#813 - Joe Hudson - The Art Of Mastering Your Emotions | Modern Wisdom

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show.

My guest today is Joe Hudson.

He's a coach, entrepreneur, and a podcast toast.

We are often our own harshest critics.

Everyone knows that it's important to be kinder and more understanding to ourselves, yet this is a challenge.

So, what is a more reliable route to developing self-compassion, stopping negative self-talk, and getting out of our own way?

Expect to learn what the real matrix is, how to identify thoughts that might be holding you back, why feeling superior only works if you're suppressing emotions, why people struggle so much to connect with their inner world, how to reduce negative self-talk, what self-discovery actually comes from, and much more.

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Check out. I have been falling in love with your work over the last few months.

I feel like it's been very timely for me as I try to feel feelings and tap into emotions and you're the guy.

So, I've scraped some of my favorite tweets and quotes from you that I've picked up and I want to go through some of those with you.

First one. How to see the matrix?

One, name an unwanted emotion in your life.

Two, list the ways you try to avoid it.

Three, notice that every way you try to avoid it, you actually create it.

Yeah. Yeah, I call that, I have an episode on that one.

It's called the Golden Algorithm and it's basically this idea that the emotion that we don't want to feel is the emotion that we invite in the exact way that we try to avoid it.

So, the perfect example of this in my life was I had this experience of being emotionally abandoned as a kid and so I would just keep on finding emotional abandonment everywhere I looked.

It was like the guy who's like close their eyes at a bar, throw a dart behind their back and they're always going to hit the wounded woman and they're going to be attracted to one another and that's how it's going to work.

It was so I always created this abandonment and so when I thought it was coming, when I saw the abandonment even though maybe it wasn't there, I would harden up.

I would like get angry or something which of course creates more likelihood of abandonment.

So, I would try to not feel it and in the way of not feeling it or I would really try to care take somebody and that would create resentment in them and then they would abandon me.

So, every way that I try to avoid it, I was recreating it in my life.

That just goes across the board everywhere.

So, whether I'm working with a CEO who's trying to avoid their shame, I can guarantee that they will do something to create shame and then have to deal with it in the terms of their company for instance.

So, this is one of the realities our life and it's an amazing thing because intellectually you can get it but what I think people don't get is you can just literally look at every single place where you have pain and you can backwards engineer it.

You can go backwards and go, oh hey, right?

So, what am I trying to avoid?

How am I avoiding it? How that's how I'm creating it and backwards engineer it?

Why is it so reliable that the way you try to avoid it creates it?

To me, it doesn't seem from first principles like that could be the case.

You could avoid it in a way that doesn't create it.

Yeah. You know, there's the famous saying that which we resist persists.

So, it's acting under the same principle.

So, it's not that, it's not that.

So, for instance, if it has to have the emotional catch of like you really don't want it and so therefore the way to change the algorithm is to actually go, I can't wait to be abandoned.

I can't wait for someone to be angry at me.

I can't wait to feel scared.

I can't wait to have anxiety and then fall in love with those emotional experiences and then the pattern all goes away.

The thing that creates it isn't the fact that you're like, oh, that's not something that I want.

It's the fact that you're avoiding it.

It is the, oh, I don't want to feel that.

So, think about it in a workout context.

If you never want to feel challenged physically, you are going to be challenged physically.

You, on the other hand, you're like, I like to be feel challenged and therefore you're going to have a longer, happier lifespan of not being challenged physically.

So, any kind of complex ecosystem and I think there's a great quark in the Jaguar which was written by a Nobel scientist.

I think that's the name of it.

It talks about this and so does, you know, who else talks about it is the guy who did Black Swan.

No, same talent. Yeah. And he talks about basically like every, every kind of complex ecosystem, it needs to be challenged.

It needs to have like a certain kind of like a, like it needs to have the strain for just to stay healthy.

And so it's the same thing.

It's the same principle in action.

If you are not leaning into the difficult emotions and learning to enjoy them and finding the gifts in them, then you're just, you're inviting them in the same way you would be with pain, physical pain.

I've got an example story that involves a horse from last Saturday.

So, I went to a retreat called Mirav Val.

Mirav Val. So there's one out here in Austin.

And for the people that don't know, it's pretty cool.

It's like a sort of holistic health, five-star hotel, meets a meditation retreat, kind of all rolled into one.

And they've got a million different activities.

One of them was equine therapy.

Whitney Cummings told me that courses can sense when you're stressed and you can't be angry around a horse and stuff.

And I thought, this sounds cool.

Fuck it. Equine. I don't have horses on hand.

I'll do equine therapy.

I kept calling it horse meditation and the instructor lady really didn't like the fact that I kept calling it horse meditation.

Equine therapy just seemed too wonky for me.

It's like called it horse meditation.

She introduced you to all the horses.

For the people that haven't been around a horse, these things are huge.

Those sounds like such a, and people that are around horses will go, duh, yeah, of course.

These things are massive, right?

And it is intimidating, especially for the bigger ones to be around them.

Anyway, I found myself sort of quite calm after a little while.

They were all super chill.

You know, they just stand there and look.

They're not doing anything.

They, they, it doesn't even look like they're breathing or alive.

If it wasn't for the fact that they were warm, you wouldn't even know it was alive.

Anyway, the lady was, um, well, educated, sort of psychologically.

She definitely done her work.

And we go back into the circle afterward, and she asks what came up.

And there was one point where you had to try and get the horse to lift its leg.

And you sort of do this by putting your hand on its upper shoulder, and then you sort of ride it down the leg and you give it a little tug.

And if it wants to, it'll show you a tooth, and you can use it to clean the hoof with a little pick thing.

And I noticed that as I was approaching the horse, I wanted the horse to like me.

I really, really wanted this horse to like me.

And I'd already set up a success failure algorithm in my mind that if I couldn't get the horse to do this thing, which the lady had said, you know, it's about being calm, and it's about asking for this from the horse.

I thought, you know, if this horse doesn't lift its foot, I mean, that's just classic me.

That's such a comment on how I am as a person.

I'm like, you know, do not use a horse lifting its foot as the barometer for whether you're a piece of shit or not.

Alas, here I am, like hoping that the horse likes me.

And I mentioned it. I mentioned it to the group.

It's really stuck with me.

Like it's kind of a silly example.

But I think, um, name and unwanted emotion in your life.

I want people to like me.

List the ways that you try to avoid it.

And like that certainly in childhood and probably now in adulthood, um, it is definitely something that I could see.

It just happened to manifest in the middle of horse meditation.

Yeah. Yeah. There is funny that you said that somebody recently was watching me do the kind of quick coaching that I do in courses.

And we have some videos on them.

And and she was, she was a horse whisperer, you know, someone who basically works with like unmanageable horses.

And and she's like, oh, you do what I do with people.

It was an amazing. I was like, what?

Like how and and and for her, the whole thing was like that attunement, like the energetic attunement or like nervous system attunement.

I said, it's a better way to say it.

Like a nervous system attunement to the person.

And and there's no place you can see that more clearly with like, then raising kids, if in them when you ever raise them, uh, you walk into the house stressed and your kid will take like one or two chances to try to like get you unstressed.

If you miss them, they're going to be stressed.

It's only going to make the whole situation a shit.

Um, kids are like horses.

So she's pure Hudson. All right.

Next one. Next one. The spiritual path for so many is just another way to say, I am not good enough yet.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, from my that comes from that comes from my own experience.

Uh, you know, I got into meditation.

So my story was that I had a meditation retreat.

I didn't do it because of any reason, but I thought it would be a challenge.

I had this like amazing experience in this meditation retreat.

And then I spent a whole bunch of time trying to get it back.

And so meditation started to started for me as a like a form of management, which is absolute fucking hell.

Like, I was trying to manage myself into becoming better.

And and that's just like that, that has to start with the assumption that I'm not good enough.

And so so much of this work is like, oh, there's this deep shame somewhere that says, I'm not good enough.

And I need to fix my broken somehow.

And I need to fix myself, whether it's and they call itself improvement, right?

Where the other way of looking at it would be, there's an oak tree like at what point in its life, what point of its evolution of its development is it not perfect?

It just like it wouldn't particularly make sense.

There's a nature is to evolve is to grow is to change, but it doesn't make us bad before something that is essentially wrong that we have to fix.

As a matter of fact, that concept is what slows down the process probably more than anything else I see these days is people thinking that there's something broken with them instead of just noticing that there's evolution that wants to happen.

I have been kind of obsessed with I think this question, which is this balance between being and becoming this sort of delicate interplay between wanting to leave it all out on the field of play in life to get toward the end of it and think, yeah, like I fucking did it.

Like I did things. I tried my best.

I strived. I worked hard and I'm proud of the outcomes I got whilst also not wanting to whip yourself through the experience so much that you don't ever end up enjoying it.

And I did this series of live shows last year and probably the most common one of the most common questions.

One of them was I don't know if the thing I'm doing in my life in the direction I'm going into is the right one.

And the other one was I know that happiness is to be found in the present but I keep working very hard and kind of castigating myself with a tyrannical inner voice for the future.

And this the spiritual path for so many is just another way to say I am not good enough yet this sort of perpetual.

I also have this theory.

I'd love to get your take on this that personal development assuages are low-salt esteem because it convinces us that we're not the finished product.

So we don't ever have to actually judge ourselves.

It's like yeah, I might be a piece of shit today.

I might not have any self-esteem right now but I know that I'm moving forward.

Therefore tomorrow or next month or next year maybe all of this development and the trajectory that I'm on will mean that I'm finally I finally feel good enough to love myself.

Yeah. So when I hear that, I want to give you my opinion on the second thing you asked but the the first thing that struck my my attention was a difference between being and becoming.

If one can't exist without the other there's no difference.

So the idea that there's a difference is just a fully just conceptual.

You once talked about this thing you called thought superposition or something like that where you had a negative superposition.

Yeah so cognitive superposition being and becoming and hold them both for a moment and then that whole duality just kind of disappears.

So that's the first one like that and I don't think there's really any way that you would not strive.

Like there's no way that I could convince you to not strive that's because that's part of like how you're wired and I don't know any human being that doesn't like isn't drawn to evolution to evolving.

The question is can you you know how much can you enjoy that process that's really the question and one of the best ways to enjoy the process is not to believe that there's like that there's an end right that that's part of like the problem with a lot of a lot of versions is that they they they sell you an end that doesn't really ever exist.

There's no you know there's no billionaire well there are actually some but but there's no time where you're like that's enough money or that's enough power or that's enough spiritual progress.

It doesn't work like that.

The there's just a choice that you're making that you get to make in any time about how you want to spend your time and how much you want to enjoy it and the for me I really care about efficiency and enjoyment is just like this amazing way to measure efficiency.

So if I'm driving a car and and it's a really really really fast car I don't call that an efficient car.

The efficient car is a car that moves from A to B with the least amount of energy and somehow another like when we think about our lives efficiency is speed but if you really think about like oh I just did that thing and I came out with more energy than when I went in I did just did that thing and I had so much enjoyment of it that I left feeling freaking great that to me is like

that's efficiency and and that's the enjoyment that enjoyment is a great measurement of it and so what I notice is the more I focus on my enjoyment and not just me like people I coach people in the in the courses I do I'll see so many people who are stuck and I'll just be like yeah just focus on the enjoyment like make that the priority and their productivity just goes off

the charts because everything else will be you swimming downstream from that.

That's right yeah so it's like I would say that the question you ask being and becoming is not and it's not a real question and or it's a real question but it's it's not a real context in the and the answer so to speak would be enjoy like how do you enjoy this journey the most and that rather than you know how do you get there because there's no there the presumption is that the process

of becoming can't be enjoyable and the process of being is enjoyable that's the dichotomy right in the process of becoming I posit an ideal I can pair myself to that ideal I find myself lacking that drives me to become better like that's that's the assumption right that there is no becoming that is enjoyable right yeah that's it that's right and the other assumption in there

that's baked in is that if you just focus on being you're not going to become which is just like yeah yeah right every meditation teacher in the world will tell you well any good one is going to tell you that's bullshit because we're just going to ask you to sit here and be and then that's what's going to help you become you know so both of them both of the two assumptions

are false what do you think about that idea of I'm not yet the finished product therefore my low self esteem and like subconscious self hatred is it a swaged yeah that's the second part so I think the thanks for reminding me of that yes so I my experience of that is the low self esteem is there's nothing that the critical voice in the head says to you is true and so you can do

anything you want to do but until you see that fact you're you're you're fucked so not to say there's a truth to it but there is no fucking truth and so one of the main things that the critical voice in the head says if I wasn't here you would just sit around and drink beer and and fuck off and so you need me like that as an example would be one of the things almost everybody's

critical voice in the head says so great I'll tell you what I'm gonna sit I'm gonna be your boss for the next like three months and every two minutes I'm gonna tell you I'm gonna criticize you and then you tell me that's fucking effective you tell me that you get more motivated tell me that you're like excited to be doing the work that you're doing that you want to work

with me that you need me there's no way you're gonna do it everything that the critical voice in the head says that there's a falseness to it and and when you can see that it's like the cognitive superposition again it's to me it's not holding two realities is true at the same time it's holding all of them is true and not true at the same time and so when the critical voice

in your head goes off and you can just see like oh you're just scared that that's when this this the safety comes there is no there is no self-esteem that gets built by listening to their critical voice in the head and doing what it says it doesn't work if it worked we would all be fucking very very have a lot of great self-esteem but that's not the case the more that that thing

is loud and brutal the less self-esteem that people have Robert Glover said a couple of weeks ago that uh he knows a very few people who have managed to convince themselves to change from a place of hatred like just self self hatred is a potent but toxic fuel especially if you use it for too long absolutely yeah that's that's a great way to say it that's lovely yeah it's

also just I mean think about this like mental experiment for a second you're now gonna you're stuck on an island and you're the only people there are saints you and a whole bunch of saints and the thing about them saints is they're not perfect people or anything like that they just love you unconditionally they love themselves each other and you unconditionally

you've got food you've got shit you've got everything you need but you're stuck there and you're gonna be stuck there for a decade when you walk out how how are you what's changed about you and yet the critical voice in the head says no well you can't love yourself yet you've got a blah blah blah before you deserve that but we all know that if we were on that island we would walk

out just completely different we would be the thing that we hope to become with all that criticism that's it that's the mental experiment if you run it you just see it right away like oh yeah that you're not gonna get to where you want to go through being a really shitty boss to yourself just rounding out your idea of enjoyment as a measure of efficiency or I guess energy

return as a measure of efficiency an enjoyment as kind of the the signal that tells you when it's working right you say when I when I do things with enjoyment I use very little energy and often get energy from the doing correct is that so is it your position that leaning into enjoyment will not only help you to by design enjoy the process but also get you better results

on on the backside is that as simple as it is yes as simple as it is I think there's there's a there's a subtlety to it though there's two ways to enjoy yourself one is choose what you do that's enjoyable but the other one is learn how to enjoy whatever you're doing so right now you and I are having a conversation if we both said let's how do we enjoy this 10% more of this conversation for me

immediately I put some attention into my body I'm like I feel more deeply connected with you you went and drank some water you like oh you took care of yourself and so there's that too so there's an enjoyment one part of the process of enjoyment is how do I not change anything and just enjoy it more and the other one is how do I do the things that are enjoyable or do things

in a way that are enjoyable and and so you have to hit it on both those levels if you only try to do the things that are enjoyable your fucked because that's actually an avoidance and that avoidance is going to bring the thing you're trying to avoid to bear so so it has to be like both of those two things to get there one of the most common answers around the friends that are kind

of my level at the moment when we're talking about sort of what do you want to do with you you know everyone's in their 30s some degree of sort of financial and professional freedom and a lot of the you ask you know what is it that you're hoping to really do the most common by the most common answer by far is I just don't want to do things I don't want to do anymore like that's

the most common and that is the either the first or the second version it's um limit gearing your life and the activities within your life toward things that you enjoy more so but you're right that there there is a whole other world of first off inevitable things like you're going to have a kid the kid's going to go to hospital like what are you going to do you're going

to be sat in the waiting room for six hours and no one's going to give you an answer you that you need that skill set because yes there's a kind of fragility to an over optimized enjoyable life because you never actually end up building the skill to be able to enjoy things that aren't enjoyable by design but I think that on the other side um there is like a Puritan work ethic

that a lot of people in the UK will resonate with where uh life being enjoyable or choosing things that are enjoyable feels like you're undeserving of it your needs your desires you know you shouldn't have them subjugate them who the fuck are you this you know that's that's not for you um suffer and be and be grateful for it yeah yeah if you don't if you don't suffer you're

not actually you don't you don't deserve it that kind of thing yeah both of them are super toxic I mean if you look at like who like who's least likely to recover from alcoholism they're going to be the an addiction it's going to be independently wealthy people who can who don't have to there's no right yeah there's no flaming field so to speak there's no and you see this with I

mean because I work with a lot of billionaires you see this trap that happens where it's like oh I can buy myself out of anything that I don't enjoy and and there's a con there's a consequence to that uh the perfect example that I think about is when I meet somebody who's like dedicated more than five years their life to caring for somebody like a mom that has Alzheimer's

or a kid who's you know born with some sort of thing that requires them to be cared for full-time there's a softness to those people I can recognize it like I I can say to them oh wow who did you care for for so long I can see that in you it's the only way you're going to get that some version of that is the only way you're going to get that that kind of softness that that piece

that they have like I know many people meditative for years you don't have that like there's you know I hitchhiked up to to Alaska which is a really hard thing to do I have experiences that I could only get that way and that's that was extremely uncomfortable for like we would sit on the roadside for like at the time like five hours straight like waiting for someone to

give us a ride um so there's just something that like if you are avoidant of things that you don't enjoy there's something really toxic about that and if you think that you have to you can enjoy life and so it feels like it's the solution to that problem is how do I enjoy what's happening right now?

Are there any cues or mantras or practices that you fall back on when you think what are the sort of fundamental components of maximizing enjoyment yeah so so the way that like the the work that I do in the world I try to create as much of it as a set of experiments right so because I don't nobody really believes like I'm going to have a talk with you now we're going to have ideas

there's maybe maybe two that resonates with somebody who's listening to this thing they're going to be that school maybe they remember them maybe they don't that's kind of what intellectual understanding gets you whereas if you do an experiment and you run it you're going to understand stuff very differently and so and and because I had massive authority issues

when I was in my 20s I didn't I didn't want to listen to anybody so I just like ran these experiments and um so the experiment I ran is how do I I the first thing I experiment I ran was I'm going to go two weeks and not do anything I don't enjoy and somewhere like on day seven or eight I was sitting in front of the garbage can it smelled like shit I did not want it in the house but I

did not enjoy taking out the garbage and I just sat there I was sitting there just sitting there like what the fuck do I do I have I have committed to this thing and I was like mmm I'm like the only way that I'm going to get through this is to figure out how to enjoy taking the garbage out mmm and and that was like the first lesson to me that oh enjoyment was a state of mind as much

as anything else and and so how do how do I enjoy things and then that became this new skill set so to me the most of my mantra is coming questions and because the questions leave the mind open instead of like closed and it leaves the mind and wonder so for me I the and would be the mantra if I wouldn't call that but would be how do I enjoy this 10% more just a little bit more and then

that just builds over time it's just like working out like you're not going to get you're not going to get all buffed and ripped by you know saying how do I get to 100% right now it's like how do I just like increase the weights a little bit yeah I I had a very similar conversation to this one a year ago with Sam Harris and he gave me inspiration for a realistic path to enlightenment

which I think is way way better than most of the sort of permanent non-dual blissed out ideas that we presume you need to go to a cave for and his was just stringing together a few moments of peace throughout the day you know okay you know if I can have my my my mind and my feet rest in the same spot just just three times today okay and then maybe you know in a couple of weeks

maybe that starts to become five whatever triggers you want I've got posted notes around the house and when you realize that just that sequence back to back to back and it's the same as this it's just like are you going to be able to make everything permanently enjoyable no probably not but what would this be like if it was a bit more fun what would this be like if it was a little

bit more enjoyable if it was a little bit more easy yeah yeah there's also just to give you a couple of other ones in that like that to kind of dovetail off of what mr.

Harris said is like here's like a really cool trick it's like you're looking at me we're peeping hanging out we're just having our conversation something that makes my life more enjoyable is the question what's looking out behind my eyes so if you like but keep your eyes open and look like and we're having the conversation you still understand everything I'm saying

but you just have this question oh what's looking at yeah I see the smiley yeah it's just like what like that just that thing can create the peace in the moment and and it doesn't even require you to like go off and sit down and blah blah blah blah like there's these little tricks like that paying attention to your inner ear when you're listening to somebody it creates

like this presence in the conversation and a lot of the work that I do is how do you have something like meditation relationally like how is it that like when we're in a conversation when we're connecting with people and we're parenting or being a boss or whatever we're doing how does that become our practice rather than our practice is something that we do and then

we try to like maintain it during life it doesn't fucking work it didn't work for me it works for some doesn't work for me yeah taking meditation off the cushion as it's called has been a bit of a difficulty for me I almost I almost feel like I'm Bruce Wayne and Batman with you know where I who I am on a morning when I'm sat down a journal breathwork meditate read get up and go

about my day and there's that me and then there's the sort of dopamine caffeine, neutropic fuel version me fight fires throughout the day and reads things but reads them with a purpose of kind of bring them back up blah blah blah it's very very very interesting I want to come back to it I want to get some more of your questions but I got another one here so letting go doesn't

happen by telling yourself to let go letting go happens when it is ready yeah yeah that's a how to explain that one I would say there's this there's this thing that I do where like I ask people to put their hands together like this and I and I say okay try to pull your pinkies apart and so go ahead but that's doing it I don't want you to do it I want you to try to do it right and then

feel that whole feeling in your body that in that feeling of trying and then just feel the opposite of it yeah so that so we think that we can get to where we want to go through effort and there's a but there's another place that is like that but the idea of surrender or the idea of receiving whatever words work for you that allows for a whole secondary thing to get done and sometimes

that's far more effective than effort and so I mean like so like when I'm lifting weights as I keep on using weights example because I know you're you're into it but like when you're really doing like a really good set of reps there's the effort part of the rep and then there's the stretch part of the rep if you try to apply effort to the stretch you fuck the stretch like

it's about the up you know it's like that moment where the weight is hanging and it's like stretching out the arms ripping the muscles and it's a similar thing that there's there's something that you that has to be received into or surrendered into for it for it to be effective and work and so what I notice is a lot of people try to let go and that you it doesn't work well

that was you right finding this peak experience in meditation and then that's right gripping tightly onto the desire which immediately creates this success failure with and the entire it was your first one first meditation right yeah first time meditation you had no yeah that's right yeah that's right and and then a thousand other times you know like the too much

effort a thousand other times yeah I mean that's fueled by the critical voice in the head right dude I think about this all the time so um there's basically no scenario in life that I've ever looked at or at least for maybe like the last 10 years where I haven't thought more effort will not make this better everything single thing that is put in front of me if I just work

harder apply more cognitive horsepower focus better if I just lean in if I grip more tightly yeah this thing will work and I I kind of have a um okay so can you show me then how that works with enjoyment fucking enjoy it fucking enjoy it okay you're gonna enjoy this it's like the it's like the it's like the sort of slightly outraged mother on a subpar holiday telling her

children we're having fun why are just why are you having fun why aren't you smiling yeah yeah yeah smile but this is fun this is fun um but yeah I mean just thinking about that that sort of gripping so tightly to things and and assuming that that is the outcome that you're trying to achieve assuming that that's the thing on the other side of it uh I've got to it's not fully

fleshed out so I might I might bumble this but I'll see if I can get it across to you I got the kind of um building out a uh an idea about hard work and about why it's so seductive in the modern world the way that I think is that most people most advice is charitably given to people who probably do need to work harder many more people perhaps on average need tightening up than loosening

off therefore the advice the David Goggins jokka willink you know stay hard get up early and and stop hitting snooze and doing all the rest of it maybe does on average improve the lives of most people but there is a very big cohort of people for whom that gripping more tightly mentality pushes them further into the exact thing that they need to stop doing that they're already

trying to control all of the outcomes they're gripping so tightly to all of the things that they're doing and um I think the reason that hard work is so seductive is that it reliably makes most things a bit better but can actually for a very big number of people over the longer term make it way worse.

Yes I would I would put a like a slight spin on that I don't disagree with what you're saying and then I would spin it a little bit so I would say the thing that's seductive about like like let's work harder is or like let me inspire you to work harder is one is it rhymes with the voice in the head so that like it's like I believe so if you think about the voice in the head as a tyrant

most of us relate to the voice in the head like we're you know like they're they're the absolute person who believes in them right like so to pick whatever political figure you like think about the person that you hate on the other side the the person that the sorry think about the political figure that you hate and then think about the person who buys into everything

they say that tyrant is the voice in our head and we are the person who believes everything they say and so when somebody says you need to work harder they're like yes check I know I needed to work harder and be telling myself as a piece that's so good it's it's like a like psychological confirmation bias yeah an internal confirmation bias so that's half of the thing

the other half is this feeling of empowerment most people in our society feel very disempowered they feel like they're scared of the consequences of the actions that they want to take they're scared of the consequences of following their truth and so they feel very disempowered and so this gives them a feeling of oh I I I can have empowerment and so it's very sexy

and very and the empowerment side I think is absolutely right like that is actually you need to have that there's probably one agency you have agency over the outcomes yeah but once you actually figured out that you actually have agency and empowerment then the move is love then the move is learning to love yourself love others be unconditional in your love and and what you

start to find out is that the unconditional love and empowerment they can't really exist without one another you can't really what what we call love that doesn't have empowerment is like co-dependence it's like how do I make you happy so that I can feel safe it's a fear based action and empowerment without love is actually just power and there's you'll never get

enough of it and it can always be taken from you and so it's really it's like those two things become one eventually but so so so I would say that love would help anybody on that whole spectrum but the sexy thing is and the thing that they that they are going to go for is that you can be better you can be empowered dude you blow my mind all of these are a really really great all

right next one the desire to be special can only exist if you don't know who you are wow man you've been on my Twitter picking picking all of the headlines today yeah yeah yeah fanta yeah so there's this idea that basically if you're trying to be special then that comes from a place of low self-esteem or that comes from a place of and of wanting to improve wanting to be

better and if you actually know who you are that like that it you just couldn't you just couldn't it wouldn't it's not a possibility there's a great Tibetan saying if you're or if you think somebody's better than you then that's comparative mind that's misery if you think somebody's beneath you that's comparative mind that's misery if you think somebody's equal

to you that's comparative mind and that's mystery and our society is falling a little bit into the equality thing now but but if I'm not better if I'm not worse and I'm not and I'm not equal then I'm special and so then then I know who I know that would be me knowing who I am it was as long as I'm in a comparative mind I don't I can't know who I am that's that's basically what it's

pointing to why would you be special if you're not better was or equal well I mean that makes me if I can't be better than anybody or worse than I have to be unique I have to be I have to be something that's not those things so I read that I read the desire to be special can only exist if you don't know who you are I said maybe maybe it maybe it does does dovetail that basically

the desire to be special is kind of a fruitless pursuit because by virtue of the fact that the chance of you being here is so infinitesimally fucking unlikely and that no one else will ever be born in the exact same space at the exact same time with your genetics and your experiences and that the most that you can ever hope to know of any other person even your best friend

or wife that you've known for your entire life and shared everything with is one trillionth daily of what you get to see of yourself the sort of specialness is imbued in your own experience the depth of experience you have of yourself is so asymmetric compared with that that you get from other people that the desire to be special is chasing a thing which is already

there yeah it's not what I meant by it but it's really beautiful yeah I can't disagree with that I think the way that I would say it is more like if you go back to Sam Harris that in the process of understanding yourself of what some people would call weakening you know there's the moment of I am nothing and there's the moment of I am everything and when you see yourself

clearly in that way that you are the same as every that like you and God you and nature you and humanity you are the same and when you see that you're nothing like how does the idea of not being special and or being special like how can it even exist that would be another way to say it why do you think people want to be special where do you think that drive comes from they weren't

loved as kids in a way that was deeply attuned that they were told that they had to be a value that they couldn't cry that they couldn't get angry that they whatever that that who they were was needed to be managed and so that they are looking for somebody to say I love you but then it never works out because even when you get it you become the superstar everybody loves you

but then it doesn't work out and so it's the only way it really works out is when you learn to love all those parts of yourself and therefore love all those parts of other people say all the words I've got the word enough coming up as you say that the someone you are enough you as you are no more no augmentations no accolades no fanfare no nothing you as a child you as an adult

you are enough as this thing even the idea of enoughness seems like that is limited in some way I don't know how to explain it there's this thing that it's it's similar to you know one of the teachings that they have I think it's a mistranslation of like oh accept your emotional experience the idea is that you're supposed to accept yourself and that doesn't like that to

at least in my language that doesn't really fulfill what fulfills is welcome like I can't wait to have the experience of being abandoned I welcome it I have a quote that's joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome and and it's welcome it's not accept where you accept her children you know what I mean and who are the children

of joy the family of emotions so all of them so the more that people are willing to welcome the anger the fear the the helplessness the sadness the grief the excitement which is also incredibly hard for people to feel the more that you can welcome those and more joy just as a natural part of existence one of my favorite story it's a dark story but one of my favorite stories

is about tiger woods and his father was very tyrannical especially when he was a kid sort of this this guy who just drove tiger to be the best that he could a golf and there's a video of tiger I think he's maybe two and a half or three playing golf on some late night TV show and his dad woods during coaching and training he would racially abuse him on the golf course he would say

these white people are never going to let you let you play here you're not it like it's you're not performing well like real just heavy heavy heavy but they had a safe word like you do during rough sex and he said just if you ever need me to stop just say the E words say the E word and it'll all be over and I'll stop doing it and he never once said it throughout all of childhood

and the E word was enough terrifying man and look at what came out look at what came out you know you have a guy potentially one of the greatest golfers of all time but it's a broken human yeah yeah yeah I mean this is the right and and and then we tell the story that that's what's necessary to be the greatest of all time and it's definitely counter examples of it who like

I mean okay so to say that no human has trauma I wouldn't go that far so there's always like levels of trauma but there's not that level of trauma racially abuse on the golf course for them exactly so there's a guy I met recently he's now like a boy I'm sorry I can't I can't Trump he's a work he was with the warriors he was a really great player in the warriors and he but didn't

start playing basketball he's from Africa and now he's a newscut broadcaster I'm sorry I can't remember his name but I was at a party and I met him and his story was like I just wanted to go to college and I came from Africa and so I played basketball till my fingers bled so that I could get the scholarship and he's tells this story and he tells about like the love of his parents

and how that pursued him how that and I don't know too much about like a LeBron James but my understanding that his mother and his relationship was definitely not Tiger Woods and his father's relationship so there's definitely places where that level of trauma is not required to well this this question sort of I guess the the power of low self-esteem or the the the power

of this need is probably the thing that's obsessed me the most over the last few years because when you look at someone like Tiger and you think well you know look at what he achieved and you go okay but your definition of achievement is set the art of achievement the art of accomplishment is is so narrowly defined it's just within this very one small domain is that what you

want for your life and I'm watching um tour de France unchained on Netflix at the moment you've seen this no no no no I highly recommend watching it if you're obsessed with sort of human performance and the narrative it's like a behind the scenes kind of like that formula one uh drive to survive series yeah and um you just see these guys that are sacrificing everything

a guide died in 20 last year on the uh giro d'Italia like the the Italian one if they come off at the very least there's broken bones and the skin grafts that are needed and all sorts of stuff and this guy died at the point being if you want to become the absolute best within a narrowly defined pursuit there are a lot of weird externalities and prices and really what you're

looking at is a game of who is prepared to who is prepared to sacrifice everything else in their life the most in order to be able to win at this one thing yeah I think also so I obviously work with a lot of incredibly high performing people in the business context and and so I think with athletics I think we'd like to use that like athletics and navy seals like I think we

like to use that place and and I think that's it's true but it's also only one example of greatness is physical greatness and we're in a day it we're in a modern time where there's like you're competing with seven billion people for that particular kind of greatness and so I think and there's only five percent of the top 100 percent that are ever going to be known for their

greatness and so I think that that's a particular thing whereas something like business or art or like I'm not sure if that same kind of thing is required like I would if if I was if I wanted to bet on an artist that would go to be succeed and for me it would be the person who would like more likely enjoy their work and when I work with super high-powered CEOs my experience

is that when they start learning to enjoy what they're doing they become far more effective what's interesting is I don't think that's like I think that if you're in certain bureaucratic positions you might not rise to the ranks as quickly you may you might just leave but particularly the CEO position or the sea level position of a company that say doing more than a hundred

million and rev those folks when they when they turn that switch on it totally because they're not they're not in there they get to control a lot of their day and what they choose to do to be effective so I think there's something about the physical performance in particular that's nuanced there that it's that it's that hard-working again right it's that gripping

tightly it's the assumption that in a domain where performances are easy to quantify there are established rules around working hard and game tape and diet and sort of thinking about it three three six to five 24 seven but you're you're totally correct like if you were to look at take podcasting the best podcast is in the world and not the ones that live in breathe podcasting

they're the ones that have sufficiently interesting lives that they can actually talk about it on a podcast there's work to be done you know yeah addiction and networking and and conversational still was there also like the best biathlete in the world if I have this right I don't I was told the story I don't know if it's true but some Norwegian guy and like he sits on the couch

like six hours a day because he's like my body needs to rest if I'm going to be high performance that wouldn't surprise me but and the further that you get away from that uh into poetry into art into any any creative endeavor those those things business those things don't come about through sort of force of will even writing I know that whatever inspiration is for amateur

professionals to show up and do the work like that's true I think for the fact that most writers maybe need tightening up not not loosening off but also where does their inspiration come from their inspiration comes during the walk that they have or the nap that they needed in the middle of the afternoon yeah exactly so yeah so it's an interesting balance of like how

how tight does the string need to be in your particular profession and but there's also the question of like you said so I know plenty of people who woke up at 60 who were like I'm a billionaire I'm successful and I'm absolutely fucking miserable that's a nightmare that's I mean that's the future that everybody should feel yeah and it's and it's it's incredibly prevalent

I like I you know I have another quote that's um the problem with managing your life is that you have a life that you need to manage and and that's that's I just see that happen for folks is that they've like managed themselves into this area and now to maintain it they have to continue managing themselves and then at some point they're like that that hurts it sucks I don't

want that anymore people who repress their emotional experience are fragile they get stuck on decisions more easily and they are slower to heal from experiences why yeah so we talked about the at the beginning we talked about the matrix and the gold now algorithm so the reason that I came up with that is because I was looking for effective ways to get people out of patterns

or habits that they were in and so including myself and so what I noticed is that when people all of a sudden welcome like in my case the abandonment then the pattern stops and so the the way the way that we like if you have emotional stagnation shame is one of the best forms of emotional stagnation guilt another form of emotional stagnation judgment another form of emotional

stagnation when you don't have that emotional fluidity then you're going to start repeating these patterns over and over and over again and and so as far as the decision making one which is slightly different so there's a book 2012 book called DeCarte's Air by a neuroscientist who basically it's now become more nuanced but I'm going to do the un-newance version of it

which is basically the the the decision making part of our brain is the emotional center of our brain if you take the emotional center of the brain out of your body your IQ stays the same but your life falls apart because it takes you a long time to decide what color pen it takes you oh I've heard there was a guy there was a guy didn't you have to choose a a date for an appointment

and the interview is or whatever we're just looking at him and it took him 45 minutes because he has no value set that's right yeah so so we make emotional decisions it's really easy to see in your own life not that way but like how many motions how many decisions did you make to not feel rejected or to feel loved or to feel like a success or to not feel abandoned or rejected

you know what I mean there's so you so we make all these decisions on an emotional basis we don't make logical decisions we use logic as a way to try to figure out how we'll feel based on a decision and so so I noticed that like the the proof is in the pudding if somebody is having a hard time again decision we find out what they don't want to feel they feel the decision gets

made I cannot tell you how many people who are you know slightly depressed and feel stuck when they get angry they have absolute clarity on the other side of the anger just like boom it just they they've been black and white thinking binary thinking for you know months on a subject they get angry and then it's like a hundred percent clear so there so what we're doing

is we're trying to avoid an emotion by in the decision that we make and if we love all of the emotions we have clarity in our decision making yeah I'm okay with the fact that some people might hit me on that I'm okay with the fact that I might be abandoned I'm going to follow my truth and I'm going to be okay with the consequences which is the real empowerment that we're talking

about and so that's why and so if we it doesn't matter if you're like you know a world leader or the a billionaire with a massive thing if you're trying to avoid certain emotional experiences you know like you're predictable it's easy to beat you and and like and and you're going to be stuck in that pattern I get the sense as well that a lot of people that a high performers

rely so much on their cognitive cerebral horsepower and it's proven in the past look at all the things it's got you know great your models are my models I mean you had if you had access to my model you're your life as well yeah yeah so you know you have this very sterile approach to a decision making and to moving through life and then you're told the exact thing that you're

scared of doing you have no experience in doing yes you now to need to stop being the fourth degree black belt in this particular modality go back to being worse than a white belt like absolute beginner at this thing that you don't even have any evidence that it's going to be good okay all of this evidence from fourth degree black belt modality that says look at how fucking

impressive I am the world loves me yeah yeah that you're describing like my first meeting with a done a client yeah so so the intellect is amazing and I love it and it's really really really useful and it's not your whole intelligence so like if you my work really has an idea that there's like the mental intelligence loosely prefrontal cortex human emotional intelligence

emotional fluidity loosely mammalian and the kind of the the gut intelligence which is more like in the reptilian side of things and and if you really want to have change in change yourself you you work on all three you don't work on one or the other but most of us are highly developed in one not very developed in the other so you get a lot more transformation for the buck

focused on the place that you suck yeah so it's not abandoning the models but hey learn to go from zero to one in emotions and that's going to 10X your models as compared to you know go from 100 to 101 in your model like it's good but but eventually it's like the way I think about it is it's like three pencils with rubber bands and there's always tension between them so if one's

really low but at some point it's just you're holding more and more tension and so for me it's you have to work on all three if you want real transformation the emotional experience is just the one that is mostly abandoned by our society we've been told be logical don't have don't make emotional decisions and we've experienced emotions that's something that was bad

that made us feel out of control that hurt our relationships and so we immediately went to trying to manage them instead of learning how to harness them and instead of learning like the beauty of them and and how they actually work because they don't work rationally like how many people have I worked with you are like yeah I'm angry but it's not rational it's like yeah

that's a this fucking emotions man they are none of them are rational but they are incredibly wise if you know how to listen to them I've been big into evolutionary psychology for the last four years or so and have had a lot of conversations about relationships mating dynamics and stuff like that and I've got a blog post brewing in me about how even evolutionary psychology

that tries to be all encompassing when it comes to mating and mate selection misses the most important thing which is the phenomenon of falling in love with somebody because it's not rational and you know the way that I and all of my friends and colleagues have talked about this forever is in terms of mate value and exchanges and mate guarding and you know a male parental

uncertainty and it's you know it's this amount for that it's trading resources for safety and blood so on and so forth and you go yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's nice that's nice and I can put it on a spreadsheet and all the rest of it but what about the way it feels and you know how many times I'm I went through a break up a couple of months ago so I'm kind of slowly reintegrating

myself back into the dating scene and there's so many times I've found with friends that are dating and myself as well I'm like dude on paper this chick's amazing like so all of the tick tick tick tick tick tick all of the different things why why don't I feel like this is a something that can continue I don't I feel like this is something that works and go well because you

don't get to choose that you don't get to choose that that's not so much I'm going to argue there I think you do but it's not a short term choice so there's two thought processes one I love what you're saying about evolutionary psychology and and I have this model that I use for like emotional evolution like how we evolve emotionally and and we can get get into that because there's

so little literature done on there's like this is how motions work and this is what we can measure but there's not like here's how you develop cognitively that is out there PHA and 100 others but there's no like here's how we develop emotionally but but on the love thing so so here's what I noticed is people fall in love with the folks who have the pattern that they need

to heal in them so you had a critical mom say then there's a good chance you're going to fall in love with a critical woman and that like that's where the heat's going to be that's and I've listened to people have their first dates and I'm like you're just listing off what you're going to do to each other like it's an amazing experience if you're listening to it from that but telling

each other about themselves but they're really saying like this is how I'm going to relate with you and this is how I'm going to read it this is like we're going to just paint this all forward if you heal that stuff then you're going to be attracted to other people you're not going to be attracted to that anymore and so my experience is like a good relationship is it starts

with here's my trauma this is your trauma they're well-mated we have something to learn from each other the exact thing we're here to learn and we're both willing to do the work on ourselves to learn it and you put those two things together and you have a long-term successful relationship without them it's questionable yeah a lander but on says that on your first

date you should ask there's one question that should always be asked which is in what ways are you crazy that's a short version what you're a thing exactly are you my kind of crazy yeah yeah and I mean for me marriage was marriage and child raising where the most important spiritual practices of my life are self-development practices of my life like I like we we we turn

I just got really lucky and Tara was really the person who like when when I asked her to marry me she said yeah we're going to travel through Southeast Asia for six months together in backpacks if we can survive that we're going to see the sea therapist and we're going to do a meditation retreat if we're going to get married these were like the requirements don't it's

like you're Navy SEAL hell week but just cracked it a little bit and it was just like this beautiful thing that set the course for our relationship as a way to understand ourselves grow and to grow and then that that was always the purpose of our relationship and and the love was there and the love just is only deepened and it's no longer like a it's not like the kind of hot

love of the first three to five months but it's like so much better yeah I even had that I was on the bike this morning thinking about this idea for what evolutionary psychology gets wrong about relationships and one of the things that came up was you know describing this transition from passionate to companion systems and blah blah blah and he go yeah I know but what does

it feel like tell me what it feels like stop describing it in terms that can be written in a journal and you know I guess this is maybe where you know the limits of science actually in some ways do and maybe you need to look elsewhere maybe you need to look to art and music and and and conversation and poetry and and things like that experiences all right next one if you can't

say no easily yeah you can't be trusted why so we have this experiment we run in some of our retreats where your job is to try to get someone to do something and and at the end of it we'll ask you know was there anybody who who didn't get a no and there's always somebody where someone said yes to them so there have been impairs and somebody's like will you do this and they have to

ask you to do something you can do right there in the moment we do a push-up will you blah blah blah and somebody always doesn't say no and you'll ask him do you trust them they're like now you can't trust somebody like if they say no to you then you know they're in their truth otherwise you're like what's actually happening under there what's actually what's actually

going on for you and so it's just as simple as that I thought the quote you were going to say was if you can't say no then you can't find your yes which is also something that I say and I think they're completely related it's like if you're hanging out with somebody and your experience of them is that they're always there to please you then you can't trust them because you

don't know them you can't like because they they don't even know themselves enough they've like completely lost themselves in you and anytime that that relationship happens it always ends in resentment there's no relationship where somebody loses themselves and somebody else and there's not resentment that follows Neil Strauss last year the best quote of 2023

unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments it's a good one fucking monster that's a great quote why is it you know we're often told especially as kids but as we grow up as well about the dangers of being selfish and and and focusing on ourselves too much and that we must give so on and so forth if that's the case why do we find it so hard to make our own needs a priority

why do we subjugate our desires and the things that we need in order to please other people how do we hold these two things at the same time can you repeat that question i think i heard you but i want to make sure did you say we're told not to be selfish yeah we're growing up like stopping so selfish you know give give the toy to your little brother yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah yeah will the solipsistic narcissists and all the rest of it and yet in the same sentence were somehow often subjugating our needs our desires don't matter i don't make myself a priority please please just like me love me it's because we learn from mimicry more than we learn from what we're told and when a parent says to their kid you're being selfish

it's the parent being selfish but the parent never says to a kid you're being selfish unless they're not doing what they want them to do that's when you call a kid selfish so with the so verbally they're saying don't be selfish but the emotional system the gut system the guttural system is saying be selfish like me right now this is what adults do we're selfish as my

we're so fucking selfish we're gonna tell you we're gonna shame you because you're not doing what i want so we have that conflict inside of us and and then it just like goes everywhere in our life because we haven't actually resolved that internal conflict of oh i had a great example of this is i had a friend who was a Catholic and it had just a wonderful tradition of faith

in him but at one point he said to me he said Joe i i have a hard time knowing when i'm supposed to take care of myself or if i'm supposed to sacrifice for others and i don't know when i'm supposed to do that and i said oh oh i didn't know your god so say to masochist set up a world where there's a difference between those two things that it makes no fucking sense to me and my experience

is that when i'm truly doing what's best for me i'm also being highly compassionate for other people like there's there's very little time and i can occasionally like in business deals where it's like it's just now arbitrary about how much money is going to who the the principles of it have worked out there's a couple places like that but in almost all situations

if i'm really really taking care of myself it is also the compassionate thing to do for others.

And i include saying no.

Exactly. Almost most importantly it is saying no because then i'm not breeding a relationship of resentment.

So so and so what typically people mistake for being compassionate is like did i make the person uncomfortable it might be nice it's not compassionate at all like a compassionate act might make somebody really really uncomfortable and so usually when people are saying don't be selfish they're saying like make me comfortable and so but being actually when you're

doing what's actually best for you it's just not always going to feel good if you're doing what's actually best for other people it's not going to feel good in the moment long term it will but in the moment it isn't.

People don't want you to be perfect what they want is to feel connected with you.

Yeah yeah so that's the weird part right so i don't know how many people get uh they get they get so hung up around the axle being perfect.

First the first thing about perfection is there is no such thing there's like your idea of perfection my idea of perfection so it's an unachievable place and and if you notice with the critical voice in your head the idea of perfection it's a moving target like and typically if you really start listening closely to the voice in your head it'll tell you contradictory

things it'll say like um you know you really have to work hard if you're going to get your goals and then it'll say you're abandoning your mom and dad because you're working too hard like there'll be all these if you really like write down all the shit it says and you look for the contradiction it's amazing just like that politician we were talking about and the person's

like yeah yeah whatever you say like they're contradicting themselves all over the place as well and so and so that so since you can't hit the target you're never going to get there but somehow we think if we get it right then we'll be loved but people actually want to feel connected great products great podcasts great friendships great marriages great businesses

all are built on connection great athletic performance is built on connection to yourself to your body there's no way someone's going to have athletic intelligence without a deep connection to their body so connection is the thing that actually but somehow or another in our minds because of the voice in the head we think that perfection's going to get us somewhere it

doesn't and and if you'd literally do that work of saying okay like how do I make this podcast more connective with me and with other people it'll be a better podcast so true when I first started doing this six years ago I thought that the job of a podcast was to be this sort of ruthless indexer of information that basically the goal was to kind of extract as much wisdom

from the guest as possible and then put it on the internet like like a live version of blinkist I guess and it took I don't know probably 400 episodes for me to realize that you're much closer to a vibe architect than you are to a synthesizer or essentializer of information and the more that's one of the beautiful things about pursuits that are a little bit more artful

that there isn't perfect and that's one of the problems again of using sport as a rubric there's very tightly defined rules right we know what 300 kilos on the bar if you pick it up and I don't pick it up you win in powerlifting okay like her right that's we know exactly what that is but what does it mean to say that this was a better blog post or this is a better piece of music

what does that even mean and there's even sports stuff like bodybuilding in which it's not so much about the quantifiable metrics it's about this sort of weird like ethereal way that it's all put together into an experience and there's the the movement and there's the song choice and there's the you know the fucking color of the tiny pants all of the different bits

and pieces but yeah um first off that I love that idea of of perfection and then the second one had this idea about reverse charisma and there's this famous um story about Winston Churchill's wife I think who gets to meet the two presidential candidates for America and she says that she left the first dinner with the first one feeling like he was the smartest person on the planet

and she left the second dinner with the other saying that she felt like she was the most interesting smartest person on the planet and um yeah I realized I realized that uh what we think we want when it comes to charisma and being around a table what what we think that other people want from us is for us to be impressive and and sharp and witty and cool and funny and all of the rest

of it but when I think about the people that I like having around my dinner table the most it's not those people it's the ones that make me feel like I'm that person yeah and if you go okay well if that's how if that's what I want from other people I can just be that to other people and reverse charisma is way easier to achieve than actual charisma reverse charisma is just

being interested in the other person yeah yeah that that I think uh so much from that people don't want you to be perfect what they want is to feel connected with you yeah and that's the that's the place where I talk about love so like if you learn to unconditionally love all the parts of yourself it's really easy to unconditionally love the parts of others and so all

of that benefit of what you call reverse charisma comes with it which is really quite which is really quite sweet but it also comes with it not from a place of like oh look what I got which always falls apart like it's not like oh I've accomplished a goal it's just like life is a dream that I never thought possible coming true it's a whole different thing you know the thing

about reaching a goal and having happiness there is it's only happiness because there's a moment where you don't have a goal that you're defining yourself by that's why you get that happiness when you reach that goal but there's this other kind of goal which is like I'm not I don't define myself by what I do I do shit I do well I like it I enjoy it it's fantastic but I'm

not defined by that and then some sort of joy comes from that back to that original prompt of of of how I forgot you had a quote that you used to mind but I can't remember what it was which one the the spiritual path for so many I'm not good enough yeah exactly yeah exactly back to that quote about spiritual path being not good enough yeah one of the what my business partner

in the productivity drink that I make James took some psilocybin and sat on a cliff in Australia and this question came to him which was does the world love you for who you are off of what you do and then I told this to Mark Manson and he said he's an even harder question do you love you for who you are off of what you do and that that's really stuck with me it's a very very difficult

question to answer right you know you you almost promise you feel like you've been promised this value trade with the world if only I can be sufficiently impressive if only I can be smart or rich or sexy or successful or admirable or kind or giving or whatever the fuck it is then dot dot dot then only half the people will hate me like look at all those people have the people

hate them like it's just like yeah the story that I have that's like that is um was told to me by a guy who like started these big retreat centers his name escapes me but he is who's talking about like this near death experience he had and he had these two people walking towards him in the light and he's like oh they're gonna they're gonna judge me I'm here to be judged I wonder

if I'm good enough and when they got there and they basically looked at him and said so have you been good enough and it's like I remember how much chills it gave me at the time because it's like right yeah this is like this is the moment isn't it's there's no outside that's going to give you any kind of validation there's you know like look at look at the people of all the validation in the world

like they're in and horrific rap battles they're trying to get a horse to lift its foot up try to get a horse to lift its foot up that's right yeah so one of the big journeys that I've been doing for the last sort of seven or eight months now um facilitated through therapy uh but required by the rest of my life was trying to feel feelings properly trying to fully connect

with emotions and tap into that just from a basic level what is it about feeling feelings and emotions that caused so many of us to struggle to just get there yeah so there's a couple of things that get in the way so if you're a kid who was physically abused and I put a quarter in one hand and a key in another hand without telling you what's in what you wouldn't be able to know

because you've killed the sensations in your body enough because it was too intense for you to feel so if you had enough physical violence you can't feel your body the same way anymore so it's the same thing with emotions so like when I was a kid as an example when I was a kid I would be made fun of every time my crud and I was uh 20 something years old and I was going through

a photo album and there was a picture of me crying and I remember I was like crying my parents threw a pity party to make fun of me they even took a picture and then they put it in the photo album to be like you know see that you don't want to be that I was like oh shit that's probably why I haven't cried in like 16 years so I took the photo from the photo album I put it on my desk and I

was like I'm gonna learn how to cry again how about six months eight months later I still hadn't learned how to cry as like I didn't have any you know internet was just getting started I didn't really have any resources and so I I would go I lived in Los Angeles at the time I'd go up to 10,000 feet and then I would like hike on a trail and then I'd hike off trail so whether it

no big of me and I'd practice crying I would fake it I'd be like I'm an actor just trying to cry and I did that for like three months twice a week until finally like it broke and I could actually have authentic tears so the first one is that we just suffered some sort of abuse and that abuse could be really outward like what happened to me make it also be like every time you're

sad mom fed you every time you were boys don't cry girls don't get angry you got ignored you got you know bribed out of them whatever so so very few parents are just like oh cool I'm gonna sit with you while you're having a big emotional experience and and be in loving attention of that and attuned to you it's a very rare thing great if your parent go to get a book called listen

it's fantastic book on this and one of the greatest is the parenting yeah yeah for parenting it's also really good for CEOs do you know who it's by yeah patty whiffler yeah she's a she's a dear friend she's amazing um yeah the book is listening the the the organization is called hand in hand parenting and it'll it's really great five tools super easy to use anyways easy

to you easy to understand hard to shit to use um but this anyways so that so that's one reason is that we were emotionally abused and so we cut off the feelings of the emotion then the second reason is that and I use emotional abuse because it doesn't no one else is going to call it that but I use emotional abuse because I want to just like call it what it is which is like you

are trying to aggressively change somebody else's emotions whether it's passive aggressive aggressive you're like and then the second reason is that all of us had this experience of losing control with an emotion at some point right like I was jealous and I fucking couldn't help myself and therefore the woman left or I got so angry at this party and then I lost these

friends like we all had this experience or just I'm 12 years old I want to fucking keep myself I'm having some you know I feel so out of control and so that's the second one we have that experience in the and the natural stage of development is like okay I need to learn how to control my emotions oftentimes that second part only comes because of the first part meaning like

I have two daughters and they have incredible emotional control at 13 years old because their entire life we've been present with them and their emotional temper tantrums and everything and so there's like there's no discipline required there's no shame required they're just like they know what it is to feel connected and to feel good and they want to feel that way

what does it look like to be present with a child or another person in their emotions yeah I'll give you an example of that so it's being with them without being in them and for a child a great example so my daughter was having this really bad time when she was three years old and we're at a whole foods and she's just like oh having this temper tantrum I'm like all right here

we go and I like sit down I'm containing her making sure she doesn't hurt anybody not hurting the food and I live in this like somewhat hippie town in this little hippie woman came over and she's like are you okay dear and my daughter's like I'm just having my emotions ah so it's just being present with somebody and not judging them and not trying to fix them not trying

to make them better oh it's gonna be okay I'm gonna smile like none of that crap it's just like oh yeah this is how you are fantastic let's I can be with that I can be with your fear or your anger or whatever it is without trying to change it without trying to change it I mean I will depending on who I'm working with but it's sometimes I don't like I might say not at me like I don't

want your fear at me I don't want your anger at me I don't want your sadness at me but I'm happy to be here with it with the sadness of the anger so that's what it's so it's just letting them have the full emotional experience while sitting with them and being present and loving them as they are in that experience which is the thing that very few of us got as kids and if you

don't get that then there's these big moments of feeling completely loss of control under an emotion and and so then you're like fuck I've got to manage the fuck out of this and so you start really trying to manage it and then these fears arise which is the third thing that makes it difficult I'm scared that if I'm sad I'll be sad forever I'm scared if I get angry I'll destroy

everything I love I'm scared that if I'm if I'm fearful I'm gonna actually be helpless if I feel the fear I'm gonna actually be not able to do anything and those are kind of the three things that we have at those are the three fears are completely fucking wrong but they're the things that we tell the stories we tell about those emotions just go back through them again sadness

is gonna last forever if I really open up this sadness I'm gonna be sad forever I'm gonna be depressed if I'm angry I'm gonna like destroy everything I love and or destroy things that are important to me and if I'm scared I'm gonna be if I allow myself to feel the fear I'm gonna be paralyzed not gonna be able to be competent I'm gonna be helpless but it's not true like we

all know anybody who's cried knows that in the other side of a good cry you feel fucking better right like if you feel your anger you become more determined like in in the in the Tibetan philosophy they talk about I think it's the five the five poisons and the five virtues and everything like that and then later on in the scripture they talk about how they're the same

thing and my experience is that like anger is like a hose right so you think about anger is a hose and this is the energy that's running through it and you can get this way and it's nice stress and you can get this way and it's you motherfucker I fucking blah blah blah you can get another way it's like fine I'll be okay you know like you can kink it different ways when that hose

is unkinked it's it's Martin Luther King it's it's Gandhi it's it's it's a clarity and determination and a boundary and that's that's what unkinked anger looks like it's it is that clarity and determination and so that's the virtue that's on the other side of the anger to me I call that all anger and so because of these things it's stop us we never get to feel what happens

when that when that emotion is moves through us unresisted when we have what I call emotional fluidity and so we don't get to that like that kind of determination we don't get to that that kind of determination there's other kinds but we don't get to the the joy and the and the excitement of life I was going to say so you mentioned a bunch of emotions that that are negative

what I also think that people wish that they could feel more excitement or or enjoyment or elation yeah that's another fallacy it's an absolute fucking fallacy they want to like mentally they're like yeah I want to feel that but like like if you just like if I ask someone like if I'm in a retreat and I say to some people okay we're going to release a manger let's move some

anger 10 15 minutes later eight out of 10 of them are going to be going they're going to still be releasing that emotion if I say okay hey let's release some excitement most people are done in three minutes there it is really scary because the really positive emotions if you allow them to fully fill you up it really dissipates the sense of self the identity starts moving

like collapsing in on itself and so they're they're actually very hard for I mean we want them but if we feel them for too long we're like what the like it gets a little bit wonky for us for most people and it's like anything it's like learning to feel those emotions it's like it only really comes after you've learned how to feel the negative ones and then there's the work

of actually feeling and and being in those really positive emotions and it's why you can meet people who are like meditators for years and they peace they can feel but they'll still be suffering with depression that joy that kind of like big heartfelt open joy like that's a harder thing to feel than like a nice Aquanimus piece that's interesting it's definitely

less safe yeah um yeah oh my god this could be taken away from me oh my god what what the fuck's happening who am I in this because it's so big it's so expansive those feelings that the idea of self just fucking can't compete but there are still so for all of me saying that people struggle to connect with their emotions a lot of people listening to this show will be familiar

with the cerebral horsepower praying at the sort of altar of cognition thing um but there's also still a bunch of emotions that are just kind of less exciting and more dour that everybody is familiar with anxiety you know this sort of ambient sense of a little bit of fear that's going on it's not full fear it's not gripping you but it's you know anxiety worry concern

uh insufficiency shame um so we we're connecting with some emotions one subset of them is there a way are you thinking about how they get alchemized or moved around is there a a way that you think about this yeah so yeah so if I think about emotional development um the like the end of emotional not end but like kind of like the more mature areas of emotional development

is like all those feelings they're they become hard to distinguish between the two any or between any of them and so um so that's that's an interesting piece to it the other interesting piece is that a lot of what's happening is repressed emotion so somebody has like chronic anxiety like I worked with people safe with OCD and often times there's an event that started

the OCD where they felt deeply out of control over a situation and unsupported out of control and unsupported if they can go and feel and they couldn't feel it at the time it was not possible to feel because mom was dying that was dying blah blah blah something the parents were violent whatever there was some way they could not feel if we can go back and feel that emotion that didn't

get felt that OCD starts dissipating as an example I know people like oftentimes people super depressed not super like not not depressed like where they're having visions but could like a dysthymia level of depression where the negative self-talk is through the roof if they really can feel the anger and that they weren't allowed to feel as kids that all went inwards

towards themselves that depression starts subsiding so oftentimes the emotional those little emotions that we're living with every day that aren't joy is because an emotion is stuck because there's an emotion that wasn't welcome and so joy can't hang out there when all the emotions are welcome if we can go back and feel those feelings that were not allowed to

be felt and we can welcome them that thus like the welcoming of abandonment then the patterns change and then we can feel the joy and that joy can be scary it's I have not seen one person when that joy first fucking shows up that it's not scary for them because it's just alien it's fucking big man joy is like it's just big like that you're like we know ourselves by our contrast

we know ourselves by what we compare ourselves to and enjoy like the comparison the contrast starts going away and so it's like you become like a like a speck of dust in the notion of joy when it's really old yeah it's a very unmooring feeling you know it's a deep level of joy yeah it sounds great the you know again people can use their intellect and rationality as I am

right now to go sounds fantastic feel feelings yeah understood go back and hear the thing but you know this what does it look like what does integrating emotions embracing them feeling feelings what what does the process of going from cerebral performative artist to actual fully integrated human look like yeah um so yeah so there's different levels depending

on like where exactly it got stuck so if you are so we have a tool called emotional inquiry which is basically like you think about your if you're like a little kid and you pick up a a um frog you know like what the hell is going on here and you're like kind of really investigating it you're investigating your emotional experience with that same with that same um level

of wonder so it's just this guided audio that we have and we have a course in the decisions course because it's all about emotional understanding because that's what clarifies decision making we ask people to do that once or twice a day the transformation is like well I can people go if they want to pick up this course um well the course is called it a art of accomplishment

is the course I think we have a site for you called view.life modern wisdom slash modern wisdom but it'll be in the links I'll find it I'll get it off you and I'll put it in the link yeah yeah um but it's called the great decisions course um but that emotional inquiry thing we have for free you can you can you can there's we have in a podcast where you can look at and it tells

you how to use it and then you can go and download it so that's all free and but the um but with emotional so emotional inquiry is one way to do it expression is really really good and very critical to actually express your emotion so for instance when people think about expressing an anger it's such a weird thing they're so scared of it that whenever we're scared we think

about things in a binary way it's like this way or that way so they're so scared of anger typically it's like I'm either going to hold my anger back or I'm going to get angry at somebody and they never think oh I can just get angry and not at anybody I can just like move my anger and not not get angry at anybody and not do it at somebody meaning that they're you're getting the angry

at somebody but they're not in the room they're not feeling that they don't have to know about it and so so you can actually just express the emotions that you have and if you can't figure out how to express them then you can fake it till you make it it's a very slow way to do it we have things in our courses that take you through it but that we can't get for free because it's

just we want to make sure we're monitoring people as they go through it so that's another thing that it looks like the other thing that it looks like is there's this thing that happens where your your gut tightens you're like oh and I don't want to feel that and you push it away so my example this is like we got kicked out of the house at some point when our second was very

young and at and every time I drove by the house which I had to do on a weekly basis I would feel like this punch in my gut like pop back and I was like oh so I started driving by the house and I'd sit there and I'd just feel the fuck out of that feeling like what is that what's going on and so there's that other thing when you feel that thing our immediate movement is like oh let's

let me move away from that it's like now let's actually attend to that let's actually feel what that is just talk talk to me I think that's a really lovely cue that the people can probably quite quickly pick up on just take me through that step by step that someone has just like the echo of a sensation that the continues to come up when when they see a person or a whatever

a situation that they're in just walk me through you feel that tension in you so what are you looking for in the body in the mind what do you want to step by step so everybody will do it a little differently like I was so cerebral when I started doing this I noticed the mental reactions to fear before I actually knew what it felt like in the body but there's some great research

that actually shows like through heat maps that there's very similar physical experiences we have with different emotions generally the way that I think about it is or the way that I talk about it is is that emotions are held in the muscles so if I look at somebody I can tell you pretty quickly and it's like when I coach people people go how do you do that so because just

by looking at somebody's face or whatever I can tell what emotions are being held so I go that's the critical parent hunch or that's the repressed anger line in the eye or whatever it is you know so you can see how people are holding their emotional experience so it's all held in the muscles so there's a physical sensation that comes along with an emotional experience

and the job is to get really curious about it why am I avoiding that so like if you're lifting weights and you feel that burn and you try to avoid it you're not going to lift weights for as long as if you're like oh how do I really get into that burn it's the exact same experience so you get that cook and you go okay what is how big is that how round is how thick is that how dense

is it how is it moving like what's going on here and so you just put your attention on the somatic experience of of the emotion that's happening that is that's like the most basic that's like the most basic way to start getting into it at some point the expression is really necessary because you can't un-hold the emotion that like the the musculature holding can't

happen until unhappened until you've actually done some expression so we do this like week-long workshop it's like it's it's off records very hard to get it we only do like 36 people a year and it's in groups of 12 and the and like they call it like they people feel like they've had a facelift they literally you can take shots before and after and their face looks different

because the emotional holding has changed and so I only coach people who've been through that experience because when they've been through that experience I don't have to justify emotional awareness they know they know the benefits of it they've seen the other side of it and so so that that's another thing but expression is really important at some point and if you're

expressing fear really important to have that with loving attention to not do that alone when you talk about expressing what do you mean?

So anger expresses usually with like a lot of yell anger moving particularly of the chest the so it's you know like it's because it's closed the held anger is held in shame and so the opening of the chest is a really important part of the expression of it similarly fear is done with shaking so if you look at a deer that just has been captured by a mountain lion and then escapes

they do this like shake off thing you can notice that like horses are kind of doing it dogs are kind of doing it consistently like they're getting that like low level anxiety off of their system on a regular basis so shrieking and shaking is a big part of the of the fear release process sadness and grief different sadness is tears with a lot of gut shaking but the but grief

is can like usually flows from all three if you're like in a full grief reliefs I was in this funeral for instance with my friend who had passed and everybody was like sad and sad and sad and you could just feel like the energy was not it was stagnant it was like he wasn't actually fully being grieved and I was like I'm fucking pissed and I got really angry and then other

people got angry and then like you could see so much move so much of the grief moved and if you look at those kind of indigenous grief rituals anger is often a part of it you know it's not just sobbing it's like oh it's like hitting the wall it's there's like a there's another part of it so grief is like it's some sadness with some fear and some and some anger but this is expressing

it it doesn't necessarily need to be to a person if you're angry does it need to be to the person that you're angry at no no no definitely not I would I highly recommend not angry at somebody else is an emotional abuse it's like it's it's it's saying I'm going to try to control you with my anger it's horrible unless you have permission so there will be moments like with Taren

I'm like I really would like to express a manger you know and she'll give me permission or not but the but like with the kids as an example with the kids so I'm making my Sunday pancakes the kids are you know knowing oh this is the time when dad is like most focused and so we're going to ask him like 20 questions and getting a fight you know like the whole thing and I'm like

and it's like perfect timing and I stop everything I jump up and down I'm like I'm angry I'm angry I'm angry I'm angry and my eight year old looks at me she goes that was some pretty good anger dad because she knew that I wasn't angry at her like I wasn't I was angry but I don't need to put it on her I can just move that anger and then get back to to being a good parent you know and and and she

wasn't scared of it it wasn't like I was a 200 pound man who was like yelling at like a two foot tall kid or three foot tall kid or whatever how do you think about this sort of relationship between brain and emotions and body and sort of moving out of and and between those is there a hierarchy is there an interplay is there a they're all part of the same system I I make the distinction between head

heart and gut and transformation just because it's a good way to figure out if you're holistically achieving it or not but I haven't found anything that makes it so that you're it's better to do one than the other first or anything like that the what I notice is that people who are more one way are gonna start there like I was more head related you know I thought I'd everything

in my head because of the emotional abuse I was high in my head and so that's where I started and the people people who are like dancers who are like deeply in their body the somatic work is usually like the first thing that they're gonna go to but they're gonna believe their stories for a lot longer than I did so it's just like it's where you're inclination it people playing

to the strengths almost of the typically yeah and it's where they get the lace bang for the buck but it's usually yeah as you said you're going from 100 to 101 as opposed to zero to one yeah exactly yeah exactly I think a lot of people will be familiar with meditation I guess probably everybody listening to this is tried it or maybe as an experienced meditator yeah talk

to me about the difference between you know this is a new modality I think emotional work it's not even something that I'd really heard of until pretty recently and I'm deep in the personal development world you know stuff like what you guys do out of accomplishment Hoffman process and then we've got sort of all of the therapy talk therapy it's sort of psychodynamic

stuff psychoanalysis and then we've got mindfulness what what's the difference between let's say mindfulness emotional work therapy and stuff like that how do these piece together and how are they similar and different yeah so again like some most work kind of hits on all three levels the nervous system level the emotional level and the and the head level but they

usually have one that's like a strength to the others and so one's going to emphasize one more than the other and so the emotional work that we do is unique but it's not the only thing we do but it's what we're known for often because it's the hardest thing to find in the world you know so but we're working on the mental and we're working on the on the nervous system as well

and so I would say each one of those things has a strength in there but you even you say like mindfulness like there's mindfulness that you know like if you look at like the teravot and buddhism out of Burma that's like going to be a very somatic experience of like it's like moving your attention from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet it's going to be very somatic

oriented whereas other forms of mindfulness are not going to be as somatically you know and so you're looking for the tool that fits the job and that fits you and so that that's typically how you do it and so so for instance like when right now I'm doing the masterclass and so people will ask me questions and I'll assign experiments and one of the ways that I decide the experiment

that I would assign to the person is like how heavy were they how emotionally aware were they and what they were doing and so that's you're just looking for that it's very hard to describe how to know which one except for if you know you're really heavy go to the somatic if you know you know you know the one that I think is actually more is more is just starting to come into

the light is more of the nervous system stuff like how do you I would say the best practice for nervous system is the gut is pleasure is knowing that you can find that pleasure or enjoyment anywhere at any time that it's just watching the sensations of your body move and that there's like can be a deep enjoyment and and that part I find is is like oftentimes a place that will help

people more than any other because they they're so dysregulated most of their life that they can't actually settle enough to make the other work useful that's that's interesting do you consider it kind of a foundation that the other two sit on on top of just not no I don't I think they're all equally important I think they're it's just for in in today's computer in today's

society it's one of like the on-off like have you turn the thing on and off I don't know how I like turn the thing like okay let's just relax the nervous system and then see see if all the rest of the tools will work yeah I've got Johnny Miller coming on the show at some point soon I know he's been on your guys is your guys the show yeah so that world of nervous system regulation sort

of somatic work somatic therapy something else one of my friends are in doing at the moment yeah it's a whole a whole new world yeah so for but if I'm looking at you it's deconstruction of the negative voice in the head it's finding a place where you can and you can cut this but if I'm looking at you it's it's the deconstructing the voice in the head would be the intellectual

work and the and the nervous system work would be like having a feeling of deep pleasure just in the existence of being alive I would like really want to strengthen that muscle and then the emotional work is release probably fear would be the place I would start I'm you're a good judge of character let's go back to the the negative self talk stuff because I think a critical

harsh judging in a monologue is something that lots of people are all too familiar with what is that to know about that why does it come from typically comes because we learned that's how to talk to us but that we learned it from our parents that's typically or not just parents but like caregivers teachers etc I remember I did a podcast on the voice in the head and my daughter

listened to it and she's like my voice in the head comes from this teacher and this grandmother it was like so so I think that that and she was like nine or something at the time and ten maybe and and so typically that's what we've learned some of the stuff we've made up as a way to like we learned it to prevent a certain kind of experience emotional experience that we're

having um but I think that the the the part that's most useful to know about it is that the you try to stop it it won't fucking work like you can't you can't just be like I'm gonna stop that you can kind of modify it that way what's important is how you react to it so if you come into my shop every day and I yell at you you're gonna treat me one way and if you come into my shop every

day and I'm like oh my god so good to see you you're gonna treat me another way it's just it's not any different with emotions and so or with the voice in the head excuse me and so so the voice in the head comes and it does its thing and if you react like okay you're right I should do that and you're gonna get one thing if you're like oh I really see that you're scared and I'm right

here with you you're gonna get a different thing if you sing it a musical like you know or if you're like wow you're a shitty boss or like there's a thousand reactions and what typically what we're doing is we're trying to control the voice in the head rather than think about all the different way running experiments about how we react react to it because there's a lot

of flexibility to go this week I'm gonna react to the voice in the head this way this week I'm gonna react to the voice in the head this way this week I'm gonna react to the voice and then and running those experiments starts to teach you how you want to relate to it how it wants to be related to and and you'll notice that like there is care in it like it does want you to succeed

it does want you to like there's there's it's quite sweet it's just really incompetent miss guys is yeah and so it's like it's and so if you take it that way and you like oh you have good intentions you just don't know how to do it let me work with you it's like a that's that it's gonna show up differently in your life and then there is a point where just like most of it goes

away like there's not a the where there's not really repetitive negative self-talk wow so in your experience either with you or with your clients you've been able to get them to a stage where that drops off I think for very many people it's such a staple part of the texture of their daily mind experience that it that's like saying oh and what my heart would stop beating

right yeah so I would not say I get them to it but I would say that that happens that is an experience that happens for a lot of people in in in around the work for sure and the way I look at it it's actually a natural stage of development and that if you just take the things that have blocked development it'll happen naturally it's it's as natural is like a tree growing a branch

that allows it leaves to be at the sun it's just it's an incredibly natural process and it just it's just that so many people get stunted that it doesn't happen naturally I've kind of got this got it in my head about the this blending of ambition and peace that we've talked about where and this very typical trajectory that I see among a lot of my friends high standards

desire for high standards which leads to positive and ideal comparing myself to that ideal inevitably falling short fearing that if I don't reach the ideal that I'm not going to be accepted safe wanted loved validated by the world so critical self voice comes in which is the motivator that's the chariot here whipping you as you have a bridal in your mouth and you

try and run along and run faster faster faster but then there's a another stage which I certainly know intimately well and I think a bunch of my friends do too which is shame about being critical to yourself yes yeah yeah god how fucking pitiful how how how stupid am I that I can't even have high standards without being critical and then thinking oh my god look at me I'm

being critical about me being critical and it's just this infinite regress of sort of self self-castigation yeah yeah that's what the I think that Zen talk that talk about it like it's like asking it's like asking the asking the ego to get rid of the ego is like actually asking a thief to is like asking a thief to take care of your house it's never going to fucking work

and so it's a similar thing it's like the the negative self-talk starts becoming starts working on itself and it just doesn't fucking work and the antidote is is you know loving attention and the amazing thing is it just loving awareness can change so fucking much like like just sit with next time you're on a on a on a plane flight and you're sitting there and somebody

just ask them a question and give them loving attention and like you just like unfucking amounts of transformation can happen in an hour I did that once and I literally like asked one question in an hour and just listened with loving attention and like hear my problems and then oh wait I hear some solutions to the problem and oh I hadn't thought about it that way and they're

like and they just needed someone to just like be there in loving attention same thing goes for ourselves like loving attention can like solve a lot of shit oftentimes I see people have this recognition in our work where they'll whatever they'll pop through something they'll be like oh my god and then the first thing they go is how do I keep it it's like yeah that's

the exact wrong question like how do I keep it is is is saying that I am scared that it's going to go away it's like in that like how is that going to help you instead of like oh I'm so grateful for this moment oh let me land it in my body let me really feel this what does this mean for my life let me absorb it let me digest it how am I going to keep it and it's and it's and it's back

to me driving the thing and you know we're instead of just being in loving attention of the thing itself what else is that to say around shame emotional stagnation piece is really important it is an emotion that stagnates like the the rest of the emotions is the way that I see it so and it's also it's also so this is this gets on a touchy subject but you know you have that podcast

on morality recently which kind of dovetails into it so let's distinguish guilt and shame guilt being I've done something that I'm not proud of that doesn't feel right in my system and I don't want to do it again and shame is there's something fucking wrong with me I'm like I'm I'm bad as a human being I'm broken they're I'm flawed or something like that um shame when you

feel like you're flawed then how do you fix yourself like it's like like there's it really slows the entire process down and then you're ashamed of all the emotional experiences or some of the emotional experiences that you have so you don't you can't let them move and therefore you can't get to clarity and so it's a shame is is that shame is on the mental level on the on the prefrontal

cortex level it's negative self-talk on the heart level it's a stagnation of emotion on a gut level it's I'm not safe and you're basically if you're constantly being attacked in the head then your nervous system never feels safe you know you fucking need to work harder does not make the human body feel safe and therefore you're you're never in that place of renewal

where you can actually rest and recover and therefore grow and beil nourished and transform like you know with working out you need both the effort and the and the rest you don't work the same muscle group out every day because it doesn't work as well and so it's the same thing you need that rest um and so that's what's happening on the on the on the shame on shame it's

the those three things and that's how they hit in the different categories of the of the mind or however you want to call yeah it's um it's very interesting that some of the people who have got the most admirable lives have the least admirable internal states that people who are unbelievably successful in sort of worldly ways does if you were actually given the opportunity

to trade and you knew the full price that you would have to pay in order to be them it's probably one that you wouldn't thought the bill for even if the benefit was a a billion dollar fortune yeah and we and then we make a story that we need to be that neurotic and fucked up to be successful because some successful people are that but it's I I definitely know a lot of successful

people who aren't like that so it's also there's a false narrative that that's a price you have to pay typically and and we and it's just like a great way for the voice and the head to justify itself how do you think about um the tension or the relationship between self improvement and finding out who you are I think the tension isn't there I think if you find out finding

out who self realization leads just to evolution there's no like you can't not do that when you see when you see that the voice in the head is not you when you see the thing that you see for a second when you ask what's looking out behind my eyes like and and when you see that like there's like a lot of like a certain amount of fear is going to drop away which is going to help

you evolve in a more quicker more enjoyable way as an example like there's no way like Sam Harris is like it's not like he has not improved in his like he's done all this self-awareness stuff I'm sure we could say how have all the ways your life gotten better and he could tell you what they are so I don't think there's a dichotomy I just think if it's like if I'm playing music

and I focus on I want to really impress people and be great at music I am not going to make as much progress in my music as if I say I want to get lost in it or I want to be the best rapper or if I have something that's beyond like like I have a goal beyond the music right the best people the people who make the most most successful businesses aren't doing it because they want to

make money they're doing it because they have a vision or they want to win or they want to be like they want to compete they have something that's beyond the money and the money is just a necessary aspect to their particular form of art same thing if we want to be really successful at understanding ourselves or having more peace or joy or whatever the thing underneath

self improvement is you're going to get there quicker not by saying how do I improve my wrong and how do I improve myself you're going to get there quicker by how do I understand myself you're going to get there quicker by how do I fall in love with myself those there's just just just better approaches you can you can you can make some progress the other way don't get me

wrong it's just it's just not as efficient and your definition of efficiency again is return on energy joy during the process yet it's interesting with the efficiency point that you know the eyes and how I make tricks you probably come across this it's a don't so it's a a way that you can probably you can look at tasks so you have things that are important not important

urgent and not urgent yeah it's a mate a matrix that you can come up with and as far as I can tell people are continually being pushed into the urgent more and more and more which by design pushes you away from the important that's not to say that urgent things can't also be important but that they tend to the urgent stuff tends to be urgent in and of itself and it's like

important necessary but not sufficient in order to be able to get yourself through so don't don't mean addiction is a huge part of that too it's like that crazy like I see people do this all the time it's like they want to press enter it so the email is done enter enter enter enter enter enter but everyone every email if you would put a little more thought or consideration not delegated

the thought or whatever it is you would have twice as few emails but you're so into the enter enter enter enter enter correct yeah that's interesting that we almost create our urgent environment correct in that way yeah the algorithm again and going back to yeah I'm thinking a lot about this at the moment sort of going slower to go fast so I've had to put a ton of stuff

on hold because the level of complexity that was happening kind of internally with the show and and I've got this product that I'm trying to release and there's a live tour happening at the end of the year and there's a book happening next year and all of this stuff it's like like I can continue to spin all of these plates but they're likely ahead of one of them dropping

and the pain that I go along the way okay so I needed to kick the book another year down the road paused a ton of stuff that I was working on and I was like I just want to really enjoy the show I really want to have fun when I have these conversations and I don't want to turn up having just been on five calls back to back and then this slack thing and then I I'll get a couple of emails

in and then I'll read the guest book and then I'll like go and I'll do the episode and then I'll get straight back out because I've got that call to do that it's like this is not for this not fucking like it's not what I want to do so that's required everything to basically stop that isn't just show and now rebuild all of the operations from the ground floor up so that everything

runs nice and smoothly and that's important it wasn't urgent it was never going to be urgent but eventually it would have been one of those things that some Fisher would have been cracked through and a huge fucking explosion and I would have had a mental breakdown and I still may and but yeah thinking an awful lot about trying to prioritize the important over the urgent

and it feels like the what you were talking about there this sort of you can brute force your way through this you can grip really really tightly and sure maybe you'll get some great outcomes but they're going to be less efficient in terms of return and energy and enjoyment they're going to be less effective and you're probably going to be way more miserable the whole

way and like what's the point like what are we doing this for we're doing this presumably to just be in an enjoyable emotional state the whole time in any case so the quicker route to doing all of those things is to just focus on the important stuff in any case yeah yeah and that's the that's the other cool thing about enjoyment is that if I so I do this thing in enjoyment

called the five star meeting and so I ask all my executives to to rank every one of their meetings one to five stars based on how much energy it gave them and then once they've done that for a week the job is to make sure that you have a week in the next month or two where all of your meetings are five star meetings the two things that it does is one it usually halves the amount

of meetings they have which is fascinating but the other things that it does is it shows them every single place that their company is having issues because that that's the symptom a bad meeting is the symptom of so just in so it's the same thing it's like oh you could see in the future and say oh this isn't going to be enjoyable this is that you know so what do I have to do

and what you said was oh I have to make sure I've got a good foundation and so you're actually building the capacity for a bigger longer term more sustainable success and and you don't you get that from enjoyment you get that from like oh was that an enjoyable how well I make this enjoyable for me is there an equivalent of the five star meeting experiment but for people's

personal lives that's a great question I mean the 10% better I don't no I don't have one because it's like there's so the thing about a company is that there's really only two things a company has they have the relationships in the company and they have the ideas that come from the company so the atomic structure is meetings and decision making and it's those two things

if you get those two things right your company's going to be fine but I don't know what that atomic structure would be for a personal life that's a great question I definitely think about it thank you for that question it's great you've mentioned a couple of times it's danced around the word of accomplishment but it's been interested in the title of art of accomplishment

yeah is accomplishment an art yeah there's this great saying that's um the that the peak of a businessman's career he's a poet and the peak of a poet's career he's a businessman have you ever heard that no I love that I don't know I can't know who to put that to that it's told to me by my friend Steve um I love that quote and so you can get things done in a lot of ways you can build

a house in a lot of ways but if if if you do it in an artistic way there's just a lot of joy and pleasure the reason we titled it this way was because um I really I was really interested in in teaching self-realization or self-development whatever you want to call it um but I wanted it to be really applied because that was my journey like I was I sat for eight years in a room

meditating and at some point I like had no money I'd like gone into debt I was like $40,000 in debt living in the shithole and in silver like Los Angeles and and I was like I would time to have a family and it was married I'm like okay well I got it and I knew that I would fail at whatever I did if I wasn't if it wasn't about self-discovery and so I became a venture capitalist

and when it did that for 15 years and I and I ran this philanthropic organization and and I needed to find how each of these things would help me become more self-aware the business was the was a form of was a form of self-discovery that I needed that and what I found out was that I mean the Tibetans call it skilful means but like what I found out is that like I sold better

if the person I was selling to or I fundraised better if the two of us were like learning about ourselves in the process there was connection instead of perfection and if I had connection it worked better and I found out if I connected to people better there was like more better product that was created and I all of a sudden I learned that like all these business tools

if you use them as a form of self-discovery become better business tools and they also help you learn about yourself and so it was incredibly rewarding for me and so I wanted our organization to to be practical I wanted it I wanted you to be able to walk away with tools that not only helped you understand yourself better but helped you build businesses that were going

to be more successful and create actually fulfillment instead of just a shit storm of bigger problems.

Yeah I really appreciate the fact that you guys get tactical with it.

I think there's a big transition happening at the moment with online content I think we're out of kind of the first wave of personal developments information on the internet I think that maybe you could have said that sort of Tony Robbins and that kind of era late not early sort of teens and then but the real big wave I think that hit a lot of people was more Jordan Peterson,

Alander Botan from the School of Life it was that kind of wave that really sort of opened people's eyes to oh my god there's you know sort of valid philosophical insights out there which are imbued with meaning and seem to be timeless and evergreen you know like different people different perspectives or whatever but largely pick your favorite fucking wisdom dispenser

of choice like there's someone said something over the last 10 years that's gone like oh my god that's how I see myself in the world and that's great but there's definitely been because lots of this stuff can sound fantastic but never actually get stressed tested in the real world what it allows is for a lot of sort of fluffy aphorisms to to sweep through and a cool insight

that doesn't okay that that sounds great but like where does this grow any fucking corn like show me what this does and how do I make it do it to me so I think we are and this is happening in many many areas we're moving away from the mr.

beastification of YouTube I think there's much more strip back approach when it comes to vlogging, relatability, authenticity that that people are trying to to really tap into is all a huge revolution it's a counter movement away from what we had before which was more polished it didn't feel quite as raw and it wasn't as spit and so does it you couldn't sort of grab

it with your hands so the fact that you've got questions to ask yourself like that like you know how could this be 10% more enjoyable like what a lovely you know that's a tactical thing one of my favorite ones was realizing that you never focus on the peripherals of your vision this is your inside of the ear you've given me the auditory equivalent of this that you're

looking at stuff the entire time but if you just take a tiny little second and realize I've got all of this vision out here and it immediately down regularly by like 10 or 20% it's crazy how much that opens up and it's like fuck like I love those practices and those those have been things there were the things that were the most meaningful and impactful to me when I first

started doing this and I think that there's a huge gap I think what what you're doing this blending of you know like robust evidence-backed insights about human nature with a little bit of art but then just really getting straight into the tactical stuff I think that's where things are moving I think that's what people want not platitudes yeah I think that the one

of the reasons it's effective especially with like the experimental philosophy that we go for is at some point in the development of a human it's really important to realize that you have a choice as an example I have a choice it gives me a sense of empowerment and agency at some point it's really important to realize I don't have a choice I can't even decide what fucking

my next thought is I like it's all been a fucking gift it's all been a get that I can't even like I wasn't in control of all of it and this is just an amazing gift for me one platitude's gonna hit one person one platitude's gonna hit another person but if you give them an experiment to run and you let them like discover that for themselves it's gonna like land in their body

they're gonna see the thing it's gonna it's gonna be visceral and it's gonna actually move them through anything else is just like it's like a short term of piphany it's it's kind of the the sugar of of like of self-awareness instead of the like oh I've like I put this in my body I've tried nourishing meal exactly yeah but it's really good for like flipping through YouTube

yeah well dude I mean you know I've I've contributed my fair share of watch hours to to that stuff but I don't think that you know that is there's only so many different modalities that you can do that are really impactful and that you can do for free on your own with it like there's not endless number of those but there are a lot of insights that spoken at the right time

in the right way will hit with somebody that's different so you know I'm all for I'm all for aphorism porn as much as it needed you know I'm consciously making an effort myself to try and find tactical tactical things to rely on so it gone through a few in spirit of that yeah we've gone through a bunch of um interesting questions today yeah what what are some things that people

can go away with in terms of little questions that they can ask themselves we can recap some of the stuff that you've already said or anything that you think yeah yeah I think they rely on an awful lot what do you people what should people leave with yeah so just on the on the set that we've covered already um change the way you respond to the voice in your head do that experiment

and change every week the way you respond to the voice in your head that would just actually respond to the voice in your head is a really good one um and how do I enjoy things 10% more like the best way to do that is there's an app called YAP and you set a reminder I don't have any sound on my phone except for YAP and so when I run an experiment with myself I will set use that as

a reminder and be like oh and then I ask that question so it's really good if you find a concrete way to remind yourself of the question um other cool thing and then the other one that we did was um was just ask yourself who's looking out behind these eyes like on a regular basis like in the middle of conversation that's a really good one uh other experiments to run uh I literally

have like a hundred uh one of the ones that I find really effective is and um we have a like we do a workshop on this and we have a podcast so it's really easy to have all free and um it's do a gratitude practice with a friend every day seven minutes so it's saying out loud what you're grateful for back and forth and um but do it from the feeling of gratitude you you have to feel

the gratitude and then speak from the gratitude rather than I'm going to think of something I'm grateful for and say it so it's an emotional experience and you move it that way particularly if there's people who are like having struggles with money it's really effective to be grateful for all the physical stuff like all the materialistic stuff you have in the world

the reason that this is such a great practice it one is usually we solve problems with what's wrong how do we fix it rather than what's right and how do I grow it what's what's right how do I grow it is is half of the solution set and so really really effective way of of approaching your life secondly it changes who you think you are so if I'm walking around constantly going

I don't have enough of this I don't have enough of this I'm not I'm not working hard enough I don't uh then I walk around with the lack which is why there's like many billionaires that you and I have spoken to that are walking around going I still don't have enough because but if you can actually define yourself as what like oh I'm the person who has all this shit then you

change the way that you approach the world and you change who you think you are is it incredibly effective if you if you actually have the felt sense of it rather than just the words incredibly effective I have been pretty sort of open about doing a lot of gratitude journaling uh maybe fucking hell 12 12 six month gratitude journals filled in and some house in Newcastle

somewhere but absolutely if I look back on that uh so much of it is me just answering a question it's like okay I've got to get up and here's the thing and I've got to do it and one of my grateful for today I had a nice morning walk and I do the thing and it's like it's just another thing on the task to do as opposed to the actual goal which is to fucking feel the gratitude exactly

the goal was not to write a list of three a day for like fucking six years like how does that mean that is like a number of and that wasn't the goal and if you do it with somebody else then you get the mirror neuron action of them feeling the gratitude you feeling the gratitude is just nice like it's uh important to do in person rather than over the film zoom works really well

okay but you want to see the person yeah you want to have the you want to have the shared emotional experience and you want to like vibe off of each other it's like the difference between playing tennis and playing against a wall it's just I'm gonna guess that silence is okay if you're not going to just be able to spontaneously feel and come up with stuff like bing bing

bing bing bing bing yeah silence is really important savoring the gratitude is really important taking your time is really important and um and feeling the gratitude before you speak those are all parts of the things we have we have a instructions on it that like I think you can find in our in our on our website instructions for but that that's a that's a really incredibly

powerful one another one if you find yourself like just at the beginning of the emotional stage then just being able to label the emotions that you're having five times today what's the emotional experience I'm having right now and checking in and just doing that process can be incredibly useful for folks um just being able to label and the weird thing is that we've

never had the same emotional experience twice meaning like it's always nuanced it's always different and so some people will not even be able to they can't identify how they feel they're like I don't know I feel fine I feel good that's the thing so a trick to that is you can make the sound in it like how do you feel like that's actually the feeling the better representation of the feeling

then I feel slightly disappointed with 10% you know whatever so um but to actually like make a sound or label the emotion that you're having like five 10 times a day is a great way to start the emotional awareness process just to like oh I this thing is controlling me at least I should be aware of what what is controlling me um so or it's it maybe controls not the right word

but you know it's it's it's influencing me and I should know how it's influencing me so that's another great experience go go and go and stand next to a horse yes exactly you have a baby you fucking irrational desire for the horse to like you so dude let's let's bring this one into land I really love your work I think that uh what you're doing is genuinely novel and I'm

so glad that my friend Charlie introduced me to what it is that you guys do everyone's going to be interested to keep up to date with all of the stuff you've got going on where should they go uh art of accomplishment dot com or view dot life slash modern wisdom one word will be a great way for them to find out what we're doing oh yeah and there's there's all sorts of just by the way

we we have a podcast on a whole we have like in a hundred episodes on different topics we have a shit ton of experiments you can access we have like we we're really trying to give a tremendous amount of free stuff out there because we want it to be accessed by everybody including five free workshops one like on gratitude so there's all sorts of ways that you can participate

for no money oh yeah well I'll uh I'm keen to bring you back on to talk about your view framework and there's probably like a million other things that we need to talk about as well but for now dude I really appreciate you thank you so much what a pleasure thank you yeah thank you very much

[Joe Hudson: Mastering Emotional Fluidity, Breaking Negative Self-Talk, and the Art of Accomplishment]-[#813 - Joe Hudson - The Art Of Mastering Your Emotions]

📋 Summary

Introduction: The Matrix of Emotional Avoidance

The Trap of 'Becoming' and the Myth of Perfection

Efficiency Through Enjoyment

Emotional Fluidity and the Power of 'Welcoming'

Practical Tactics for Real-World Change

Conclusion: Connection Over Perfection

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript