So, five years ago, this entrepreneur guy called Joe Chura hits me up to come to this event he produced, called Go, which was all about getting people outside to sweat, to reflect and be inspired which, at least in part, inspired Joe to start his own non-alcoholic beer company, Go Brewing.
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Right now, if I said to you, stop feeling all of your emotions, it is a stressful experience.
Joe Hudson, executive coach to some of Silicon Valley's most famous executives and CEOs.
Facilitator of people returning into wholeness within themselves to help them master their emotions so they can become unstoppable.
The more I dive into your world, the more fascinated I'm becoming with you.
Business is like, you just can't bullshit yourself.
Can we actually allow the emotional experience of our body to be there without thinking that it's wrong or bad or shameful?
How do I feel loved?
How do I feel valuable?
How do I not feel like a loser?
How do I not feel stress?
That's what we're making our decisions based on.
Almost all of us have some emotions that we're just not allowed to feel, which ends up making us make incredibly horrible decisions, which create more stress.
The thought that you're broken creates most of the brokenness that you're trying to solve for.
And so don't try to improve yourself.
Try to understand yourself.
Joe, delighted to meet you.
Thank you for doing this.
Good to be here.
You've canonized your kind of core philosophy around how you coach people into this thing called the art of accomplishment.
So what is that like?
What are the principles behind this?
And what is the kind of architecture around how you work with people?
There's a lot of ways to describe what we do.
I would say the best way to describe what we do is people are stressed out.
They're just... not happy in their lives.
A lot of people are not happy in their lives and they're very stressed out.
And we think that's because we've got too much to do, or we think because we don't have enough money, or something like that.
And what I notice is that people are stressed out because they have a lot of negative self-talk, so they're constantly under attack.
If you're constantly beating yourself up, that's stressful.
That's like, did I do that right?
You messed that up.
Why didn't you do that?
How could you mess up that word?
You're saying the thing.
You need to work out.
Why aren't you working out more?
All that kind of recursive self-talk is incredibly stressful psychologically, extremely stressful.
The other thing that keeps people incredibly stressed out and by stressed out I mean they're not present, they're not loving the way that they would be naturally, inherently is that they're not feeling their emotions.
So, like right now, if I said to you stop feeling all of your emotions.
It is a stressful experience.
You have to constrict muscles, you have to like tighten up, you have to stop things.
And almost all of us have some emotions that we're just not allowed to feel, which ends up making us make incredibly horrible decisions, which create more stress.
Because, neurologically speaking, If I went into the emotional center of your brain and I took it out, your IQ would stay the same, but it would take you half an hour to decide what color pen to use.
It would take hours to decide where to have lunch, because the way the human brain works is we use logic.
And there's a great book on this called Descartes' Error.
You can look it up.
But we use logic to decide how we're going to feel.
And so what we're really doing is we're deciding how How do I feel loved?
How do I feel valuable?
How do I not feel like a loser?
How do I not feel stress?
And that's what we're making our decisions based on.
And when you're like, I'm happy to feel scared, I'm happy to feel angry because I know the gifts of all these emotional experiences, then you have this incredible ability to make great decisions for yourself.
It seems self-evident that this is, the way to be, but it is interesting.
We're sort of hardwired to believe that like oh, our stress is a function of external circumstances.
Like if things weren't so crazy, and like I just have to get over this hump and then it's gonna be fine and like- My husband just didn't, if my wife just didn't.
Right, it's all kind of lodged outside of the self, but- Yeah.
That's kind of an epiphany to understand that, like stress, is a function of repressed emotions or feeling like you're not permitted to feel yourself in certain circumstances.
Like I had never thought of it in that context before.
And so to me, that's a lot of.
The core of our work is emotional fluidity, learning to.
When I mean emotional fluidity, I don't mean, like you, go around getting angry at anybody every time.
It means that you can feel all of your emotions.
You're not being emotionally abusive, which means I'm going to throw my emotion at you.
In our world, The easy one that everybody recognizes is, oh, I get angry at you.
Like everybody knows what, that that person got angry at me.
But you can get sad at somebody too, right?
You can say, oh, poor me.
This is all to manipulate somebody or to control somebody.
You can get scared.
Oh, I'm really worried about you.
I'm really worried.
So there's lots of ways of getting emotional at somebody that controls them.
So we're not speaking about that, but we're speaking about oh, can we actually allow the emotional experience of our body to be there without thinking that it's wrong or bad or shameful?
And, I mean, that's, you just see people's life, you know, we get to see people's lives change.
That is like one of the biggest change agents on the planet because, if you think about it this way, how many people know they should exercise and they don't?
How many people know that they should be nicer and they aren't?
How many people know that they should eat one way and they don't?
So that means intellectually, they get it.
There's nothing more that you can do intellectually to change the situation.
But they don't get it on some other level right.
Because if you got it, you would do it instead of I'm bad because I don't do it.
There's this other option, which is you actually don't get it yet.
And where people typically don't get the transformation is with the emotions in our society.
And so what I notice is that when people get it in the head, which I would call like, the human prefrontal cortex brain, If they get it in the heart, which is what I would call the emotional intelligence, the mammalian brain, and they get it in the nervous system, the gut reptilian brain, then transformation happens.
It can't not.
So part of what we do at Art of Accomplishment is work on all three of those levels.
We don't work on one of them.
We work on all of them.
It's counter-programming for kind of our cultural prerogative.
It's an antidote to this hustle culture that we're in right now.
Repress your emotions, barrel forward, just get it done.
And it doesn't matter how you feel about it.
These are short-term strategies that always end up in some kind of worse scenario down the line, inevitably right.
So emotional fluidity is the opposite of emotional repression, basically.
Can you be with your emotions?
I'm somebody who I'm in addiction recovery, been in AA forever.
And one of the annoying catchphrases, there's many in those rooms, I love this slogan.
Feelings are just feelings, you know, and we're so afraid of our feelings.
Like we do so much to avoid any kind of discomfort.
I mean, all addiction is, you know, stems from an avoidance strategy of like just not being able to tolerate some kind of emotional situation and being willing to do anything to avoid it.
Yeah.
And the more that I reflect on my own life.
I told you ahead of time I wasn't gonna make this like a personal thing, but like it's gonna seep in.
All of my errant patterns and you know kind of behavioral coping mechanisms that don't serve me.
All stem back foundationally to something that I'm trying to avoid.
Yeah.
It's incredible.
An emotion you're trying to avoid.
Yeah, an emotion that, you know, and you can say another annoying thing in AA is like self-awareness will avail you nothing.
Like I have a lot of self-awareness, but it doesn't mean that I'm doing anything about it necessarily.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
You can talk about it and form a whole narrative and a story around it, but that is very different from being in the solution.
Yeah.
So if you put together that thing that I said about emotion making good choices, you want to have a drink.
There's an emotion that arises that makes it that you want to have a drink.
If you're like, oh, cool, that emotion.
I can't wait to feel that emotion.
There's no need for the drink.
And you can have all the self-awareness that I'm an alcoholic.
But if you can't sit with that emotion, you're gonna have the drink.
So how does one go from a conscious or even an unconscious aversion to experiencing a certain emotion to curiosity and welcoming of that experience?
Yeah.
The first one's the hardest.
The first one...
It's like why would I ever wanna feel?
This thing is kind of where you'll hear people on the first emotion that they're going for.
And one of the things I like using is like, well, why would you ever wanna work out?
Like that sucks.
You know, like it burns.
It's like you get exhausted.
Like what would make you ever want to do it?
And the answer is always because the next day or in weeks I feel better.
So it's like a very similar thing.
So that's what you can help people get to.
You said curiosity.
Curiosity is the right way to approach it.
It's a deep wonder.
So it's not just a feeling.
It's just a feeling.
It's like, well, where is that feeling in your body?
How does it move?
How does it sit?
Because feelings don't stay still.
It's not like I have a feeling of anger and it's just this sedentary thing in my system.
Even the feeling of stuckness has some movement in it.
What is the somatic experience of that in your body?
And starting to have curiosity and understanding.
But then what happens is, once you can welcome that, first emotion patterns start changing.
So I have this thing that we call it the golden algorithm.
And the golden algorithm is the feeling that I'm trying to avoid.
I'm gonna invite in the exact way that I'm trying to avoid it.
So-
For me, emotional abandonment was huge.
My dad became an alcoholic.
I felt very emotionally abandoned.
So every time I would smell emotional abandonment, even when it wasn't there, I would do one of two things.
I would be, fuck you, I don't need you anyhow, which makes people emotionally abandon you.
Or, oh, what can I do to help? which makes people emotionally abandon you, right?
Neediness and getting hard both cause that.
And so this thing that I was trying to avoid the feeling of abandonment I was creating in the exact way I was trying to
Well, once I'm like, oh, cool, I'm being abandoned.
I can't wait to feel that.
Like I can sit with that.
I can be there with that.
I've done that before.
And when I do, I learn something.
So I'm gonna do that again.
Then all of a sudden I don't do those two things.
I don't get hard.
I don't.
And then the pattern starts to dissipate.
So as soon as people start to say, see, oh, here's the pattern in my life.
Here's the emotions I'm avoiding.
If I can look forward to them.
The pattern changes then.
Then people, just what's the next emotion?
Let's do the next thing, let's go, let's go and it falls away.
I've heard you talk about like the conundrum of letting go, like letting go is sort of this active, like verb right, like you're, you're like willing something to go away as opposed to.
I don't know if there's a word in the English language to represent what you're talking about.
Maybe surrender's a little bit closer to it, but you're in this allowing space.
It falls away naturally.
Yeah, what I notice is the best word in the English language for our society today is receiving.
If you and I just here right now, just receive life, which is called life, energy or life, and we just receive, it's the way that your brain can construct the least amount to do like letting go, surrender all that stuff.
It's like i have to do something to let go.
But you know the zen say how do you let go of a hot frying pan?
And so receiving, i find, is the one that works for people the best.
In reflecting on your golden algorithm, I was thinking about my mother, and she's somebody who suffered quite a bit of loss and never really got help for kind of healing the trauma of that.
Her brother and her father both passed away.
And as a consequence of that, like she kind of clutched onto me pretty tightly out of fear that she might lose me one day.
Which of course, you know, pushed me away.
And I've spent decades resenting her and have a very challenging relationship with her.
And now she has dementia.
So there's no kind of like reconciliation between us possible.
Yeah.
But I'm on the precipice of recognizing not only the fact that she's been my greatest teacher, but that the love and emotional needs that I didn't receive were a reflection of her, on some level, loving me too much.
And it's given me this portal to... empathy for her that I always lacked.
But downstream of that, I've been challenged in my capacity for intimacy.
It's like, leave me alone.
I can't have anyone smothering me.
This has impacted my marriage and i'm on this journey to like kind of move towards yeah, the discomfort of intimacy yeah, and so your words around like curiosity or just like you know that on the other side of that experiment is a new freedom, I have like 20 things that I see in what you just said.
So that pattern is very like.
You clearly know that pattern of if I feel smothered or dominated in that way by a mom, avoidance is kind of the natural thing, because that was the only way you could get a sense of self as a kid.
So it's like, if I allow it, there won't be a me left.
So I have to rebel.
And the way that I can rebel is to avoid because it's a sense of me.
And so intimacy is hard typically in that situation, because this is the emotional stance that you learned to take, because your mom was this way, right.
That you weren't like this, so you went this way because that's how you got to keep yourself, And if you do this, the fear is that you're going to lose yourself again.
So the protection is to actually keep yourself, which is when you see it that way, You're like oh, the job is actually to like be in myself, in the intimacy.
It's not to lose myself in the intimacy.
It's actually to be fully a hundred percent myself in the intimacy that, that changes for me.
I've seen that change a lot of folks.
The other thing that's like useful to see with your mom is that, like all that fear that she had well was, in a weird sense, devotion.
We're not scared of what we're not devoted to.
So for me, one of the ways that I learned to forgive my mother, who had a different pattern but, by the way, also lost a father at a young age, is to just see that fear as devotion.
And that helped me have a lot of empathy.
But that's not like a step you take right away.
You also have to get angry and pissed and you have to do all the things to get to a place where forgiveness like to jump to forgiveness doesn't really work.
You have to.
I mean, I'm dancing around it right now, but it's still a leap.
Is there any other kind of like practice or like sort of daily ritual or anything like that that you would suggest?
The best one is, it's the same practice that you have in AA rooms, but it's in the marriage.
If you remember, in 12 Step, the first time you came up and said something, it felt really, really vulnerable.
The hundredth time you said that same thing.
Probably that vulnerability feeling wasn't particularly there.
I say that because it's important to come into your marriage every day and say one vulnerable thing, one thing that makes you pucker, that makes you go, that is like a tremendously important.
Yeah, I'm just like recoiling, you know, it's like, I'd rather run an ultra marathon, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you know, on that kind of avoidant.
So make it really small, just like you don't run your ultra marathon the first day.
Just like it doesn't have to be big.
It could just be as simple as like, I don't want pasta tonight.
But it's that one thing that makes you just pucker a little bit that changes it very quickly.
That's helpful.
Thank you.
Then there's the pesky inner monologue that has something to say about all of this.
That runs interference on everything that you're sharing.
Yeah, I mean, there's two forms of it.
There's the inner monologue that's self-abusive, and then there's the story that you're telling, which at one point was clearly a healing story for you, but now may be holding you back.
There's those two forms of inner monologue.
There's the inner monologue of belief and the inner monologue of daily recursive.
You're not good enough.
Why are you doing?
Why didn't you?
You should have done better.
You've got these six other things to do.
Have you done them yet all that?
So there's.
There's two levels of that recursive, limiting belief in the negative self-talk.
That's a situation in which self-awareness definitely avails you nothing.
We all have our inner monologue.
I just assume everyone's is negative.
It's probably not the case, but mine certainly is.
And just being aware of it, even understanding how it's impacting your stress levels and your inability to kind of function optimally in the world, doesn't do much to derail it or to cajole it, I suppose.
I mean, you have a whole thing about like, you're not trying to shut it down or mute it.
You kind of have to dance with it, right?
You have to humor it.
I have like 10 tools our week long that we do that's under the table thing.
We go through like 10 tools to work with the negative self-talk.
The studies that we've been doing on that we can reduce on average negative self-talk by a standard deviation.
So there's a lot of tools that are used.
But you're right.
Just awareness of it doesn't typically do much, and fighting against it entrenches it.
That which we resist persists, I think, is one of the slogans.
That's another AA slogan.
But there's lots of tools, and one of the simplest ones to access is to...
Right now, what happens for most people is they have an inner dialogue who's like you're not good enough for X, Y and Z purpose.
And this one's like, yeah, right, but fuck you.
So yeah, right.
Okay, fine.
And then I'm going to undermine by not doing the thing.
So you should eat differently.
You're right, but I'm not going to, you know, that's like the typical dialogue.
Everybody's worried about this.
How do I change this?
But the more flexible option is to change the response.
And what would be an example of that?
Well, the best way to do it in my experience is experiment.
So, because if I could tell you, but then it becomes something that you have to do.
Why aren't you responding to yourself in this way?
I don't know, fuck you, right?
If I tell people what's the most effective response, then it'll become a should, which will be this person, the upper dog's voice.
And then they'll rebel against it.
So that doesn't work so well.
So instead, what I say is experiment.
So one day respond to it with, oh, aren't you cute?
And the next day respond to it by singing a musical.
And the next day respond to it with, I see how scared you are and I'm right here with you.
And then the next day respond to it with like, shut the fuck up.
And then the next day respond like write a list of 20 ways that you think would be fun and enjoyable to respond to that negative self-talk and respond that way for a day.
Like do the experiment.
The dilemma with the striver is, of course, this notion that, whether it's that internal monologue or that quest for specialness, these are defense mechanisms born of childhood trauma or just experiences when we were young that highly capable people figure out how to turn into superpowers.
This is what creates successful companies, or you name any kind of successful person out in the world.
Many of them have this unhealthy relationship with some kind of strategy that was born out of something dysfunctional early in life that has fueled their success.
Here comes, Joe.
You know, when these people reach, they've climbed to the highest mountain and they look around and they're like how come?
I'm unhappy.
Or like, how come I don't feel fulfilled or I can't be present in my life?
Like this is something that, you know, I've struggled with.
And you're saying well, you know, these strategies that served you so well are not serving you and it's time for something better and new.
That's a threat.
Like well, if I, if I don't have those, then my whole thing is going to like fall apart or cave in on top of itself.
Yeah, my message is a little bit different, which is this strategy has always been dirty fuel.
Right?
So...
If you take right now, I did two little videos on this.
One was like this woman who's Chinese American great skier won the gold medal.
Another one is the best golfer in the world right now.
And what they'll tell you'll hear in both of the interviews they'll just talk about I love skiing.
I love playing golf.
I love practicing. they're not grinding because they love the thing that they're doing.
If they were grinding, they wouldn't still be doing it after decades, right?
Or whatever it is.
It's being process oriented.
It's like, there's something that they love about the thing that they do.
And so that's not dirty fuel and that makes champions.
It makes the best.
If you go to great jazz players, they're like, you gotta fall in love with practicing.
I love practicing.
There's this great thing on the internet about this guy and he's just like yeah, I fall in love with every note.
I'm just falling in love with every note.
And you don't practice to get anywhere.
You practice like you brush your teeth.
You're brushing your teeth.
You're not trying to get anywhere with it.
And that is what you see makes excellence in every field.
And then there's also obsession that I see all like, and you don't get obsessed over something you don't love.
I'm totally obsessed with whatever the thing is.
For me, it's the work that I do in the world.
If I didn't love it, I couldn't stay obsessed with it.
And so I think that those are actually the clean fuels.
And the thing is that anybody who's been that successful has those two things somewhere.
So they can recognize them.
They can see them.
They can say, oh, I can acknowledge that that fuel is cleaner than this other thing.
And so to recognize that the thing that you thought was driving, you has actually been putting the brakes on is often the first step to being able to have the courage to think oh, this might not be the only way to get it done.
So this is a long way of saying the critical inner voice is a dirty fuel, in that it may have catapulted you to a certain kind of plateau, but essentially- you're on a crash course with burnout anxiety, perhaps depression, like there will be a reckoning at some point.
Yeah, it's not.
It's not sustainable, correct?
There's three ways it's not sustainable.
There's like i'm gonna like get like blind drunk every weekend.
Not sustainable there's.
And so some people can do that for, like you know, into their 60s.
Um, there's the not sustainable like i sold my company and now i'm depressed in my house and i like i don't know what i want to do and i'm second guessing myself all the time unsustainable.
And then there's the unsustainable in the fact that i just constantly sabotage myself and i never get to the thing that i want to get to.
Those are the ways that it typically is unsustainable.
Talk more about the self-sabotage instinct.
On some level, we're all getting in our way all the time in various ways.
Yeah, so what you learn when you start welcoming your emotions is that The negative emotions are the ones that you learn to welcome first and they're the easiest to welcome.
And the positive emotion is the hardest to emotion.
It's like, why are we so welcoming to the negative emotions?
And so you know some of us aren't even welcoming to that, but yeah, that They somehow are easier than like the love that we earlier in the podcast like that's the one that's actually scarier for people.
And if you just think about, it's very rare to find somebody fall in love and they're not scared when they're like romantic love or they're just that.
A lot of what's happening is what I would call pleasure anxiety or love anxiety.
The reason that, that is, we'll call the love anxiety one is because for most of us, love was married to something that was destructive.
Love was married in my case to criticism, in my case to abuse, in your case, it was to smothering.
And so if I'm gonna accept love, then I have to accept the smothering.
They're like wired together in our heads.
And until we can separate them, until you can separate.
Oh, I can have love without transaction, I can have love without being smothered.
I can have love and have my own self possession.
You have a fear relationship with love, and instinctually correctly so, because you needed to separate yourself from a mother who was doing that or you'd have no sense of self.
So that's typically why it happens is because we actually have to distinguish it and there's somehow or another.
Having a negative emotion is less, is more comfortable than having a really great emotion that turns negative.
You know that's like i don't want that.
I don't want to lose that thing and you always lose it, like you don't stay blissfully in love forever.
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You're a very curious figure to me.
The more I dive into your world, the more fascinated I'm becoming with you.
A bit of a conundrum this guy with a venture capital background who is coaching some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs people at SpaceX and Google and OpenAI.
But also, this... person who is steeped in spirituality and spiritual inquiry.
And as much as that might strike people as counterintuitive.
It's obviously like a cohesive philosophy and a foundational aspect of how you interact with people and interface with them and coach them.
How do these two cohabitate in your mind?
Yeah, that's a great question.
The.
I think one thing to think about is you know, in 1970s you were an environmentalist or you were a businessman, and you couldn't be both.
I don't even think there was many businesswomen in 1970, right?
And then now you can be an environmentalist and a businessman or a businessperson.
Or an artist and an athlete.
An artist and an athlete.
That apparent separation of identity collapsed somewhere along the line 1990s, mostly when cleantech came in.
And so to me, it's the same thing.
It's being deeply committed to self-discovery only serves business right.
You can make a lot of money planting trees.
You can make a lot of money cutting trees down.
You can be very successful in business in a way that allows you to understand yourself and get to know yourself better, and you can do it in a way that doesn't do any of that and leaves you miserable.
Even if you've had all the success in the world.
That was one kind of recognition that allowed for it.
But I think the deeper recognition for me was I spent, you know, 10 years mostly meditating, and business is like you just can't bullshit yourself.
You can bullshit yourself on a pillow pretty easily.
You know you can.
You can sit down and convince yourself that you're happy, but then get in like a car with a screaming kid for five hour road trip and see how you're doing.
So to me, business was this thing where Could I maintain an open, loving heart?
Could I maintain a sense of self and self-possession when one of the companies I loved was failing?
And that became a much better ground for me to discover myself at that moment in my journey than sitting and meditating.
At some point in your venture capital career you realize that it's really an education in human psychology and human behavior, right.
You're starting to realize these worlds are congealing.
Your effectiveness as a venture capitalist is correlated heavily with your ability to understand people and kind of solve their blocks and help them kind of actualize their ambitions.
That was because I was a bad venture capitalist, not because it was a good one.
Meaning great venture capital is you invest in people who don't need you.
And I invested in people who needed me.
I invested in not people who I thought would be able to take care of everything.
It was like people who had potential, they had a good idea.
And I had a personal part of myself that was still trying to save my alcoholic dad.
So I was like finding people to save.
And so my portfolio did not do as well as if you would have hired a whole bunch of people who don't need you.
And so then, my only way to save the portfolio was to coach, was to coach them and to coach them into being successful.
So with this awareness, how does the idea of coaching come to pass?
How did you kind of square that equation?
I just started helping out some entrepreneurs who I had invested in and the word got out.
And so I just took all those years of stuff that I had done and applied it applied it to business.
There's something intractable in the human mind about the idea of kind of transcending the daily pain of living.
Like, if we can just outpace it, if we can, It's always around the bend, or the promotion or the next thing.
And then...
There will be that opportunity where we won't have to deal with uncertainty and pain.
And I think that's sort of a driving force behind so many of us.
And that's a denial of reality on some level.
Yeah, I have a phrase that says joy is a matriarch of a family of emotions, and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome.
And so not only is it a denial of reality, it is the exact opposite direction, in which you have a joyful life.
Mm-hmm.
Elaborate on that, because there's a lot packed into that.
That was one of your kind of 30 in that viral tweet where you had those 30 points.
But this is like a portal into a deeper conversation around how we manage our emotions.
Yeah, so if you look at kids, they're just joyful a lot of the time.
Like you little kids, they just have a tremendous amount of joy, and the more they get told not to be happy, not to be, don't be so excited, don't be so sad, don't get angry, don't be mean, don't have a temper tantrum, don't right like, which is basically sending them the signal you are not enough.
There's something wrong with you.
Your anger is wrong.
Your sadness is wrong.
These emotions that you have are wrong emotions.
And the more that those happen, you can just watch it in children, the less joy they have.
And the more that they open up, if somebody starts feeling them, the more joy they have.
Because it's like we're a dock with like one place for the boat to sit.
And then like the anger is not moving because you're not allowed to get angry.
So there it is.
And there's no place for joy to park.
And that messaging from parent to child is really about the parent's discomfort.
Correct.
It has nothing to do with the child.
Correct, yeah.
It's very cool.
If you ever get on an airplane and a kid starts crying and you're in the front of the airplane, you just get up and you look around at all the faces and you can point to who wasn't allowed to cry as a kid.
Because they're just so uncomfortable.
They're so freaking uncomfortable.
That's right.
And so in your own parenting, you have two daughters.
Two daughters.
How old are they now?
20 and 17 today.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She's just like for people who are listening and not watching your whole like composure just changed.
Like you just lit up like.
Yeah, I'm so in love with my daughters.
Share the story about your experience.
You know, kind of parenting them through this kind of total self-acceptance of their emotional states.
Because I think that's really powerful.
Yeah, this is my wife again.
My wife is like... is the creator of all good things in our life.
She found this thing called hand-in-hand parenting.
I cannot recommend it enough.
It is, without a doubt, the most powerful spiritual work I've ever done was parenting in the way of hand-in-hand parenting.
It's like five very simple, easy tools.
It's a beautiful process.
But part of it is that you not only allow your kids to have whatever emotion they have, you actually encourage it.
So if they're like, I want a cookie, I want a cookie.
You're like, yeah, I really hear that you want a cookie.
I'm sorry that you can't have a cookie.
You just really allow them to have this full thing.
And what you'll notice is that kids...
They're disconnected.
They're out of themselves.
They'll have this big emotion and then they'll be like a connected, loving kid again.
It'll just like whack.
And if you don't do that, then you'll just start to notice that your kids are just like getting cranked up and they're just never well connected.
They're just like, they're kind of always on an edge.
And so my wife.
At this point in our marriage, my wife had a whole bunch of weird ideas in my mind to how we were gonna raise our kids.
And I said, no, she would have to fight.
And then I would say, okay, and then she would be right.
And so by this point in the marriage and she brings hand in hand home, I'm like, okay.
You're the CEO of the house and you're just right most of the time.
So I'm going to agree to whatever you tell me to do for three months.
And if after three months, it doesn't feel right, we'll change course.
We'll have a talk about it.
And so she brought Hand in Hand in and I just saw the change.
And we had a two and a half year old at the time, Esme, and I just saw the change.
It was just like unbelievable.
And she just, and I also noticed, oh, I don't want to sit with that temper tantrum.
I don't want to sit with Because I wasn't allowed to have them as children.
And so, in the process of learning how to sit in unconditional love with my daughters, I learned to sit in unconditional love with my own children.
So your daughters become your teachers.
Because they're reflecting that discomfort back onto you for self-inquiry.
Yeah.
And so just a couple of stories to make it.
I was once with my eldest.
She's like three and a half years old.
She wanted something at the Whole Foods restaurant.
I was like, no, she just goes for it.
She starts a tear.
And I was committed at this point.
So I'm like, right now, let's go.
And I get on the floor, I contain her so she can't pull stuff off the shelves.
And she's just yelling and screaming in this store.
And I live in this kind of hippie town and this old hippie woman came by and she's like are you okay?
Looking at me like, you must be screwing up somehow.
I know how to raise kids.
Are you okay?
My daughter's like, ah, I'm just having my emotions.
And then this is like, went right back into it.
I was like, okay.
Even on some level, she's consciously knowing what's going on.
She sees it.
She knows that there's relief on the other side of this.
And to this day, She'll call me up.
Two days ago, she called me up.
She goes, I really need an anger release.
I really need to move some anger.
Because she'll notice, oh, I'm starting to feel stuck.
I'm starting to feel resentful.
That means I have anger that needs to move.
And so because of that, she also deeply learned how to listen to herself.
So I can give you countless stories of both of my daughters where their friends got into trouble.
They didn't, you know, not trouble like from a parent, but got in trouble in real life because they were listening to themselves.
They're like, I'm not doing that thing.
Because they didn't have... any message that you shouldn't listen to yourself.
Whatever this is, it's true for you in this moment and you can move and live with that.
Yeah, that's a tremendous amount of emotional maturity for a young person and a capacity for emotional self-regulation through just permission to feel however you feel.
So you're not repressing anything.
That's right.
I think the key piece there from the parent perspective is the non-judgment piece, like allow them to do that.
So when you're in the Whole Foods and that woman's judging you like, I just felt myself like judging my yeah, she's right, I'm a bad parent, I should be doing something.
This public display of chaos um so much, so much gets like provoked.
Yeah exactly, like deep old stuff.
Yeah, exactly yeah, and and and so the the kind of cool experiment with my daughters is both of them are really good at receiving love.
Both of them are really good at, like expressing and sharing love and like Yeah, I mean my daughter, she was just in a spring break scenario.
Her friends were out.
She had the intuition not to do what they were doing.
They got in this massive accident.
She was the only one who spoke English.
She went to the hospital, translated. and like was there for them and translated for the doctors, translated, she just like did this whole thing and gets on the phone with me and just starts bawling and just cries.
And I'm like, oh, it's so great.
I am right there with you and then she's like okay, i gotta pull it together, i'm gonna do some stuff.
She goes, you know, calls me back, like next day balls for a while and she's like i just miss you and i love you and i i, at the end of this thing, i want to spend a day with you.
Can we make that happen?
Yeah, There's just a way in which, like and when I'm with her and both daughters, there's just so much love that and there's nobody trying to avoid it because it didn't come with like a caustic thing.
Or we got better at making it less and less caustic.
I think it's more accurate, but yeah.
That's really beautiful.
I suspect it's easier to parent a child properly.
Well, it's difficult.
To do that right, you're going to make mistakes.
But I would imagine parenting a child in that way into adulthood, whatever emotional problems that they may have later in life, are gonna be knots that are easier to untie than you know.
The typical person that you work with, who comes in with all kinds of you know, it's like you're trying to untie like a massive knot.
At that point, right when someone comes to you and they say you work with all these successful people, like you know, I've done all these things.
I don't know.
I just can't, like I'm unhappy or I'm, you know, unable to be present in my life or I'm dealing with depression.
What is the process by which you begin to understand what their core malfunction is and how to address it?
Yeah, I don't ever see it as a malfunction.
And the way my approach is a little bit different is that My job in that conversation is to speak to the part of them that knows and to like have a dialogue with that.
So I don't really listen to the story very much.
I don't really listen to the thing that they've told themselves a dozen times.
Like that's all clearly not helping.
You've told yourself that a dozen times, nothing's changed.
So that's not gonna do us any good.
So my job is to really connect with the part of them that knows, that has that clear understanding, because we all have it.
We all have our true north, just like I trusted it in my daughters.
I trust it in my clients.
And my job is to potentially be a road sign every once in a while and to ask questions that allow them to see it themselves.
So what would be an example of one of those questions?
Everything is usually pretty specific to the person in the moment.
So, if you like, go online in the in lab.
All these YouTube videos of me coaching people live in front of like audiences and um online audiences.
And You'll notice, I hardly ever ask the same question, but generally one type of question that I would ask is they would tell me a story about themselves and then I would show, like direct evidence, that that isn't true from the conversation that we've just had and then ask them to fill in the gap for me.
So for instance, you're scared of intimacy.
However, you share your entire life story with an audience of people.
How do you make sense of those two things would be the type of question that I might ask.
Or I might ask you say you're scared of intimacy, but you're sharing this with a whole bunch of people that you don't know, an extremely large audience.
If it's not intimacy, what do you think you're actually scared of?
So it would be something like that.
That would be like a typical way that I would do it, because I'm getting the wisdom from them, even though their story doesn't correlate.
So to start showing them this distinction between The story that I manufacture around my life or the people that you work with?
It's just a narrative spun by my brain that's attempting to overlay it with some kind of rational logic.
Like that's an obstacle to the solution.
The solution is really like, forget about all of that.
Like you have to transcend that and start to like, on a somatic level, like feel into yourself.
And these are skills that we weren't taught and certainly aren't emphasized or prioritized in modern developed society.
Yeah.
The weird thing about our stories is that every epiphany is a rut waiting to happen.
Wait, every epiphany is a rut waiting to happen?
What does that mean?
So let's say I'm 18 and I feel powerless, right?
It's really important for me to have this epiphany of I have choice.
I can choose and I can make my life what I want it to be.
That's a really important epiphany to have that like oh, like.
I get to make my life At some point that epiphany stops serving.
It becomes control freaky.
It becomes stressful.
And a new epiphany is required.
At that moment of wow, I can't even control the thoughts that I'm having.
This is all a gift.
Every thought I've ever had is like one that I can't control.
This must be a gift.
That becomes a new epiphany that serves for the next part of the journey.
And to have flexibility, to be able to actually understand I do have choice, and to understand that it's all a gift becomes the integration of those two things, the idea that creates a lot of relief in our system will at some point limit us.
And so... that's the limitation of whatever story we tell ourselves.
And oftentimes, because it created so much relief, we start identifying with it and say no, this thing is really important.
Instead of being able to see the truth in different sides of things, which is where the freedom comes.
And there's this.
I think it's a Tibetan saying.
It says sky as wide as the mind, and action is fine as barley flour, and what it's pointing to is that can you see?
Can your mind be so wide that you can see the truth in every perspective?
But that doesn't change how you do things.
There's only one thing you could possibly do.
Yeah, that's a lot.
Yeah, i'm just trying to let that settle.
Uh, In your case, an example of that would be self-reliance.
Initially this is a lever for growth, and perhaps you even self-identified with it at some point.
And then it runs its course and it becomes an impediment to your growth.
Yes, because it's cutting you off from connection and community and depriving you of that which is basically required in order to feel whole and to be more self-actualized.
And to take whatever mission I have in the world to another level as well.
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All of these kind of wounds that turn into superpowers ultimately become Achilles' heels.
And the identity piece is huge.
When we identify with them, it becomes this that's like the meta story of like who we are, and in order to grow, we have to disabuse ourselves or detach from that identity.
Like shed a skin yes, and you know, kind of wander in the desert until we find uh, you know, a more fitting skin for the next growth spurt.
Yeah, that's exactly how i see it working.
Yeah, and then it there's another piece to it too is like There's a question that you can get into, especially for like the mind to find peace.
There's a question that I got into which I've now refined to.
The question is like what am I essentially?
And the reason I use the word essentially is like it would have to be something that I've been since the moment I was born until this moment.
So I'm not angry because anger is coming gone.
I'm not my thoughts because my thoughts come and go.
I didn't even think for the first couple, three years potentially, right?
So what am I essentially?
Because if you identify with that, it's a whole different thing than identifying with person in recovery, or identifying as the husband, or identifying as the capable person or the self-reliant person.
All those have limitations.
But if you can identify with what you are essentially, then you don't give yourself that limitation and you you become far more effective.
And the answer to that question is not an intellectual one, It's something that has to be discovered.
I asked myself that question 10 times a day for like a decade.
Yeah.
And it's, and it, it is not an intellectual answer.
Is there a way to put words to it?
Yeah.
I mean uh, in Lakeisha Lincoln, I think, is like the one, the one that they use in the.
There's like the part of me that sees you as a part of you, that sees me loosely translated, like the thing, that that which is behind your eyes looking out, that which is aware of.
There's a lot of ways people have tried to point to it.
The I am that idea.
I mean it conjures the notions of oneness and questions the notion of identity itself or individuation.
Correct.
And that becomes a deeper Right, probing of what is consciousness and what is reality, fundamentally right.
But what it does on the effectiveness level, like on the just like art of accomplishment level, What that does is, if you're not identified, I'll give you an example of what this does.
Let's say you are a programmer right now.
You're a computer programmer.
AI has just absolutely changed your world.
Half the companies that are there today won't be there in six months.
I work inside of companies like OpenAI where it's a different company every three months.
Everything is changing so rapidly.
If you're identified as anything, you're screwed.
If you don't have the emotional fluidity to grieve and move and change your identity from programmer to software conductor or from you know inspire of of other people or whatever like.
If you can't change that identity, you're in a hurt situation and in any kind of high changing environment it's like an accelerated crash course in the notion that anything you would, you know attachment, is suffering right.
Yeah.
You know, on a kind of like hyper intense scale.
And guess, the silver lining in that is, it's compelling people to confront surrender without having to become an alcoholic or have some other kind of personal crisis, because the landscape or the tectonic plates under our feet are shifting so quickly that you have no choice if you want to sort of survive and be able to get up in the morning and function.
Yeah.
Yes.
And so that's one way that it helps.
The other way that it helps is like, okay, now I'm going to do emotional fluidity.
I'm going to like learn my emotions.
I can see that I'm not those.
So all of a sudden they become less scary.
Or when you realize like, oh, today's not like yesterday.
I feel all this fear, like to just be like, oh, that's interesting.
I feel afraid.
What is that telling me?
Or like, what can I learn about myself?
Like having a healthy relationship with your own self.
Shifting emotional state.
And that's the kind of cool thing is, when you start having that emotional fluidity, those signals become incredibly clear.
So the anger tells you I'm not holding a boundary.
There's a determination and or there's a determination in my life that I want that I don't have.
The fear is telling me that I'm either trying to move into a bigger room, that I'm being called into something bigger, or that there's some way I'm not taking care of myself.
There's an action I'm taking that I want to be taking that I'm not taking.
These are like...
Every one of these emotions actually has a really direct signal.
Once enough fluidity is there that you can start, you start getting excited for the emotions.
You're like, oh, cool.
I'm angry.
Where's the boundary I need to draw?
On this subject of improvement versus understanding, like this gets at the crux of kind of the personal development industrial complex.
Like the whole self-help industry, is kind of premised on this notion of brokenness, this sort of shame-ridden, guilt-provoking idea that there's something wrong with us and we need to read these books or listen to these people or go on a spiritual odyssey to quote unquote fix ourselves.
So talk a little bit about how you think about.
This makes me sad.
Yeah, i think that, like the, there's an interesting thing.
It's like the thought that you're broken creates most of the brokenness that you're trying to solve for.
Say that again, the thought that you're broken creates most of the brokenness that you're trying to solve for.
So if I took somebody who's deeply ashamed of something, just shame in itself creates massive stagnation.
So for everybody in the audience, as an example, here's something I can tell you about yourself.
I can tell you that there's something that you've been telling yourself that you should or shouldn't have been doing for the last decade.
If you're 30 years old,
And I can tell you that thing hasn't changed.
And the reason that the thing hasn't changed is because you're telling yourself you should be different, because that should is a form of shame.
Shame creates stagnation.
It's not a way to actually create transformation.
Nobody has like shamed themselves into like any kind of lasting transformation.
And, as a matter of fact, the quote I love on this is shame is the locks that keep the chains of bad habits in place.
And so there is a certain level of shame that is, I need to fix myself.
I am broken.
The avoidance of that shame is the cause of a lot of the behaviors that people are.
I should stop using porn.
That's shame.
If you didn't have that shame, probably porn would not be as useful or as attractive to you.
Like what you worked in the room the 12 step rooms is you're like working through that shame that came with the alcoholism.
That relieves the alcoholism.
So the idea that you're broken and need to be fixed is often the biggest issue.
That is, creating the things that you look at as evidence that you're broken.
The thing I like pointing to people is like, if you can't go into the past and you can't go into the future, you have to be right here in this moment.
Please tell me what's wrong with you.
What's the problem with you right now?
There's no problem right now.
So how the fuck could you be broken?
Like it requires a false, it requires like a memory or a false future to be broken.
And so just the self-awareness.
And the other thing that's interesting is like, well, let's look at a oak tree.
There's an acorn.
It turns into a sapling, turns into a young oak.
It turns into a senior, you know, old oak.
Like which one's the perfect oak, which one's the broken oak, which one's the not complete oak, right.
And so we look at ourselves like we're not the 100-year-old oak tree, so there must be something wrong with us.
As if evolution ends, as if our evolution could be complete.
Okay, I am now complete and fixed.
There will be no more evolution in me.
It's ridiculous.
Nor does the oak tree compare itself to other oak trees.
Correct.
I mean, this is the root of much of our suffering, right?
And the brokenness becomes this identity that calcifies us.
Correct.
But we convince ourselves that it is a kind of launchpad for growth.
Like oh, I'm going to fix this thing and this is worthy of my time and attention so that I can become better.
It can come from a good place.
But the underlying premise you're saying is... not just flawed, it's completely incorrect.
Yeah, it's also just dirty fuel.
It's just a very inefficient way to get to where you want to go.
If you are on a transformational journey that's That's like effective.
You're never going to end up where you think you want to go.
You're always going to end up someplace far better than that, because as you transform, your idea of what's possible will transform.
As you transform your idea of what's great and good, you will transform.
As you transform, your ability to love will transform.
So your idea of what perfection is today is like a shadow of what is actually available to somebody.
To my life, I went through a long stage of constantly trying to better myself.
I'm so glad that never happened, because the thing that I found is so far greater than anything I could have possibly imagined when I was like 25 years old, beating the shit out of myself.
I had no idea what was available.
I had no idea that I could love my daughters the way that I love my daughters.
I couldn't fucking even conceive of that reality.
But it's a function of surrender as opposed to some kind of pursuit.
Is this what you're saying?
Because I'm thinking about this notion of brokenness as being motivation for transformation.
And if you disabuse somebody of that and say there's nothing wrong with right now everything's, everything's perfect.
Right now, everything is exactly as it should be like, how does someone engage with transformation from that perspective?
Why transform if everything is just perfectly fine right now?
That assumes you have a choice.
Like that's like the oak tree, like why grow?
Why why?
Why put out some more leaves?
Why like why stretch to the sun?
Like it's our nature, like a three year old isn't like I need to improve.
And yet they improve.
You know like there's more transformation from zero to seven years old than there is in any other time in our life.
And there's never the thought I have to improve myself.
I have this thing that I believe, which is that we're here to grow and evolve.
This is our kind of blueprint and mandate and that everything that happens that our small brains label as good or bad, you know, without really any kind of data points.
Like we just decide this is good and this is bad.
Every single thing is an opportunity for transformation, for growth, for evolution.
If we can perceive it as such, you know, instead of saying, well, this is terrible.
And, you know, I hope that never happens again.
And you're saying the way in is through, like trying to find a way to suspend your judgment and approach with curiosity and understand that like it's, it's always grist for growth.
It's there for the taking.
Yeah, I use the word wonder over curiosity.
Just because curiosity is like you're looking for an answer and wonder, you can be in the awe of it a while.
And I find that wonder is a more effective, efficient modality than curiosity.
Curiosity means that there's a you needing to figure it out instead of just like whoa, check that out.
Whoa, check that out.
Curiosity feels more accessible to me than wonder.
I'm intimidated by wonder.
I'm the guy who's like, All of my wounds engineered this incredible life that I have, right?
And here I am unable to be present for it or actually enjoy it.
Thinking well, what was the point of that?
And now I'm like, I want to experience joy.
I want to experience awe and wonder and be present with the people that I care about and really invest in my relationships.
Instead of just being captured by the next responsibility or just being anxious and feeling urgent all the time about the next thing that I have to do, because so-and-so is waiting.
Blah blah, blah right.
Yeah.
And wonder comes up a lot, like awe and wonder.
And I'm like- you know, when was the last time I, like, how do I access that?
Yeah.
On a very practical level.
Like curiosity is like, I can make a choice.
Yeah.
But wonder feels like something I have to.
Really, I guess I would have to inhabit a certain state to make it possible.
But I can't just decide to be in awe and wonder.
There's like a super easy, practical way to like get into wonder really easily.
If you'd like to know it.
It require like a two-person thing, please.
So give me any is like a, just like a simple game.
You give me any um question that you're in in your life and it needs to be in the form of a how or what question.
Wait, say again what kind of question.
Any question you have in your life right now, like what makes it that I have a hard time with intimacy.
What makes me scared of love?
So it just needs to be an actual question that you have in your life.
And then I'm gonna respond with a how, what question.
And then you're gonna respond with a how, what question.
And then I'm gonna respond with a how, what question.
And then you're gonna respond with a how, what question.
We're just gonna go back and forth for a couple minutes and just see what happens so okay, so i present you with a question that i'm struggling with, basically about my life.
Yeah, whatever question you come up with, i'm gonna what's the question that that brings up in me?
And then you're gonna be like what's the question that that brings up in me?
We're not answering each other's questions, we're just yeah yeah, and they all have to start with how or what, How or what.
Okay.
Yeah.
And if your brain does that, that's fantastic.
What does that mean?
When you kind of do your 404, we go, uh, that's great.
What is interfering with my ability to actually enjoy my amazing life?
How would you know if you were enjoying your amazing life?
This is fucking me up.
That, that, yeah, that, that.
Cause like, I know what I want to say, but it doesn't fall into that structure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How can I return to the experience of feeling joy that used to come easy when I was younger?
What makes joy need to be easy?
All right, first, I'm just trying to understand the question.
What makes joy... Wait, what makes joy... Need to be easy.
Need to be...
What are you doing?
I don't even know what's happening right now.
That's wonder.
That is fucked up what you just did.
That's some kind of weird sorcery.
That's wonder.
All right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You were playing by a whole different rule book with that.
I was assuming the ground rules here and you were playing four-dimensional chess with my.
We've had literally hundreds, thousands of people run that exercise in small groups and one-on-one.
It consistently.
People do it.
They think they see their whole problem differently, they see a set of solutions differently and they've never tried to get to a solution.
They've only been trying to ask how questions, because wonder is far more efficient than curiosity or driving to an answer.
That's super interesting Because it requires you to go outside of your normal pattern of thinking.
By the way, that's how our work is.
Like when we do courses, it's not me sitting there talking, it's people doing exercises like that to learn how to.
It's all experiments, that's what we do, it's a pattern.
Interrupt, I mean basically to experience our wonder, you have to transcend your intellectual like mind, and I'm living in my head all the time, and so that's like a leap right, and so the only way you can do that is to, like you know, like shoot an arrow into, like my whole, like rubric right, to like be, like wait what is happening, you know, to like shake it up.
One of the transformations that I'm trying to make right now is to live with a little bit more ease.
I have this thing around suffering.
If I'm not bleeding out on the table, I just didn't work hard enough and it could have been better.
And then the inner monologue, et cetera.
And so I've constructed a life in which I sort of volunteer for suffering, and suffering is grist for growth.
And it's been this powerful lever for transformation in my life.
But I'm the hermit crab who's outgrown that shell right now.
And it's very uncomfortable for me to be like, well, what would it be like to, create something write a book do a podcast and not have that heaviness or that burden or that like imperative that it must that it must be like hard and i have to like push and push and push otherwise it lacks value yeah so i'm a little confused by that because it seems like uh being vulnerable and receiving love are hard.
So it seems like your natural disposition should be to put that, like go after that.
I'm confused.
Meaning, say more about that.
I'm confused now.
My work here is done.
You said doing one act of vulnerability every day sounds like absolute hell.
Not that bad, but uncomfortable.
Right.
Well, you're the guy who suffers, so go do it.
Right.
And I should say, I haven't mastered this, but I've come a long way.
I have a far healthier relationship with all of these things, but I'm recognizing that there's still growth for me there.
And I want it, and I want to grow in that way, you know, and I can see the light at the end of the, at the end of the tunnel.
And and, you know, life is life is better there.
What stops you from trusting that it'll just be there?
If anything, you've already made it halfway.
Yeah, it's fear of rejection or a sense of imposter syndrome, probably.
Yeah.
I could coach you, but we're not gonna go there.
No, we're not doing that.
This became way too indulgent for self-indulgent.
I promised I wouldn't do this and then here we go.
I don't mind.
But anyway um, at some point, if you ever want to do a coaching session, i'm happy to do that.
Dude, believe me, like you're the you're, you're the guy, i think you're the guy for me.
Final thoughts what is a common misconception around those ideas that you would like to correct the record on?
Yeah, we've said it, but i'll say it again which is um, Understanding yourself is a far more efficient path than fixing yourself.
And just notice, I would say like for most people you can do this, not everybody, but most people you can do this.
You do a hundred things a day and you pick three that make you bad.
But take a look at the other 97 and just notice the inherent goodness in it.
Like notice, like how inherently good it is to like dedicate to this podcast, to bring this out into the world, to treat me with kindness and connection when I get here, to operate with curiosity towards me, to bring people who, who could change lives, into people's lives.
Like notice, all the other things like that's what i would say to a lot of people.
It's just like you notice those three or four things a day.
See what it's like to put your attention for a week or two on all the things that prove you're inherently good rather than prove that there must be something wrong with you.
I appreciate you.
Thanks for coming today.
I appreciate you too.
What a pleasure to be here.
This is great.
If people want to learn more, where is the best place to direct their attention?
I'm told I'm supposed to know the answer to that.
This is your self-promotion moment, Joe.
Go to artofaccomplishment.com or go to the podcast Art of Accomplishment.
Those are great ways to get to know us.
All right, man.
Well, please come back and share more.
I feel like I would love it.
We just tiptoed around the surface of this.
So I really got a lot out of that.
Thank you, Joe.
Pleasure.
Pleasure to be here.
Yes. um
