A lot of the people in my circles may have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try to arrange a life that they enjoy and it doesn't fucking work.
What is holding people back?
It's the fact that they have emotions that they are not sitting, feeling, or expressing.
Whatever emotion that you're trying to avoid, you are inviting into your life in exactly the way that you're trying to avoid it.
What the hell? Why would I?
What is this? You have this really amazing insight.
The voice in your head is often telling you bullshit.
What most people try to do is they try to stop it and that doesn't work very well.
I think the best way to work with the voice in the head is to pick an experiment every day and respond to the voice in the head in a new way every day.
One of my favorite responses is, oh, I see that you're really scared.
Don't worry. I'm right here with you.
I got you. You're really big on helping people feel joy.
It is like such an important tool for productivity.
If you say, I'm going to figure out how to enjoy what I do 10 % more and you succeed, you are 10 % more efficient.
Not only that, usually the quality is going to get a lot better too is there just like one thing you recommend that basically everyone try to experiment with yeah it'll change your life dramatically really quickly today my guest is joe hudson joe is one of the most sought -after executive coaches amongst tech leaders and has worked with folks from openai spacex apple and other world -class companies joe's unique approach to coaching draws from his spiritual psychological and neurological psychological practices.
And in his intimate courses that he runs a few times a year and in his podcast, he helps people create the life that they want with enjoyment and ease.
In our conversation, Joe shares the two things that he finds most often keep people stuck in their life and in their job and how to work on getting these things unstuck, why the critical voice in your head is always wrong, contradictory, and telling you bullshit, and how to build a different relationship with that voice, why falling in love with your emotions is so important and so so powerful why you'd be better off focusing on what you want versus what you think you should do or think that you need to do plus a bunch of amazing advice on how to make better decisions help your team run more effectively
and why a seven minute daily gratitude practice will change your life this episode is basically for every single person it will make your life and your work better if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or youtube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.
With that, I bring you Joe Hudson.
Joe, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thanks.
Good to be here. It's good to have you.
I'm curious if there's any common themes that emerge often in terms of what is holding people back from success or just living the life that they want, especially ambitious tech people, which I know is a lot of the folk that you work with are they're kind of like archetypes of like here's the thing often come up most often and hold people back a non -specific answer to that question would be a critical voice in their head and like a uh and a relationship with that critical voice that is not not productive so oftentimes the critical voice in the head says you need me to be productive but it's usually
a huge detriment to to being able to really be successful and and even if you are successful with a really critical voice in your head you never get to enjoy it you like you might have the money but then you're like oh shit i'm still miserable you know or i got the i got the car i got the house i got the money i got the successful career and like why am i unhappy all the time so that would be i would say one of the biggest ones the another really big one that are in a a large category, I would say is their relationship with emotions is all focada.
They are either trying to pretend they don't have them or compartmentalizing them or trying to manage them rather than harnessing them and falling in love with them.
So that would be another big place.
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It's telling me it's trying to help me, but it turns out it's not.
Can you talk about that?
Yeah. I would say every single time the voice in your head is, is wrong.
So it's not the critical voice in your head.
So to be specific, I'm talking about the voice in your head that is critical and repeats.
So, you know, there's the voice, the voice that says the same thing over and over again.
You gotta, you gotta work out more.
You gotta work out more.
You gotta work out more whatever that is it's always wrong and that doesn't mean there isn't truth to what it says but it it's it's incorrect so as an example of this like you should work out more you should work out more you should work out more or you need uh you need me or you just sit around on the couch there's a great example of one and but if i was your boss and i was sitting right next to you and i was criticizing you every couple minutes there's no way that you would say wow i I really need you.
I couldn't be productive without you.
It's a bunch of crap.
So, or you should work out, you should work out.
Okay. So I see the truth that I'd be healthier if I work out.
I get that. Should I, is that it really a should there's another question.
What makes it not say, Oh, Hey, why don't you enjoy working out?
How do we get you to enjoy working out?
What's the, what, what would motivate you to work?
It's not doing any of that.
It's you should work out, out, you should work out.
So there's, it's never an accurate thing that's happening inside of your head.
And until you can see through that, it's hard to work with the voice in your head.
You can do it, but until you see through it.
The second part that I would say is that if you want to work with your voice in the head a new way, what most people try to do is they try to stop it.
They try to, you know, control the voice in the head, and that doesn't work very well.
So instead, I say change the way that you relate to the negative voice in your head so instead of being okay you stop doing that stop doing that say oh i see that you're really scared and i'm right here with you or sing a musical to it or go ah i don't believe you i don't like as a matter of fact i think the best way to work with the voice in the head is to pick an experiment every day and respond to the the voice in the head in a new way every day to have an experimental approach and say oh what's the relationship i want with this negative voice in my head because right now what it's typically
doing for most people is that it says something and the person's like yeah or yeah but i'm not going to do that so fuck off or yeah and i yeah that'll never work you know something like that is it's kind of the response and so what what happens if you change the response to the voice in your head and that gives you a crap ton of freedom and it's the beginning of what can be a state where the negative voice in the head disappears, which is really, really quite lovely.
Oh, wow. I love this so much because there's so much that comes from this thing in your head, just shooting you down or scaring you about stuff.
But it's so hard. I hear this, but it's so hard. Next time I'm, I don't know, giving a big presentation, I'm going to hear like, oh, you're going to, it's going to, some could go wrong.
You could look really stupid or you could totally forget what you're saying.
And it's hard to really intellectualize, okay, I don't have to to listen to this is there anything more there just like how to turn that around be like just like shut up yes the shut up usually doesn't work i mean experiment with all of it you know uh to me i would my my one of my favorite responses is oh i see that you're really scared don't worry i'm right here with you i got you because the part of the deal is that the voice in the head has assumed the position that it's like the boss but it's really like a little kid having a temper tantrum.
I mean, if you listen to it, if you just like dictated everything it said, it sounds like usually like a five -year -old having a temper tantrum, or it sounds like the way your mom used to chastise you or the way your dad used to chastise you or whatever, whether teacher.
So, but it isn't, it's not logical.
It's not, it's not thoughtful.
It's not typically not thoughtful.
It's, it's usually abusive.
And so it's a lot of fear.
So I like, it's one of my my favorites one of my favorite ways to respond but i've tried i mean gosh dozens of ways and there's a lot of like neat effective ways and and and i particularly think it's really good to set up a series of experiments rather than just take the one that i have because the experimental mindset means means you can never really fail so that typically somebody like worse with the voice in the head they fail and they go ah fuck it because you have we have this part of our brain called the heminula and the heminula basically is the part of of our brain that is trying to teach
us not to fail over and over again.
So it's the thing that like when you go on a diet or you go to work out and then you don't do it one day and you say, ah, fuck it, I messed up.
And then you don't try anymore or you don't try for a couple of weeks or whatever that thing, that's basically what's happening in that part of the brain.
So if you do it as an experimental thing, then you actually, you can't lose.
You're just learning about yourself.
You're learning about the voice in your head.
And the way I like thinking about that is people are like, I understand the problem, but I don't have a solution.
And I'm always like, if you understood the problem there, there would be no question about the solution.
You can't, if you fully understand a problem, you know, the solution.
So all you have to do is really fully understand the voice in your head through a series of experiments and the whole thing goes away.
So the advice here is next time you're hearing something in your head that you don't think is going to be helpful to you is try to respond to it in a different way from what you've been doing.
I would be even more subtle than that which is uh i wouldn't really wouldn't care if it if you think it's helpful to you or not i would just experiment with different ways of interacting with it and i wouldn't even do it as a goal of okay i want the voice in the head to be nicer to me i would do it with the goal of just hey how do i learn how do i how do i understand this thing it's it's like a far more productive And self -development generally, it's far more productive to learn, say, about the river valley by walking through it, putting your feet in the river, going down the river with a canoe,
smelling the soil, looking at the plants, than it is to say, okay, I am going to dam this river valley and try to...
It's just not going to...
You're not going to understand it the same way.
You're going to make some mistakes.
stakes. Amazing. The second bucket that you shared of what you find most often is kind of the root of what's holding people back is the way described as your relationship with your emotions, which I don't think a lot of people would think of.
It's the thing that's holding them back.
Can you talk a bit more about what that looks like?
Yeah, great way to explain it.
So for the logical folks, so in 2012 or so, there was a person who wrote a book called Descartes' Error.
And in Descartes' error the whole idea is that i think therefore i am and this person's like yeah that's the error and it's a neuroscientist who looked at people had damage in the emotional center of their brain and they just basically cease to be able to make decisions so their iq would stay the same but it would take them half an hour to decide where to have lunch or decide what color to pen to use it would take hours and hours to make simple decisions so their iq would stay high but their entire life would completely fall apart and what it tells us and this is not exact i'm paraphrasing for a podcast
but we make decisions in the emotional center of our brain we use logic to try to figure out how we're going to feel so you can see this just by asking yourself the question how many uh decisions have you made to feel like a success or to not feel like a failure or to feel happier to not feel trapped or to right so there's these huge buckets of emotions that we are trying to feel and not feel and we're making decisions based on those there's no such thing as a logical decision you know that idea is like i'm just going to be logical and just make a logical decision it doesn't neurologically it's
just untrue so so if you learn to fall in love with all of your emotions then solution sets become available that you didn't have before so if you are like oh i can't feel like a failure well then you're probably not going to take certain risks asks.
And if you are, oh, I can't, I don't, I want to feel loved and I can't feel unliked by people, well, then you're not going to say your truth.
And then the world is going to not give you the things that are truthful to you, right?
I go into my boss, I say my truth, I get fired.
Okay, I get fired. But then probably my next boss, I say my truth, I'm going to find a location where my truth is, and how I want to be in the world is going to be acceptable.
But if I don't do that, if i'm constantly managing myself then i'm not going to have that reality and so it's really important just for the just for the decision making part how important emotions are to be able to fall in love with each of the emotional experiences so you're not making decisions based on your inability to feel stuff that's like one there's literally a thousand others most people they feel stuck they can have a big emotional release and they don't feel stuck anymore more.
When people feel overwhelmed, it's usually not the amount of crap that they have going on in their life.
It's the fact that they have emotions that they are not sitting, feeling or expressing.
That's another huge chunk of stuff.
Depression is usually unmoved.
Anger is another example.
So there's so many levels in which people not able to feel really limits their life.
Just just one that's like almost everybody can relate to is feeling excitement is something that most people can only do for about 10 to 20 seconds most people aren't like oh i'm like i'm excited like if you walked into a denny's and there was this person there 60 year old man and just excited and was excited for like 10 minutes you'd be like what the like what's wrong with this person right but when we're excited it's contagious you know i walk into a meeting and i'm excited probably probably other people are going to walk out excited.
And so we're limiting just the, our ability to create collaboration by the fact that we're limited by our excitement and I could go on forever so that there's so many experiences like this.
So what I'm hearing is the core issues.
We're not able to feel our emotion, but there's something there, like we are angry or scared.
And because we can't feel it, we just can't break through that.
Yeah, not quite. So if you have somebody who's experienced a lot of emotional abuse in their life then they might not be able to feel the emotions that they're having and particularly where you experience the emotional abuse so that might be the case for them so for instance if you had physical abuse and i put a quarter in one of your hands and a key in another one of your hands without telling you which was which you wouldn't be able to tell me if you'd suffered enough physical abuse because you've literally cut that sensation off right and so similarly people who've experienced emotional abuse
can often not tell what the emotions are now emotional abuse is it's a big word generally people don't even like equating the two but for for just to agree on terms here when I say emotional abuse I mean you were told that you weren't allowed to have a certain emotion that that's what I mean by emotional abuse so maybe you got fed every time you got angry or you got your love removed or you got punished or maybe every time you cried you were made fun of of that you know my particular background was that and so it's when you weren't allowed to feel certain emotions you were told to cut it off because it
wasn't going to be safe because you were either going to get bribed out of it or punished out of it or loved removed because of it or made fun of or whatever it is so that that might be that but the place so that might be a step that one has to take but the place you want to get to is where the emotions are fluid where it just moves right through you it doesn't mean that you lose control as a matter of fact losing control means that there's still resistance in it so the way i think about this is that emotions are uh like a tube let's say and there's water moving through the tube and you kink a tube
one way the water comes out a little funny kink the tube the other way it comes out a little funny so let's say you have anger and that's the tube and you crank it one way and it's like you son of a you you blah blah blah blah blah you can't get another way and it's like nice dress you know you crank it another way and it's guilt it's like why would you ever do that to me and then if it's unkinked then it's like gandhi or martin luther king it's like this very loving boundary that's said it's this clarity of purpose so that's that's how i think about so the idea is to get the fluidity, to unkink
the hose so that all of the emotional experiences come out with love.
I did a meditation retreat, a 10 day silent meditation retreat, which I know is a big part of your practice and something that led to the work you do now.
And a term that's coming up for me is nonjudgmental awareness.
Basically experiencing the thing you're feeling and just letting it go, not attaching to it, not judging it.
Is that kind of along the lines of stuff you'd recommend?
Yeah. It's definitely a huge part of it.
But there's a couple things that I noticed get in the way or the translation gets in the way there.
One is it's like think about emotions as like kids in your house.
And if you like a kid came into your house and you're like, I will be non -judgmentally aware of you.
You're probably going to get a very different response from the kid than if you're like, oh, I'm so excited to see you.
Like I welcome you in my house.
And the emotions feel different.
if you're like, I am non -judgmentally aware of this emotion or, oh, cool, like, oh, cool, I'm sad.
This is fantastic. If you have that welcoming invitation and one of the things that one of the quotes that I'm most famous for is joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome.
And so like a very joyful life is a life where all the other emotions are are deeply welcomed not accepted not non -judgmentally aware of right and i think those are really great steps don't get me wrong like if you can be in non -judgmental awareness of an emotion fantastic the other thing that's a little bit different about what you said is that emotions do need to be felt like they they if you stop feeling an emotion you have to constrict your muscles so i can watch somebody come in come up for one of my coaching, rapid coaching sessions.
And by the crease in their eyebrow, I can know that there's repressed anger by the hunch in their shoulders.
I can tell you about the critical parent that they had.
So the body takes on a shape that's based on the emotions that you've been taught to hold.
And so you don't just by sitting there, well, it's not entirely true.
If you just sit there and feel them in that way without the full expression, they will move eventually, but it might take a couple of decades.
But if you, yeah, you can actually just move them.
You can actually make the sound, move your body.
All mammals do it. You know, like mammals releasing fear, they all shake.
It's part of how we exist. And so that's also a really big part of emotional fluidity.
It's not just being still and feeling them.
It's letting the muscles move, making the the sounds.
For someone that wants to get better at the skill of feeling emotions, being more in touch with emotions, helping their emotions be more fluid.
I know this is like a lifelong practice and not something you would just hear on a podcast. Okay, I've solved this.
Is there anything tactically you can recommend to a listener of just like, here's something you could do this week that'll help you along these lines?
We have a free audio on our website called emotional inquiry.
And that would be the easiest way that I would, that's a really good entry level, first step into emotional fluidity.
But the bigger problem is that every step has a different thing.
So if you're in the not aware of emotions, then that step may not be the right step for you.
Though, if you are aware of two or three emotions and you can do emotional inquiry, usually it'll open up a lot of the other ones.
There might be a point where you really need expression.
And so emotional inquiry is not going to work.
But just generally, the emotional inquiry practice is a really good one and and what it is is like if imagine you're a little kid and you pick up a toad right you're gonna pick it up you're gonna look at it you're gonna feel it you're gonna smell it you some little kids are even gonna like lick it a little bit like they're gonna like really want to explore this toad and that's what emotional inquiry is is a somatic mental experiencing of an emotional experience in your body and what is it like and what happens when you welcome it, what happens when you love it, what happens when you resist it.
So it's a series of experiments that you're playing with the emotion and observations and felt sense of the emotion.
And that I find to be incredibly, incredibly useful for people.
Just getting very curious.
Yeah, yeah, a lot of wonder.
By the way, the quote you shared about joy being the matriarchy of all the other emotions, I imagine people have said this, but inside out too i think is exactly uh a representation of what you're talking about where joy is actually she's like the protagonist almost ah all right see that oh you mean yeah i think i've heard about this i haven't watched it but i think where you think it's all about being happy and you find out that you have to accept everything for happiness to really work kind of exactly yeah anxiety starts to take over and then things don't go well yeah something else that i've
noticed listening to a bunch of your conversations you do these kind of like like lightning round coaching sessions with people and say, listen to a bunch of them.
And something that was really interesting to me is that a lot of people come to you and they're like, Hey, I have this problem.
I'm not doing, I can't do this hard thing I know I need to do, or I have imposter syndrome.
And I just keeping me from doing the thing I need to do.
And you're often like, no, that's not actually what's going on here.
I can see that's not a problem for you.
It's really this other thing.
Is that super common where people think they need to work on this one thing and it turns out that's not at all.
They're actually okay at that and something totally else i would maybe put it a little bit differently they're living in a story that describes an old version of themselves and it doesn't or they don't see themselves clearly enough to to be able to see the whole issue and so they're just kind of living with a story that's in the past so that's a really common thing so often times if i do that in a coaching session typically it's because they're showing me right there that it's not true you know so somebody's like uh i'm so scared i can't do anything i'm like you just got in front of a hundred
people to ask me a question clearly you're not so scared that you can't do anything so i'm not buying it um i don't do it quite like that i do it with a lot more love than that but yeah so oftentimes i see that people's stories are are a culprit like how they describe themselves and and a great way that you can really see this in folks is that nine out of ten times that you compliment somebody buddy i really appreciate this thing about you they're gonna go ah now or well my uh or the well my sister is even more or like that you know if you knew me you know they're gonna do some sort of version like
that and then and it basically is one of the indicators that they can't actually feel who they are they would rather in effect call you a liar oh you're lying to me or you're wrong than they would to actually accept the experience of being seen in that way.
And it does a couple of things.
One of the things it does is it stops people from seeing themselves clearly.
The other thing it does is it makes people forever want to be seen and complimented and acknowledged and validated because they're getting the food, but they can't digest it.
Do you have any advice other than working with you and you telling them, hey, here's what's actually going on for someone to like, okay, maybe revisit.
Is it maybe this is an actually problem to see what's actually going on?
So we have a set of five kind of what we think are foundational tools for transformation.
And we do these free workshops on them.
And one of them is question the assumption.
And that's a really great way to have people start to see through their stories.
So at the beginning, I said nothing the critical voice in your head says is true.
And this is how it applies.
So typically there's an assumption that you have to make for the problem to be real.
If somebody says to you, for instance, if somebody comes to me and says, I am an asshole to my girlfriend, that's their problem, right?
So one, you have to assume that the girlfriend doesn't want you to be an asshole, as an example.
Two, you have to assume that you know what being an asshole actually is, right?
It's not just what your mom told you an asshole was.
like it you know three there's some validation this another assumption there's some clear thing that says this in the world everyone's like that's an asshole and that's not rather than what actually happens in the world which is 50 of the people think that this person's an asshole and 50 think they're a hero right it's something like that also that uh that it's another assumption there is that the problem is that you're an asshole instead of that you're resisting the fact that you are an asshole and therefore it comes out sideways instead of really clear So there's so many assumptions in there.
If you see through those assumptions, usually the problem starts fading away.
It's like, Oh, okay.
What's, what's, what do I mean by asshole?
Exactly. How do I define that?
And I, the reason I, and it seems like a silly thing, right?
When I, I'm using this example of asshole, but I remember this moment in my own development.
I was, um, I was in the Dega Bay out of all places.
And I'm very good friend of mine at the time was like, Joe, you're an asshole.
and i was like no i'm not and he's why resist it just fall in love with the fact that you're an asshole i mean just allow yourself to be an asshole for just a minute just one minute and i stopped and i could like stopped and i thought of like i was doing venture capital at the time and i could think of all the things that i had done that somebody would call an asshole and all the ways in which i was unattuned to people and and i could oh yeah okay i can can totally see that I'm an asshole and in that scene and in the not only in the scene of it but in as the shame fell away all right this is nothing
I have to defend this isn't something that I like I'm a bad person because of I don't need to be ashamed of it this is just some actions that I took and as that faded away then and then over the next couple weeks lo and behold I became less of an asshole so it's a strange thing when you when you really grok that that it's often shame that holds bad habits in place.
And so is the problem that I'm an asshole or is the problem that I'm ashamed of being an asshole?
Is the problem that you're a smoker?
Is the problem that you're ashamed of being a smoker?
So typically, there's so many assumptions built into everything that we call a problem.
And if we look through those assumptions, the problems disappear, as in this case, it disappeared for me.
Wow. Okay. There's a lot there.
It connects to something I know you recently talked about, which is the emotion we want to avoid is the thing we end up experiencing a lot by trying to avoid it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
What's going on there?
Okay. Yeah, so let's take, since I coach executives, let's do an executive example.
So conflict avoidant executive.
executive i don't want to feel the out of controlness that i do when people argue so i don't want to feel that level of out of control so i am going to be conflict avoidant i'm going to avoid conflict every way that we go to avoid a feeling becomes the way that that feeling gets invited towards us so we all know what it's like to work for a conflict avoidant CEO or boss, people get really fucking upset.
Eventually, people get really upset.
Decisions aren't being made.
There's all this tension.
It's never relieved.
We never get. And then, wow, sure enough, the conflict avoidance CEO is dealing with a whole organization that's tense.
And they feel completely out of control on the fact that they can't do anything about.
So that's an example.
Or when I was younger, it was emotional abandonment.
My dad was an alcoholic and I didn't want to feel that emotional abandonment again.
And so I would get really hard when I felt like people were leaving me.
I'd be like, what the, which of course made them abandon me quicker.
Or I would try to caretake people, which would build resentment, which would make people abandon me.
So whatever emotion that you're trying to avoid, you are inviting into your life in exactly the way that you're trying to avoid it.
What the hell? Why would I?
Yeah, that doesn't counterproductive it is counterproductive and but the i think that the the really cool thing about it is you can look at any issue that you're having in your life so you can say oh like one of the problems that i have in my life is that i am constantly in an argument with my girlfriend or boyfriend let's say okay so you're constantly in a what is the thing that you don't want to feel in that argument oh i don't want to feel ashamed okay so you're getting in arguments because you don't want to feel ashamed and that's making you feel more shamed and okay so what am i doing at that first
time to not feel ashamed oh i'm defending myself oh and me defending myself is actually the thing that's starting the fight so you can backward engineer it to oh i don't want to feel ashamed therefore i'm going to defend myself which creates the fight which makes me me feel more ashamed so any problem that you're having you can actually backwards engineer it and see oh I can solve that problem by just being okay with that feeling god damn it you didn't take out the the trash oh that's the shame I don't want to feel I'm not going to defend myself I'm going to feel that shame oh oh oh yeah and then
maybe I'm going to say I'm sorry I didn't take out the trash or I'm going to say I don't feel ashamed I I don't want want to take out the trash you know but I have to defend myself to get in the fight and then I'm going to feel ashamed so you can reverse engineer all your problems this way it's like it's such a cool hack but it you know it's very hard for some for somehow or another it's very simple but very hard for people to utilize this is amazing so the advice is basically feel the thing and just kind of come to terms with this is the emotion I'm feeling and maybe this like an example of the the asshole.
Maybe, maybe I'm an asshole and just. Yeah, it's too, um, what's required for you to love and accept yourself would be and love and accept the emotion that you're having in the moment instead of resist it.
You know, there's that saying, what we resist persists.
It's how do you, how do you fall in love with and stop resisting the reality on the ground?
And in doing so it changes the reality on the ground okay but in this argument with your supposed girlfriend say you disagree about her perspective on what's going on I guess that's not the root issue here it's like it's your feeling right well like oh yeah hey sweetheart I really hear you want me to take out the trash and and I you know that's not my truth that's gonna be very different than you know defending that shame the defending the shame is going to be like wow you know no it's not my job to take out the chat right you're you're the thing you're trying not to feel the experience which is what's
going to do it so it doesn't really the response isn't the important thing it's it's really where the response comes from it's so interesting because people are constantly this is something we teach in our in our um the connection course is that it's really not about the conversation it's about where you're at in the conversation so for instance when my friend said to me hey you're a dick here's what he didn't do he's like you didn't go you're a dick you asshole like you're being an asshole you're being a dick fucking stop it he was like yeah you're a dick so what what's the problem he was he
was coming from a place of love for me and so i could not be defended in my response to him and so it's really where you come from it's the emotionally where you come from that's the important part not not as much what you say and and you can see this the perfect example of this is this happens all the time in my work so let's say there's a person who has a ceo and they're scared the person is scared of their ceo let's say this is the cmo in there i'm scared of the ceo i can't say my truth they're always getting upset they're gonna yell blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and i'll and i'll say
yeah there's one person who says it though right the answer is always yes there's that person has that ceo has one person who they don't yell at who they listen to who they who they'll they'll they'll take the objection from that they don't get angry with it's because there's somebody who doesn't approach them in fear it's because somebody approaches them a different way not with judgment but like hey look this is what we have to pay attention to and And so it's really about how you're coming at it and not what you're saying typically.
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head over to coda .io slash lenny and sign up to get six free months of the team plan that's coda .io slash lenny to sign up and get six months of the team plan coda .io slash lenny this is amazing joe uh i'm very happy with what advice we've already shared and there's okay there's more i want to tap into you you keep using the word advice and i just want to like so for anybody who's listening do not take my advice do not do not do not do not test it experiment set up an experiment try it out see if it's true for you it's one you know i just made this shit up somebody else could make up something
different it's like like you know jeff bezos made up amazon we make stuff up but we're humans but two is if you instead of just listen to it as a soundbite if you actually do it and make an experiment out of it you get to learn like it's in your bones you get to see what's actually real real for you.
And and what's real for you in this moment might not be real for you.
What's in the next moment?
So, for instance, like I could give the advice that says, hey, every you can't even control your thoughts.
You can't even you can't even decide what thought you are going to have next is it's just going to fucking happen.
So you're completely out of control.
And so it's all a gift. Can you look at life as all a gift?
And that would be wow, that could be really useful for one person but the other person they feel so disempowered that they're like i can't even control my own thoughts man i am totally trapped and and they might really need at that moment to learn that oh i i have empowerment i have choice and that's what they that's the advice that they need to hear and so like do the experiment find out what's true for you in in this moment that That's my, if there's a piece of advice, that's the one I wanna give.
Okay, so let's share more experiments people can run.
Another is this thread that I feel comes up a lot in your work is you're just really big on helping people feel joy.
It feels like that's the core of what you're trying to help people is feel more joy.
Why is that so important?
Why is joy so important, so powerful?
So I definitely would not want anyone to feel joy.
Like I wouldn't wanna push somebody into, to or like hey you should feel joy um but what I would say that's that's like a close cousin to that is that enjoyment is is like such an important tool for productivity enjoyment is such a important tool for living a meaningful life enjoy like so enjoyment is a like an amazing tool so as an example uh let's say you drive a ferrari you're not going to say hey that's an efficient car that's a that that's a super efficient car you're going to say no that's a that's a fast car but somehow in our own lives if we get something done quickly we're efficient but that's
not efficient you can go and get something done quickly and then you're so exhausted what's efficient is if at the end of whatever you did you feel feel like you have more energy, like you're stoked, like, Oh, I can't wait to do this again tomorrow.
That that's efficiency is that you've actually used the least amount of energy to get something done.
So if you say, Oh, I'm going to figure out how to enjoy what I do 10 % more than you and you succeed, you are 10 % more efficient.
Not only that, usually the quality is going to get a lot better too.
If you enjoy running, you're probably going to run more than if you don't enjoy running if you enjoy doing a podcast you're probably going to make a better podcast and you're going to do it for longer if you enjoy doing it so that so there's something really really important about enjoyment because it's not only a measure of efficiency it also has a strong correlation with higher in most things has a strong correlation with how long you're going to do it your staying power the the quality of what you're going to do all of that so that's one of the reasons that i think enjoyment is is really great the other
thing is that if you enjoy things they feel different and it doesn't require that i think one of the things that people do is they say this they say i want to enjoy my life more so i'm going to do less things like take out the trash and i'm going to do more things like go on vacation but that's not how enjoyment it works and like you can enjoy taking out the trash or you can hate taking out the trash that's a choice and right now somebody listening to this as an experiment that they can run is like okay you're going to stay listening to this for the next minute how do you enjoy it 10 percent more
and typically what will happen is somebody will take a deeper breath they'll settle into their body a little bit more they'll relax a little bit more they might physically get more comfortable there's a thousand things that they might do to just enjoy the experience 10 percent more that and in that they're becoming more efficient in that the quality is getting better in that they're hearing what i'm saying differently and so that it's just a really powerful tool what i know the problem to be is that some people will go okay now i have to enjoy life i'm gonna like disregard all these negative emotions
so that i'm in enjoyment and that doesn't work.
It's horrendous. It's just a recipe for shit stew.
Along these lines, how much of the work is learning to enjoy the thing you're doing more versus finding something that you innately enjoy?
Which one's more powerful, I guess?
Which do you point people to?
Which experiments do you find people should run more?
In our society, typically, it's how to enjoy what you're doing more.
Uh, what happens typically is that if you find a way to enjoy the thing that you're doing more, you're more likely to do the things that you enjoy.
So it's just like a, it's just a order of operations thing as compared to there's people, you know, a lot of the people in my circles because of who I coach and everything, they're billionaires and they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try to arrange life that they enjoy and it doesn't fucking work so they they actually have more power to make everything that they're doing exactly what they want to do but it doesn't that doesn't work it doesn't you know flying the the jet or buying the island or blah blah blah blah blah doesn't do it so whereas if you really learn to enjoy what's
in front of you all of a sudden one thing that happens is that you're not as scared of enjoyment like in you start saying oh wow enjoyment makes me really effective and so I'm one to do the things that I enjoy and so you're more likely to do the things that you enjoy instead of having this story I have to do x y and z so that at one point in the future I can do what I enjoy and so that it's just an order of operations things if you learn to do the thing you enjoy if you learn to enjoy the things that you're doing you're going to naturally start doing the things you enjoy.
If you only do the things you enjoy, you will not learn how to enjoy what you're doing very well.
So you share this tip of how can I enjoy this 10 % more?
Just like ask yourself, how can I enjoy this 10 % more?
Is there anything else that you find helpful for helping?
Oh, and you had right now, how can I enjoy this right now?
So it's not about changing anything in the, in the external world.
Yeah. Got it. Like internally, what can I do?
What can I change about the way I'm experiencing this.
Yeah. Or I like to ask it as how do you enjoy it 10 % more?
Because if it's what can I change, then there's trying.
Trying is usually not more enjoyment.
It's actually usually letting go of trying that creates more enjoyment.
So the phrasing can really make or break the question.
I enjoy it 10 % more.
So say someone's sitting in a boring meeting that's really sucking their soul, they should ask themselves this question.
How can I enjoy this 10 % more?
work yeah that would well should they can they get to it's a great experiment it's an experiment okay perfect yeah the reason i do the should thing is that as soon as you say you should and then you don't then you can fail and if you fail then you're less likely to try it again that's why the the should just it it ends up usually in stagnation should like if you if you like think about the way it feels in your body and when you say i should do something there's like a stagnation there's a whereas if you say something like oh i want to do it here's an experiment i can do or here's what i enjoy
there's less stagnation there's more movement this touches on something else that you talk a lot about we've kind of been circling around this idea of authenticity versus improvement where you help people realize that you are good it as you are.
You don't need to necessarily improve.
We've talked a lot about these sorts of things already, but just what else can you share there?
Just how to help people learn this?
Yeah. I mean, my favorite metaphor on this one is like, at what time in the journey of an oak tree is it perfect?
Is it like when it's an acorn, when it's a sprout, when it's 20 years old, 40 years old 150 years old 200 years old depending on the oak tree like when now i'm perfect is the idea is ridiculous so it's a similar thing for us so the idea that i need to improve myself it it it really disturbs the natural process that's at hand which is we evolve we as human and if it's like oh i'm evolving and i can enjoy it and and i'm acting from my authenticity then that's a very that has a lot of alacrity that moves quick if it's i need to improve there's something wrong with me i need to improve i should do
it that all goes really fucking slow flow, right?
Because there's a lot of emotional stagnation in that.
There's a lot of should shame.
There's a lot of stagnation in that.
And so you don't actually get that natural flow of life.
And so the Taoists talk about this as kind of like a river always finds its way.
It doesn't need, like it just always goes in that direction.
And so that's, we are naturally evolving.
Like that that is our nature.
And then to put a whole bunch of shoulds and shit in the way just slows the process down.
The other thing about authenticity that I think is really important to is that if you're success, if you are one of the few people, I'd say 10, 15%, who can say, I should be this way, this way, and this way, and then you do it, which is very few people can actually do that.
What most people do is they say, I should do this, should do that, should do that.
And then a decade later, they're still saying they should do the same things.
But let's say you're one of those really successful people.
Then you have a life for not you.
Then you have a life of who you think you should be, not for who you actually are.
And so if you move from authenticity, naturally, certain things aren't going to work.
Certain things are going to work.
Certain people are going to work.
Certain people aren't going to work.
Certain jobs are going to work.
But the ones that you end up with over time are going to be the ones that are right for you.
not right for who you think you should be.
The most obvious of this is you meet a woman and you're like, oh, this is how I should be for them to love me.
You just do it. You just do everything that you think you should do, and then you get married, and then they love, not you, they love who you think you should be.
They don't love who you are.
What kind of marriage is that?
as opposed to this is who i am and i'm gonna be as genuine i'm gonna show you all my parts i'm gonna like be as genuine as i can with you then if you if you do get married you're married to the right person you're married to the person who actually sees all that and loves that and wants that how do you hold that idea with i also want to get better i want to you know develop myself i want to feel my emotions more those sorts of things i love that i want to i the better part A little kid wants to run faster and they might want to be a better runner, but the part that they miss, the reason that they
develop so fucking quickly is because they don't think they're going to be a better person if they run faster.
The idea is, yeah, you have this natural want.
That want is the thing that moves evolution.
evolution like a plant is like oh there's sun i want to move in that direction as compared to like i should both of them are human concepts but the but the want is like it's it's the thing that it's what allows us to know that's our evolutionary path oh i have this want to be closer to people oh i have this want for great sex oh i i have this want for being able to uh have a business that supports me.
These are great wants and they, they kind of show where, where the growth is occurring or wants to occur.
It's like, that's our natural evolution.
It's great. What, what, what makes it need to be better?
What me, what I want to be better.
It just slows it down instead of, it's like saying that what I am is broken and therefore the whole thing slows down.
So I, I, we try to word everything as, you know, more in the experimental framework, but also we try to word everything as like self awareness, self experimentation, self discovery, instead of self improvement.
Because if you understand the problem, then the problem goes away.
way. So just explore it.
Just understand it as composed to making a list of things that you should do to get better that you will eventually fail.
And then you'll just be stuck in this should loop where you beat yourself up and where most people hang out a lot.
So the experiment here that I'm taking away is think more about your want versus the should and and things you think you need, right?
It's okay. Because typically when you say I want to improve, it means the subtext in that is once I do X, Y, and Z, then I'm lovable.
Once I do X, Y, and Z, then I'm okay.
Once I do X, Y, and Z, I'll be worthy.
Once I do X, Y, and Z, I'll be enlightened, whatever the fuck the thing is.
But that's just not how it works.
What works is the person who loves themselves has loving relationships.
It's not the person who's done X, Y, and Z so that they can be lovable has loving relationships.
The people who do X, Y, and Z so they can be lovable have relationships where people are critical and constantly trying to telling them that they have to be better.
Coming back. You just said this interesting quote that you also shared at the beginning, this idea of once we understand the problem, it goes away.
Yeah. Let's make sure people understand what that means.
Is it related to this idea of once you feel like I'm an asshole.
Okay. okay. And then like, oh, okay.
And then it starts to kind of fade away.
Is that, I just mean it practically, you know, it's like, can you really fully understand a problem if you don't understand the solution to it?
I don't, you're right.
So if there's a principle and I can't remember the name of it, like it's Strickland principle or something, but it's something that you, that this CFO that I used to work with said, and he would say like, problems get solved if you spend time on them.
Like if you just give attention, enough attention to a problem the problems will solve like that's that's the way it works in business an unsolvable problem obviously that's it's not going to work that way but the reason that that works is because the more you spend time on a problem the more you understand it and another way i love him or hate him you know they're one of the one of the things that elon Musk has said that I find that I found a very valuable in my time is that if you really want to interview somebody and they claim that they've done something you ask them it's like kind of six levels
down so you improve sales how did you do that exactly well we improved the pipeline okay how'd you do that exactly oh well we made the pipeline more measurable by having things that It could be, okay, yeah, and so how did you know what were the seven stages of the pipeline and what made you pick them?
You go six levels down and you can really understand if somebody was the person who solved the problem or if they're the person who is claiming that they solved the problem.
So it's the same thing.
It's the same thing.
If we just explore a problem enough, the solution is apparent.
If we understand the problem enough, the solution is apparent.
parent and so typically if we come to a problem with a a kid's mind wonder if we come to it like what what could i learn here what's exciting what what are the experiments i can run then typically that's the most efficient way enjoyable way to solve a problem as compared to i have to get to this problem by the solo at this time and we're gonna do it this way and like usually that doesn't work.
And I could geek out on why that lets democracies win over autocracies because they're far more experimental by nature.
And it's not one person saying how things are going, but just generally, we're more efficient when we're exploring.
And so we're more efficient when we're exploring ourselves and understanding ourselves and trying to improve ourselves.
There's a couple more experiments I want to help people try to run.
One is you have some really good advice around decision making and how emotions and getting better at understanding and working with your emotions helps you make better decisions.
Can you talk about that?
That's similar to what I said before, which is if you learn to fall in love with the emotional experiences, then you have more solution sets.
So let's say I want to have like all human beings.
I want to be a part of a great team.
there's no no nobody has ever like raise their hand and said I'd like to be a part of a shitty team and yet grand majority of people at their work right now have shitty teams or not a teams not great teams even though nobody wants that if one of the things you're unwilling to feel is that kind of that conflict that tensions as we talked about if your conflict avoidant you're not going to be able to make an a team because there's nothing that that is alive doesn't require tension a cell requires tension breathing requires tension playing pickleball requires tension a good team requires tension so if you're
if you're going to avoid that experience you're not going to be as easily if at all be able to create a quality team so to be able to experience to be able to look forward to any emotional experience creates more and more solution sets for us more and more option optionality so in creating a great team for instance you need to be good with people hating you you need to be good with drawing boundaries and having people upset you need to be able to have high expectations even if somebody's just you have to be okay with somebody being disappointed with themselves you have to be okay just being disappointed with yourself
all these emotional experiences have to have to be available to you if you're going to find the solutions to make an A quality team.
And so the more you can fall in love with each emotional experience, the more you have, and then that clear the decision making gets.
So that's one thing for making great decisions.
The other one that I find really, really useful and very hard to execute on to really understand it is creating a set of principles to live by.
So we all have a set of principles to live by that we're doing it, right?
So for a lot of people, those principles are, um, you know, uh, what do I have to do to get likes on Facebook?
What do I have to do to, like, I'm going to do whatever it, I'm going to make a decision based on getting likes on Facebook.
I'm going to make decisions based on whatever it is.
pretending that I want to get wealthy or trying to get wealthy or there's a series of things but if you really take a look at what it is you're making your decisions on and then really think about well what would be the five or six things that if I made decisions with these principles I'm guaranteed success and then experiment with them and then refine those principles and then Then experiment with them.
And then there'll be these moments where you don't want to do it, but those are your principles.
So you're going to go and do it.
So as an example for this, one of the principles that I live by is embrace intensity.
So it's not create intensity.
It's embrace intensity.
It means that right now, any moment in my body, for instance, there's going to be a sensation that's more intense.
How do I welcome that sensation?
At any moment in running my business, there's going to be something that we don't want to talk about.
How do I, how do we lean in and talk about that?
I don't, you know, and so we start all of our meetings with, uh, what are you scared to say in our business?
What are you scared to say is when, not all of our means, but some of our meetings are started with what, what are you scared to say?
Because we want to embrace that intensity because we know that if we lean into the thing that we're trying to avoid, our life is going to get better.
Our business is going to get better.
and so if you can make like if you can see what those principles are for you and then run experiments to see if they work and then refine them every once in a while and so because of that because of that embrace intensity if somebody comes to me and says you're fucking up this business you're doing it all wrong i don't have to think about what i'm going to do i'm like oh cool tell me what i'm missing it's gonna it's gonna be immediate it because I live this way.
Maybe I don't want to hear it.
Maybe I'm having a bad day, whatever it is.
Maybe I'll say, hey, I want to hear you.
I'm not able to. Give me a day and I'll come back to you.
But all of a sudden, my decisions get made automatically if I live by a set of principles and I find very effective living by a set of principles.
tools for someone that wants to create their own set of principles is there a guide you have is there any advice for how to actually go about starting this list putting together we have a decisions course which is like a large part of it is about how to do that the it's a difficult one to explain because there's a lot of nuance in it just as a for instance one of the nuances is defining the principles not just by what it is but what it isn't is a really significant significant, very minor thing, but it ends up being incredibly major.
But if you're going to do your set of principles and you want to do them on your own, the main thing I would say is keep it to five.
I wouldn't even do six.
I don't do six, but I keep it to five and, and I would test each one of them for like five days.
So make your principle and then see if it works for you for like five days and then do then you know and keep on experimenting until you find five and when you look at those five and you say if i do that if i live by those principles i am just almost 100 if not 100 confident that that's going to create the life i want if i live by those principles then you have a really good start and and make them simple yeah like mine minor things like like embrace intensity or connection first or everything's in iteration.
All these things that I, as soon as I live by them, things work.
Company works. Amazing.
And we'll point folks to that course if they want to take it themselves.
Cool. It's only once a year, so it's a rare one.
When is the next one?
January. Okay. Not too far away for folks that want to wait.
So again, the two pieces of advice you shared and that's our experiments that we can run to help become better decision makers one is create a list of life principles and there's a course that will point people to to take that the other is the thing you keep coming back to over and over and over this idea of falling in love with your emotions yeah embracing your emotions welcoming your emotions yeah there's also i know you do a lot of work with teams i imagine there's very similar advice for how to help your team be more effective principles i imagine as a part of it falling in love we've run
principles for teams yeah yeah that's one of them it seems to be more effective that we have a lot of I mean I think I have like at this point I have 12 things that I'll go into a company and and do with a company so so typically the way I do I like to do it is I will go in and I will talk to some like I'll talk to the leader typically and they'll say this is what I want and then I I really want to assess like typically if the person who um Is, you know, a big part of creating the problem has a hard time seeing the way through the problem or they wouldn't have been created generally.
And we all, this is not demeaning any leader, we all have these issues.
So usually what I like to do is I like to go in and I like to talk to three or four people, see what, you know, their perspective, not just the leader's perspective.
And then I like to sit in on a meeting or two and just see actually what the dynamic is.
And one of the things I like to say about how to change a company is that the atomic structure of a company is the meetings and the decisions.
So it's particularly true in Silicon Valley, but it's really true in all businesses that all we are as a company is a group of people's relationships and ideas.
It's it. Especially like Amazon, you got a couple buildings and Some servers, there's not, you know, there's like not a lot of hardware there and they wouldn't be useful without the people anyways.
Anybody, whether you're running a farm or a shoe factory or anybody successful is going to tell you it's all about the people.
And so the atomic structure is what are our meetings like and what are, how do we make decisions?
And so I'll just really pay attention to a meeting.
One of the things we do is we talk about what we call five -star meetings, which is how do you make every meeting enjoyable?
Literally, how is it that everybody, when they walk out of a meeting, they're like, fuck, I loved it.
That was great. As it turns out, we've all been in meetings that are hard as shit and we've walked out and gone, oh, those were great meetings.
We've all been in meetings where nothing happens and we're like, oh God, fuck, another one of just drive a nail through my head.
I don't want to sit there.
So, so what, what's required to make every one of your meetings five stars.
And if you do that, that that's one of the things we'll do inside of a company is like work with them to figure that out.
If you do that, every single problem with your company will come to the surface.
Every single one of them.
I had 10 five -star meetings, but these two meetings sucked.
locked that tells me exactly where we need to focus as a company that tells me exactly where to look for the problem that's happening and so it's like this and it's the same thing with decisions if you really start unpacking how the decisions are made where people are frustrated in the decision making process you're going to find exactly the problems in the company an example of this i was working with a um a friend and he's a he's a content person and he and we were we were just talking about how do you make every one of your meetings a five -star meeting he's like okay great i'm gonna he's like
yeah i'm never gonna do this i was like really tell me why he's my youtube meetings fucking suck you know he that's not where he makes most of his money but he's like these youtube meetings suck they're never gonna get better and luckily there's a a couple other people around at the time and everyone's like no wait i love my youtube meetings what do you mean like how could this not work for you and and so he he noticed like oh i like the team that didn't the the content none of it was working for him none of it was him he was just like uh and so he changed it he was like okay i'm gonna commit
to that i'm gonna see what it's like for me to just say every one of my youtube meetings have to be something that's super enjoyable to me.
And when he did it, like his YouTube numbers went off the charts in like a very short period of time.
It's just that common. Like wherever the meeting is that sucks, it means there's something else that's a problem that needs to be worked on.
So that's typically how.
So I can just look at, usually sit in any team meeting and see at least three or four of the major problems that are happening in the company.
It's such a cool way of thinking about about where to focus decision -making meetings.
And I love that the story comes back to something you shared earlier with the more you enjoy something, the more, uh, joy there is, the better it's going to go anyway.
And so the more you can find those moments and make things enjoyable, the better you have to.
And the other cool thing is like most of the executives or the CEOs that I've worked with, when they get to a point and it usually takes them, like we always have the goal of a month.
It usually takes two months to make sure every one of their meetings is five -star meetings and once they've done that then it's like how do you make sure all of your teams have five -star meetings but if you usually it's like within two months and they usually have half the amount of meetings at the end of it half the amount of meetings and their companies are more effective it's it's an incredible tool i could see why people enjoy that if you're meeting as well is there anything more along those lines before we start to close out our conversation either either around teams or decision -making?
I'll say for anybody who's running a team, Harvard's got a couple of these, but we used to do these tiny pulses.
As a VC, one of the strategies that was really effective that I saw very few VCs doing was, I would want these like pulse, I would like to read the pulse of teams with these like short surveys and stuff.
and and it was the most effective way of not very happy didn't want to come to work on monday they weren't going to make their numbers like the likelihood of them making their numbers is like going down so there was this interesting thing that just about how you know drekker i think said it first and then the virgin guy uh branson branson said it he's like culture eats strategy for breakfast or some such, but if that's true, then it's measurable and it can be a leading indicator.
And it absolutely is.
Like if you really, if you really pay attention to the culture on a team by team basis, it's an amazing, very effective way to drive results, but also a very effective way to, to know when bad results are coming.
Yeah. And what's, what's interesting to me is most people feel like they they can't control the culture like most people feel like most people i notice they feel like you know i i'm it's more likely for me to hear from a ceo god damn it like everybody agrees when i get out of the table when i get off the table everyone's like yeah we're gonna do and then they don't do it why aren't they doing it is more is i'm going to hear that more often than i'm going to hear a ceo say oh wow i you know i I really noticed that the way the email system was working in our company, we were disempowering people
by not requiring an action after every, you know, like I'm going to hear more complaints about why shit isn't working than I'm going to hear about strategies, like very gentle, simple strategies to change the culture.
And so it's an amazing thing to me that it's so powerful and yet people feel so out of control with it.
But to give people something they can do, say today or tomorrow, to work on a lot of these things we've been talking about.
Is there just like one thing you recommend that basically everyone should try to experiment with in the next, say, couple of days or weeks just to help them be better and more successful and happier?
here so i would do uh seven minutes not no less than seven minutes you can do more than seven minutes with seven minutes of gratitude with another person every day but it can't be i'm grateful for this i'm grateful for this i'm grateful for this it has to be feeling the gratitude and then seeing what comes out of your mouth when you're coming from the felt sense of gratitude and doing it back and forth and so you're savoring the grad the experience of gratitude and you're going back and forth with another human being so call mom dad sister brother business partner friend and every day just express
gratitude back and forth for seven minutes coming from the feeling not from the not from the thought and if you have a full body sensation of gratitude and you experience that for seven minutes a day it'll change your life dramatically really quickly really really quickly wow i already feel it and the practice is you are expressing gratitude to the person you're with it can be gratitude for anything in your life as a matter of fact i would say do it for a couple weeks and then do it on the places where you feel lack that's like the that's where the superpower comes in so you know i was in my own
personal life i was was uh meditating for like i spent like seven eight hours a day meditating for like years and so you can imagine i didn't have a lot of money so i was like i i was so the way i'm the joke i used to make is i would meditate and worry about money most of my day and uh truth to it's funny but it's truth and um and one day i was like thinking about money and thinking i was was driving in my car and I was thinking about this billionaire I knew.
And I was thinking about how I didn't have enough.
And then I thought, oh, this billionaire doesn't think they have enough either.
I know him well enough.
I'm like, oh, I'm, I have the experience of a billionaire right now.
I was my, I was like, he's probably driving in a car somewhere thinking he doesn't have enough.
And I'm driving in a car somewhere thinking I don't have enough.
This is great. Like I'm a billionaire.
And, um, and it tickled me, the idea tickled me.
And then I was like, well, what happens if I start focusing on everything I do have instead of focusing on what I don't have, which is where the gratitude practice came from.
And so my wife and I would sit every day and just be grateful for all the physical stuff that we had.
We were living in a hovel, we were living 15 year old year cars, we had no money, I was in debt.
I was in $40 ,000 in credit card debt or some crazy shit.
And we just did it and literally it was three months later my credit card debt was gone.
Six months later I had $60 ,000 in the bank.
Entire life changed because I no longer defined myself by somebody who didn't have. I defined myself as somebody who did have. And so all of a sudden I could look out the window and it wasn't, oh shit, I can't have that.
I can't have that. I can't have that.
Look out the window.
I'd say somebody made money on that.
Somebody made money on that.
Every fucking thing I looked at, somebody made money on.
The 20 people, 20 companies made money on the fucking lamp post. The person who installed it, the energy company, the rubber company like, there's just a holy crap.
It's all over the place.
And then in that definition, all of a sudden it became really clear.
Oh. And so it doesn't matter if the thing that you feel like you lack is time or the thing that you feel like you lack is love or the thing that you feel like you lack is money.
If you can really do a gratitude practice on the thing that you lack, there's a superpower in that one.
It changes everything.
Do you still do this?
I do gratitude, yes.
Do I do gratitude on stuff I lack i don't really have an experience of lack that's not really but you still you still do those gratitude uh seven of course yes like that that's like asking if i still have sex like why would i give that up it feels great okay so just to be clear uh you find someone seven minutes every morning probably think about things you're grateful for and share back focus not on your intellectual thing you're grateful for but just like what's coming out of your emotional body yeah feel the gratitude let the let the feeling of gratitude speak rather it in your mind.
Wow. Yeah. So that you get the felt sense of it.
Yeah. Joe, I'm incredibly grateful for you.
I really appreciate you sharing so many experiments for people to run.
I think this is going to make a real impact on a lot of people's lives.
Two final questions.
Where can folks find your courses?
I know you have a podcast. Where can folks find the stuff they do online?
And then how can listeners be useful to you?
First of all, Art of Accomplishment, the podcast, cast it's art of accomplishment with brett kessler and joe hudson i think and then art of accomplishment uh the website will show you where all the courses are it'll give you a whole bunch of experiments you can run there's all sorts of like really great information there the other thing is that we just mentioned also is just that we really want you to make sure we really want to make sure that you think that the courses are for you that the courses are the way we do courses is is that it's a very felt experience thing.
It's not intellectual at all.
It's really in your body.
And the way we like doing it is that you bring real problems that you're having and you use the tools that we teach you for that.
And the foundational course for that is called the Connection Course.
So if you want to get into it, go to the Connection Course to find out if it's right for you.
If you're not already know that it's right for you, we do these little hour and a half free workshops.
And then it'll give you a taste of what it is that we do.
Cause it's unlike anything that's going on out there that it's, it's people doing, they're like, what the hell was that?
It's just a completely different thing.
It's not like learning in the normal way.
You literally sit down with another person and run experiments face -to -face with how you're being in the moment.
And so you learn all this stuff through direct experimentation.
And so if you find out it's right for you, you can do it through these workshops.
And I'm sure there'll be a place where they can find out where to go for that.
And there's one coming up in September.
Yeah, the connection course is coming up in September.
And so that would be, it's a great place to start.
It's foundational for everything else we do.
Oh, and then how can listeners be useful to you?
I want my children to grow up in a fantastic world.
And the best way that that can happen is that if the people listening to this discover who they are and their nature and the truth of how they operate, not for them, but for their children and their children's children.
So you want to do me a favor and make my daughter's world a better place.
I also just had a son, and so I totally resonate with that.
Joe, thank you so much for being here.
What an amazing podcast episode So this ended up being as I expected.
Pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Appreciate it, Lenny.
Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening.
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