fire someone.

You got to get rid of somebody.

And he thought about it.

Oh my God, I can't do it.

They've been there for six months longer than they should have done, two years longer, five years longer than they should have done.

And then finally you do it and you realize, oh, that was okay.

And then the next thing you do is like oh, what other conversations can i have that are like that?

And you've got this sniper rifle out and you turn from like being a hitman into a mass shooter and you're like okay, i'm gonna like.

You're like, holy shit, it's a machine gun, yeah.

So it's kind of interesting that when the volume of the lesson gets so loud that you can't ignore it, you finally do it, but then you kind of go on this run right like shohei otani.

You just like have this absolute streak right of of, And that gap that you were saying between what I would call authenticity and that deeper alignment attunement is Charlie's word for it, I believe is the action.

It's like, oh, what are those scary actions that I'm not taking?

I'm going to go take them.

And if I just line those up and do those reps, that transition is much shorter.

And you might get rid of a lot of people.

Why?

Let's say, one of the pieces of when you get into the attunement is like oh, I've been caretaking a lot of people.

Then a whole bunch of people that you stopped caretaking might not want to be in the relationship anymore.

The ones who stay are going to be great.

Or if I'm a terrorist and I want to stop blowing people up, I'm probably going to have to change friend groups.

Have I told you about my lonely chapter idea thing?

Basically, when you go from a place that you are to a place that you are, that you don't want to be, to a place that you do want to be, you become so developed you can't resonate with your old set of friends, but not yet sufficiently developed that you built your new set of friends and you're sort of stuck in this zone of uncertainty.

It tarnishes the process.

You're permanently in self-doubt.

You don't know where you're gonna go.

Yeah, i was thinking about this.

Uh, i think this was maybe a couple of weeks after we were together, or maybe it's a couple of weeks before, i can't remember.

Anyway uh, this is the other side of the lonely chapter.

So i've been talking about this for like three years.

Yeah um, i'll read you a little essay.

Great, You're a different character in the mind of each person who knows you, because their impression of you is made of the bare bones of what they've seen, fleshed out by their knowledge of themselves.

So my friend Gwenda Bogle, the lonely chapter has another perspective to it.

As you grow, you don't fit in with your friends, but this means that they don't fit in with you either.

And this causes a reaction from their side too.

The hardest part of changing yourself isn't just improving your habits.

It's escaping people who keep handing you your old costume.

Others don't remember who you were.

They enforce it, which is why reinvention often feels so much like trying to break out of a prison that you can't see.

Psychologists call this dynamic an object relation.

When people interact with you, they're not engaging with you in your full living complexity.

They're dealing with the version of you that exists in their head, a simplified character built from fragments of memory and colored by their own projections.

In object relations theory, an object isn't a thing, it's the internalized image of another person.

We don't just carry people as they are.

We carry a mental sketch, which is why, if you make a radical change, you'll usually meet resistance.

Your transformation destabilizes the representation that the people around you are attached to, so they try to nudge you back into the familiar role that you know.

Charles Horton Cooley called this the looking glass self.

We come to know ourselves by seeing our own reflection in other people's eyes.

If these mirrors keep reflecting the old you, it's hard to step into the new one.

In social psychology, self-verification theory shows that people prefer interactions that confirm what they already believe about themselves and about you.

And if you disrupt this script, you introduce friction.

Yeah.

So all true.

And exactly why, especially the places we judge ourselves is where we feel that pressure from the society.

However, It really changes if you're just conscious about it.

Meaning we all want to evolve.

There's like a migrational path that we all have.

We all have this.

And there's a lot of human development studies that show that there is a path of development that we want to go down.

And maybe it gets stopped because of trauma or life events, but we all want to do it.

So if you sit down with your group of friends and you say, hey, this is who I was.

And this is a transition and I would love your support in it.

And this is where you can see things that are different, which is what I did with the company.

Here's what's going on.

What I noticed is at least 80% of the people want to support you in that process.

If it's conscious.

If you just go and do it, it's different.

So that's why I had a question i tried to interrupt you with, which was how important is setting the scene, how important is saying this is a thing that i've noticed, and blah blah blah, because you know the ruthless ceo archetype might just be, i'll just go and do the thing, i'll just say the way it's going to be.

You went through this unnecessarily superfluous fucking storytelling thing.

You know, sit everybody down here, come lie in my armpit, like let me give you the.

You know yeah, How important is the scene setting of this is me.

I have realized this thing.

Yeah.

So let me answer that as if you were that CEO who just said that to me.

I'd be like yeah, that's exactly how you should handle explaining the context of your company to your customer.

I'm not going to handhold you.

I'm not going to put you in my arm and elbow you and rub you and nuzzle you and say yeah, my company sells really great products.

Of course you are.

You're going to set context everywhere.

How do I get somebody on my page just to let them understand how I'm making the decision?

As a matter of fact, one of the things I see inside of companies, one of the biggest inefficiencies is that nobody has a shared context.

Nobody actually understands all the things that the CEO understands and therefore the CEO feels like they're all alone because they don't actually have the context.

Well, from a decision-making perspective, they are.

A CEO is a complex decision-making machine who has a degree of perspective and context that is unreplicable, very difficult to have anywhere else, which is why this amount of perspective and context is gives you the uh, the ability to aggregate all of this stuff, and it sounds to me, like you're saying, the job of the ceo is to try and make that perspective as widely known as possible, especially within his top six, seven people.

Absolutely, i would say that's a bad ceo.

A good ceo is somebody who's helping, is sharing his problems with a group of smart people, making a decision with them, and i assume The same is true in a relationship.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So most relationship death comes from not sharing context.

So the first thing I would say is it's very efficient to share the context.

You don't have to do it.

It's just super efficient.

A lot less turmoil, a lot less clunk.

I see where they're coming from.

Say again.

I understand their motivation.

Yeah.

They're my friend.

I want to support them in their journey.

Yeah, and I also feel that same call in me somewhere.

Somewhere, I feel that same call in me.

Like, even if I'm making fun of you for having the emotion, even that reaction tells you that there's something.

It's the judging again.

Yeah, exactly.

They're judging themselves.

And so you know that it's in there in them.

And so...

Give them the opportunity.

Open up the door for them as well by sharing your own vulnerability.

And again, can't do that without an open heart.

Close your heart down and you're not going to share the context.

Close your heart down.

You're not going to bring your friends along for the ride.

Let me give you an example.

I already told Charlie this story.

We filmed this vlog tracking the New York and Toronto shows that we did a couple of weeks ago.

And it's beautiful.

I hear they're going really well, man.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

Yeah, you selfishly decided to put a retreat on so you can't hang out with me this Saturday.

It's fine.

We can do it again sometime.

Anyway Max, who you met videographer was you know turned this edit around in.

It was a week of footage turned into an hour of law, and it's beautiful.

I fucking loved it.

And I was like, I'm so proud.

And it's real, it's a real different angle on the way that everything looks.

Anyway, I got all excited about it.

There was an error on the upload.

It was up for 10 minutes, came back down.

That's like cancerous to reach because all the notifications have got triggered.

And then this thing happens and it pulls back down and people that were watching it, can't watch it.

And then they're not going to watch it again.

And in between one of the episodes earlier this week, I come out and I'm like Oh, how's has everything gone up.

Okay.

On the things I'm going to the bathroom.

And they were like, oh yeah, there was a little bit of an error.

And immediately my response was, well, what happened?

Here's the process.

We need to make sure that the thing, I'm so frustrated.

And I realized a little bit later, when I was talking to Charlie, that what I should have done is gone.

Ow.

I really loved that thing.

And I really wanted other people to love it too.

And I thought it was really special.

Maybe they're not going to get to see it in the same way.

Ow.

I got my hopes up.

I should have said that.

I didn't.

We must make sure.

We're in the process.

We've got to get the thumbnail with the title.

So that was very much you ventriloquizing me from wherever the fuck you are.

I would say both are really important.

Ow, that sucks.

So people can see you.

So the team can be like, oh, he's human.

And I empathize.

And yeah, it sucks for me too.

And we can be human in this together.

And how the fuck do we make sure this doesn't happen again?

Because that anger that you feel is a boundary.

There's a boundary there of like oh, if we're going to do this, how do we make sure we're doing it right?

But I think both are really critical.

And I think that is the integration that you're talking about from one place to the other.

Because there's some fear in the system.

Then it's like I either should be open-hearted or I should be get shit done and ruthless.

And it's like, they're not mutually exclusive.

I can be open-hearted and be very clear about my vision and what i want to do and how i want to be and, and and and the reach that i want to have, of course like, how could i not think about it like a mom, a mom open-hearted, or dad, in this case, open-hearted to their son open-hearted, ruthless.

He was ruthless.

I am going to do this 15 minutes from my house.

I'm going to do, i'm not going to tour.

It was all ruthless And deeply openhearted for his son.

And it, and it's both.

And the, and the, and the models that we're like looking for are the people who do both.

And we just for a while in the journey get confused that it's one or the other.

Hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Uh, You've mentioned your business too many times for me to not do this.

I'm going to have an intervention with you.

You've done enough to me, so I'm going to put the shoe on the other fucking foot for a second.

Okay.

Have you spoken to your team after the call that me and my YouTube guy had?

Yeah, man, we are so grateful.

Did you listen to a recording or did they give you a full breakdown?

Did they talk to you about what I want as your new vertical for content?

We've already recorded two.

How did they go?

We recorded three.

That tells you how it went.

Two of them are good.

Two of them I think are great.

One of them was the golf one that I think you recommended.

Yeah, that was actually really cool.

And then there was one.

So context for everybody listening.

You wanted me to do reaction videos too.

I'll give context to your context.

Okay, great.

I had a conversation with Mike Israetel about three or four years ago.

Who was on that call?

Was it Dean me and maybe it was just me anyway.

Um, mike is a probably the fastest growing channel in all of health and fitness has been for the last three or four years.

I mentioned it on the call with your guys.

He's like the, the big guy bald yeah, and you did a like a workout thing with.

I've done a number of those yeah yeah, cool.

So i know you're talking, we're friends.

He's been on the show a bunch.

The first time he came on he was like uh, the youtube channel's kind of floundering a bit.

There were maybe a million subs, a little bit less.

What do you think that we should do?

And i, I'm by no means like some fucking super master at YouTube, but especially if someone's super talented and they're just missing the unlock,

Yeah.

I was like okay, here's a bunch of things.

From then until now they've gained 3 million subs in like three years.

So like real vertical growth.

And the guy's the same guy.

He's been in the fitness industry for forever.

Yeah.

I was like, huh, that was cool.

Like that was, there was something there, and we became really good friends and he uh, Very flatteringly attributes at least some of the growth to some of the shit that we got them.

Although it's all his talent That's largely that and It's just the same format for you.

I'm sorry.

It's the same format and the reason I'm sorry is that One of your fundamental fears is like an increase in exposure.

Yeah for you.

Yeah, not for the mission and um, but i know for a fact that if you start to do master coach critiques or master coach assesses or master coach whatever's it will, it will do to youtube something that we haven't seen for quite a while, like i'm confident that that's going to happen.

You've got the team, you've got the way that it's filmed, you've got the edit style.

You've got as well that mike didn't at the time the roadmap, because you can just go.

I'm just going to do the emotion equivalent of what he did for exercise science, and it is i'm i'm usually not wrong.

Okay, so i we, so i was very resistant.

I was like i knew you were.

I said i was like he's gonna fucking hate it and i can't wait for him to hate it.

It's so good because i get to turn it around after he's bitched me for an entire week.

Yeah yeah yeah, fuck you, joe hudson.

He uh, yeah.

So, uh, we, you know, we have a principal in our company that's everything's in iteration.

So I was sitting there going, this is, oh, I don't want to do this.

And my team was like, everything's in iteration, sit your butt down.

Because for us, like our principles are more important than any one person's decision.

Like this is, this is how we operate, including mine.

Yeah, exactly.

And so they just put stuff in front of me and and looked at, looked at.

First of all, we all decided Tara would be far better at reaction videos because she's so much more expressive than I am.

But there was one that was like a reality television show.

And my reaction was, Oh God, why does anybody watch this?

That's punking the game.

That one didn't work.

But there was, there's a couple that I thought were just like amazing to do.

Actually.

I, I again was, I was like, well, I was wrong.

That was amazing.

You had fun.

I had fun.

I enjoyed it.

Yeah.

So I think it's really critical that we get you know a list of things that I can do that would.

That's that are going to feel good, but there's some that are just I'm not going to.

I can't do like pop culture commentary.

You're going to learn, you know, the, the, uh, uh, bucket of what is and isn't appropriate.

And I'm sure that Mike has been uh his Scott the video guy, his guy uh RP will have put videos in front of him.

And he's like, No, and they probably never made the channel, right?

Or they didn't, they didn't perform or whatever.

And, over time, the curation, in the same way for that vertical of content, the same way as my guest selection is paramount.

It's the most important thing.

The most important thing for you guys is what's the video?

Like, what is it or the incident or whatever that I'm responding to?

What is that?

Because that's the well from which you're drawing all of this stuff out.

And as they say in the UK, you can't polish a turd.

Um, uh, some of them may not be turds, but you're just a incompatible turd with that turd.

My.

The one that I had the most fun with was a fight scene from a comedy from.

I think it was like the early aughts called uh, called uh.

This is 40.

And I had the, you know, Judd Apatow, who was the guy that made it.

He was sat in that seat yesterday.

Oh, wow.

Yep.

So so yeah, so I break down that fight scene and I'm like, and it was so fun, i'm so fired up for you to do this yeah, thank you.

Thank you for that yeah no no no, i think title and thumb keep it master coach something.

Master coach critiques, master coach assesses, master coach reacts, whatever it is.

Yeah, super simple.

This is 40 fight scene.

Like scott scheifler's uh golf speech, like whatever it might be, like you have an infinite amount of growth, like literally a vertical amount of growth to do from that.

That speech is is phenomenal.

Do you want to give a little like summary for the people that don't know what we're talking about?

Yeah.

So it's this.

I'm not a golf follower, but this is the preeminent golf guy now, like just amazing, apparently.

And he basically talks about winning and how the feeling of winning lasts about two minutes.

And then then he literally goes, and then you guys are just asking me he's going to say he's talking to a bunch of reporters.

You all are just asking me, how am I going to do on the next one?

So it's gone.

All this winning doesn't mean anything.

But what he says, which is the secret of it all, and he says it three or four times.

He just keeps on saying I'm just the guy who loves to practice.

I'm just the guy who loves to practice.

And that is what makes him so successful, is that he loves the doing of it, not the reward of it.

And so many people are sitting in their rooms right now listening to this or doing something and going.

I want the reward of fame.

I want the reward of money.

I want the reward of a great girlfriend.

I want the reward of, and it will last two minutes.

You got to love the thing that you're doing if you're going to actually have the success and maintain it right.

You love having conversations with people.

And when I leave here, I'm going to talk to a woman at UTA who runs the literary department there.

And we're talking about a book.

And she asked me, she's like, well, what do you want from the book?

And I said, I won't do anything for money that I wouldn't do for free.

The best story I've learned from you around that.

I mean, this meme needs to go so much further, wider than it has, with you just like flicking it onto the floor like you're tossing like a bit of offal into the bin or something.

Uh, your daughter came to you and said i've got my first billion dollar idea.

And you said, oh wow, it's an idea that you can sell for a billion dollars.

She says no no, it's an idea that i wouldn't give away if someone offered me a billion dollars.

Fucking yes money yeah, such money, and that's what you're talking about.

That's what i'm talking about.

We're going to talk about the book before you leave as well.

Don't worry.

Okay, i've got things that i need to say.

James Clear, it doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it.

If you want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire to crave.

The result, but not the process, is to guarantee disappointment.

To crave the result, but not the process is to guarantee disappointment.

It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it.

I want fame.

Fame sounds great.

I want to be a world touring musician.

Okay, do you want to spend 10 years in your bedroom playing guitar?

Because that is the lifestyle that you need in order to be able to get the life.

Yeah.

The only thing I would add is there is a great benefit to just being in the want.

But not the want.

So let's say I want to be famous right, if I just feel the feeling of wanting, even I take the fame out of it, but I just feel that feeling of wanting.

There's a great benefit to that.

Often what's happening is that we feel the want and then we immediately stop that feeling of wanting and go into.

I should do this.

We're not actually spending time in that feeling of wanting.

And if you spend time in the feeling of wanting, there is often a, a massive unlock that occurs.

So you want a whole bunch of attention.

You want to be liked by people.

But what happens is you go, I want to be liked by somebody.

You have the thought, maybe you don't even fully admit that you've had the thought to yourself.

And then you go, I need to do this.

I need to do this.

I need to, I should have done this.

I should have done this.

I shouldn't have done this, which is basically avoiding the feeling of wanting.

But if you actually go oh, i want that and i'm gonna stop everything and fully feel what it is to really want somebody's attention, there is a like, a massive freedom that can be found in that, because what you find is that want when it's unresisted is a lot like love.

It's a lot like love why or how, what was it?

Instead of that, just see what it's like like think of something that you want, like want your girlfriend to blah blah blah, or your mom or blah blah blah, and then just feel the wanting without needing anything to be different, and like look, your system relaxes and opens.

And you mentioned uh, the similarity between telling a company the motivation and the context for why something is about to happen and the importance in relationship.

Yeah, This is from you.

Every relationship fight boils down to three things.

Number one, I don't feel seen.

Number two, I'm trying to change you.

Number three, I need to defend myself.

Shift any one of those and the fight will shift too.

Yeah.

So the way I see most fights is I have a theory called the shame hot potato, which is basically I don't feel good about myself, so I'm going to throw shame at you.

And now I don't feel good about myself, so I'm going to throw shame at you.

And then we're just passing the shame back and forth.

This person feels like they're always defending themselves.

But this defense feels like an attack to this person and this defense feels like an attack to this person.

So it's like, you never do the dishes.

I am ashamed that I can't keep up with the housework, and that I'm keeping score.

You don't do the dishes.

I feel like I'm defending myself.

Look at all the things that I've done.

Why aren't you?

I feel like you attacked me for not doing the dishes and back and forth.

It just goes like that.

And so this person's response is, well, I work all day and you only work 35 hours a week.

Oh, I don't work enough.

I've been attacked.

I'm ashamed.

And off it goes.

And so every single one of those things that you read there are an expression of that cycle that's going on.

I really see that you need more help in the house than you feel overwhelmed.

And I don't want you to feel overwhelmed.

Fight's gone.

That's the being seen part.

Oh, you're right.

I don't do the dishes.

Fight's gone.

I don't need to defend myself.

So every single thing is just basically unlocking that shame hot potato that's going, which is basically people feeling unloved for who they are and not being able to love themselves for who they are.

I just love the phrase that it's like, if you're trying to change somebody, you're not loving them.

You're basically saying you need to be different to get my love.

And that usually typically means for yourself.

If you're trying to change somebody, is that there's also some part of yourself that you're not loving.

Why?

Let's say early in the relationship, Tara was very big and I would get embarrassed.

And it was not about Tara being big.

It was about me trying to be seen as normal, being fit in everywhere, not stand out.

It has nothing to do with her.

So that part of her that i'm changing is like the part of me wanting attention that i wasn't allowing myself to feel or have so typically.

That's the thing, and it and and it's, And it's also just like that old phrase.

My mom actually had this on needlepoint in the wall.

I don't know, like she needlepointed this phrase.

It's just something that happened with American moms in the 70s apparently.

And it said, trying to move a mountain or change a man, I'll move a mountain, it's easier.

So it's also just, it just hurts the relationship because the person will resist.

Yeah.

People don't respond well to being told you need to change.

Exactly.

Including ourselves.

And yet we do it to ourselves all the time.

Talk to me about that.

I should work out more.

I should stop smoking.

I should be more truthful.

I should run a bigger business.

I should be famous.

Like all those things are the things that you can look back on a decade and haven't changed.

The more we're forcing ourselves to change, the less that change happens.

Where does change come from if not from motivating ourselves?

The same place it comes from when a little kid goes from crawling to walking.

It's our wants.

It's like being able to listen to and fully feel the want that is in our world.

Wants are a far more efficient fuel than shoulds.

Shoulds is a very dirty fuel. it doesn't work very well.

It's meant to kind of stop things.

You know, shame and shoulds are like they're meant to stop behaviors and we use them to motivate ourselves, but they don't work very well.

Whereas wants and desire and natural motivation that just burns, you know, it's that golf guy.

I love to practice.

He has a want to practice.

He wants to play golf.

That's the thing.

He like kept his love for playing golf.

That's a more efficient fuel, then i should play golf every day.

If you want to like, screw up, like how many artists do you know who have done this, that they're an art?

They're, they're loving their art, they're doing great, they get a job.

They start having to do their art and they're like i should do my art.

And then their love for their art goes away.

Anything that you tell yourself you should do, the love of it just starts going away.

How do you protect yourself?

Because there are things that the difference between knowing this is the next area for growth and progress that I could put myself into yeah uh, that is a zone of proximal development.

It's not what i'm doing right now.

I don't even know if i want to do this thing because it's kind of new.

It's on the you know, outside of the orbit of what i've done.

Yeah uh, how do you know the difference between that and this?

Tyrannical should you know?

This is like part of the journey.

It's a good part of progress.

It's a.

It can be the journey to the next want.

Yeah, the crazy thing is that oftentimes, even inside of a should, you can look and find the want in it.

Right, so I should go to the gym.

Well, what's the want?

Well, the want is to feel healthy.

The want is to be skinny.

There's like some want behind it.

Okay.

You can even take that to the next level.

What makes you want to be skinny is, oh, I want to be attractive.

I want to be loved.

Okay, cool.

There's actually a real want there.

You can find the want that's beneath that should.

And then you have a lot more options.

Okay.

So let's just say it's, I want to feel good.

Well, going to the gym is one way to feel good.

Playing pickleball is another way to feel good.

Hiking a mountain, being in nature is another way to feel good.

Being with friends is another way to feel good.

So all of a sudden I have these options that open up.

And typically when we're in a should, it's a very narrow doorway.

So, for instance, when I was trying to go from not working out to working out, instead of saying I should go to the gym, I said what are 20 things that I really want to experiment with as far as working out goes?

And I want, I want to see what pickleball is like.

I want to see what salsa dancing is like.

And I just, and then I did all those 20 things in like side of a month.

And then I found out, wow, I really like pickleball.

I like, I just, I don't need to be motivated.

I don't, I just, I'm calling people, Hey, want to play pickleball?

Oh, cool.

Now I'm working out and I'm doing something I want to do.

Hmm.

So it's just finding the want that's in there and then following it, rather than listening to the voice in the head say should and agreeing with it, because then you're forcing yourself and we don't respond well when people are trying to change us, including us.

So much of today's world is focused on efficiency and optimization.

But efficiency without awareness is just a faster way to burn out.

Yeah, that's coming from Silicon Valley.

Um.

So what I notice is that people are interested in getting first of all efficiency, typically in our society, and work means faster.

It doesn't mean efficient.

So typically like if I have a car, there's a car behind us, the Ferrari.

That's not an efficient car.

Nobody would call that an efficient car, but it's very fast car.

So efficiency I think is is better defined is more about how much energy you're putting into it to get it done than it is about how quickly you're getting it done.

But we really think about it as far as speed goes.

And so if we are trying to become quite quicker at everything right that idea of efficiency, without knowing why that's the case, then you're just going to burn out.

So I'm talking to a CEO yesterday who's interested in having me coach him, and we were having the discussion about how it's one fire to the next fire, to the next fire, to the next fire, and how all this has to get done really quickly, and so we spent some time to talk about hiring people and how, if he hired four great people, how many fires would be left.

What makes you not do it?

Well, because i have to get this stuff done quickly.

I have to be efficient about, you know, making sure that we land this contract.

We do this thing, I'm like.

So you're ignoring the thing that makes you more efficient for the immediate efficiency.

And that's what I mean.

And he's going to burn out that way.

Whereas if he looks at the bigger efficiency of hiring those people.

And so we're just sitting there basically just getting dopamine fixes.

Sent the email, sent the email, sent the email, sent the email.

We're not thinking about.

Can I send that email so I never have to send another email on that topic again?

Yeah.

Can I do this task in such a way that I don't have to do 10 more steps?

I only have to do five.

And I think that's the difference between mastery and competence and mastery.

Competence is I can get it done effectively.

Mastery is I can get it done with very little effort effectively.

What are the misconceptions people have about overwhelm?

I feel like that's a pretty endemic sensation.

Yeah.

A lot of people.

Typically, it just means emotions haven't moved.

Oftentimes, it also means that there's something that you know needs to be done that you're not doing.

And those are typically the two things that create that level of overwhelm.

And we think it's because there's so much going on.

Oh my gosh, I got this going on and this going on and this going on.

But what's typically happening is I'm really excited.

I'm not allowing myself to feel it.

I'm really scared.

I'm not allowing myself to feel it.

I'm really angry.

I'm not allowing myself to feel it.

And so that, so we're cycling quick.

Our minds are cycling quicker and quicker and quicker as we discussed before.

And then on top of that, there's things that I know I should be doing that I'm not doing.

And that doesn't mean that could be, I know I should be resting.

I know I should be having that hard conversation.

I know I should be firing that person.

It doesn't mean always like I know I should be doing the thing, that my voice in my head is saying you should do this, you should do this, you should do this.

Is that why people always feel like they never have enough time?

Overwhelm seems to create that as a symptom of lack of time, which is kind of the weirdest thing in the world because we always have the exact amount of time.

I was typically, I was just.

I was having this realization yesterday and it kind of flipped me out.

My life has gotten really busy recently.

And, and then there was a, um, a moment where I had like three days where something canceled.

And so I had free time and I found myself doing stuff that I haven't done in months, because I and I was like why am I doing this?

Like, why am I like, I got so busy that there was things that I, wasn't doing.

And now I'm realizing I'm doing them but they're not necessary, because for the last three months I didn't do them and everything worked out just fine.

And so there's this weird phenomenon that happens, which is when we have what we think is a compression of time.

It just requires you to do the most important things if you're going to be effective.

And so the other way to look at the world is to say I'm just going to do the most important things, that all the time I'm not going to do the little stuff.

So typically what we're doing is we're saying I don't want chaos to reign in my life, so I'm going to do a whole bunch of things, get a lot of dopamine hits, of doing those little things so that I don't have to feel that chaos.

But if you're okay feeling the chaos, then you can constantly just focus on doing the most important thing.

And one of the things that I've noticed of super hyper successful CEOs is that they are really good at focusing on the two or three most important things and letting chaos reign everywhere else if necessary.

They know that's the thing that if that domino falls, everything else is taken care of.

I'm going to spend almost all my time pushing on that domino.

I suppose that's a skill to be able to discern.

It's a skill to discern it.

It's a skill to be able to be okay with the chaos.

There's a book called The One Thing, and he talks about this pretty well.

He talks about.

If you're going to focus on the one thing, then you have to be okay, because some, some part of your world is going to go into chaos.

And what I noticed is when people can't handle the chaos, they, they can't focus on the one thing.

Joe Hudson, ladies and gentlemen, Joe, you're great.

You're so fantastic.

I'm uh, let's say, intrepidation for what the next few years is going to look like for you.

Uh, from book to YouTube, to the courses, to everything else.

It's, uh, I'd strap in if I was you.

I think you scared me the other day on that one.

You got me really good was you were talking about what it's like for you as fame has increased and how the Amazon truck guy will come out and be like great, great podcast.

He's like.

But you said to me, in your world though, the Amazon truck guy is going to jump out and say Hey, can you coach me real quick?

Yeah.

No one comes up.

No one comes up to me expecting anything other than just like dude.

Love that episode with Charlie recently.

Oh, so good to see you talking to Huberman again or whatever.

Whereas with you, it's going to be like, I have this problem with me and my girlfriend.

I got this day, that ancestral trauma.

Oh my God, Charlie, please go ahead and start praying in front of you.

Well look, you know I couldn't.

One of the very good counter signals that you put out as a part of the time that i've worked with you and everything else is like a i am not your guru type sort of energy for sure, and i think that's very important because there are a number of people who are uh without the legitimacy of you claiming to have it.

So to have the legitimacy of you claiming not to have it, i think is good when it comes to the bullseye of uh focused on the mission, not on the person.

Also super, it just doesn't work the other way, meaning like if the person isn't their own authority, it doesn't work like you can't you you, we can't, we can't for a little while, but it doesn't sustain to like give your authority to somebody else, and so if someone's trying to take your, trying to be your authority, it's a really really, really good sign not to trust them.

Art of accomplishment youtube podcast courses, everything else.

Thank you, fuck you, joe hudson on twitter.

I appreciate you, man.

Until next time.

Pleasure, pleasure.

If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the modern wisdom reading list.

It is 100 books that you should read before you die the most interesting, life-changing and impactful books i've ever read, with descriptions about why i like them and links to go and buy them.

And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillxcom books.

That's chriswillx.com books.

[Living with an Open Heart: Navigating Vulnerability, Boundaries, and Emotional Freedom]-[#1045 - Joe Hudson - How to Take Control of Your Emotions]

📋 Summary

The Courage to Live with an Open Heart

The Anatomy of Patterns and Mapping

Reframing Depression and Emotional Resistance

Boundaries: Power Struggles vs. Self-Care

The Efficiency of Wants over Shoulds

Conclusion: The Path to Congruence

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Living with an Open Heart: Navigating Vulnerability, Boundaries, and Emotional Freedom]-[#1045 - Joe Hudson - How to Take Control of Your Emotions]

📋 Summary

The Courage to Live with an Open Heart

The Anatomy of Patterns and Mapping

Reframing Depression and Emotional Resistance

Boundaries: Power Struggles vs. Self-Care

The Efficiency of Wants over Shoulds

Conclusion: The Path to Congruence

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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