0:00
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.
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0:08
What is holding people back?
0:09
It's the fact that they have emotions that they are not sitting, feeling, or expressing.
0:13
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... Why does this...
0:20
You have this really amazing insight.
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The voice in your head is often telling you bullshit.
0:27
What most people try to do is they try to stop it, and that doesn't work very well.
0:30
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.
0:34
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."
0:42
You're really big on helping people feel joy.
0:44
It's such an important tool for productivity.
0:44
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.
0:54
Not only that, usually, the quality is going to get a lot better too.
0:57
Is there just one thing you recommend that basically everyone try to experiment with?
1:02
Yeah, it'll change your life dramatically really quickly.
1:09
Today, my guest is Joe Hudson.
1:09
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.
1:20
Joe's unique approach to coaching draws from his spiritual, psychological, and neurological practices.
1:25
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.
1:30
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.
1:40
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.
1:49
Why falling in love with your emotions is so important and so powerful.
1:53
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.
2:09
This episode is basically for every single person.
2:14
It will make your life and your work better.
2:14
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.
2:18
It's the best way to avoid missing feature episodes and helps the podcast tremendously.
2:22
With that, I bring you Joe Hudson.
2:31
Joe, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Oh, thanks. Good to be here. It's good to have you.
2:36
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 folks that you work with.
2:48
Are there archetypes of like, here's the thing, often come up most often and hold people back?
2:57
A nonspecific answer to that would be a critical voice in their head and a relationship with that critical voice that is not productive.
3:04
Oftentimes, the critical voice in the head says, "You need me to be productive," but it's usually a huge detriment to being able to really be successful.
3:18
Even if you are successful with a really critical voice in your head, you never get to enjoy it.
3:23
You might have the money, but then you're like, "Oh, shit, I'm still miserable."
3:23
Or, "I got the car, I got the house, I got the money, I got the successful career, and why am I unhappy all the time?"
3:39
That would be, I would say one of the biggest ones.
3:39
Another really big one that in a large category I would say is their relationship with emotions is all fakata.
3:44
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.
3:59
That would be a big place.
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6:38
Okay, so the voice in your head, you have this really amazing insight that I heard on one of your podcast episodes that the voice in your head is often wrong, often contradictory, often telling you, and that your advice is to learn how to work very differently with this voice in your head, which a lot of people just assume, oh, that's just like what it is.
6:56
It's telling me how it's trying to help me, but it turns out it's not. Can you talk about that?
7:04
I would say every single time the voice in your head is wrong.
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That critical voice in your head.
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To be specific, I'm talking about the voice in your head that is critical and repeats.
7:17
There's the voice that says the same thing over and over again.
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You got to work out more, you got to work out more, you got to work out more.
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Whatever that is, it's always wrong, and that doesn't mean there isn't truth to what it says, but it's incorrect.
7:25
As an example of this, you should work out more, you should work out more, you should work out more, or you need me or you just sit around on the couch as a great example of one.
7:39
If I was your boss and I was sitting right next to you and I was criticizing you every couple of minutes, there's no way that you would say, "Wow, I really need you.
7:50
I couldn't be productive without you." It's a bunch of crap.
7:56
Or you should work out, you should work out.
7:56
I see the truth that I'd be healthier if I work out. I get that. Should I? Is it really a should?
8:03
There's another question.
8:03
What makes it not say, "Oh, hey, why don't you enjoy working out?
8:08
How do we get you to enjoy working out?
8:08
What would motivate you to work?"
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It's not doing any of that.
8:15
It's, "You should work out, you should work out."
8:17
It's never an accurate thing that's happening inside of your head.
8:24
Until you can see through that, it's hard to work with the voice in your head.
8:24
You can do it, but until you see through it.
8:29
The second part that I would say is that if you want to work with the voice in your head a new way, what most people try to do is they try to stop it.
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They try to control the voice in the head, and that doesn't work very well.
8:38
Instead, I say, change the way that you relate to the negative voice in your head.
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Instead of being, "Okay, stop doing that, stop doing that."
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Say, "Oh, I see that you're really scared and I'm right here with you."
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Or sing a musical to it or just go, "Eh, I don't believe you."
8:56
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 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?"
9:12
Because right now, what it's typically doing for most people is that it says something and the person's like, "Yeah."
9:20
Or, "Yeah, but I'm not going to do that, so fuck off."
9:20
Or, "Yeah, that'll never work."
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Something like that is the response.
9:26
What happens if you change the response to the voice in your head?
9:31
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.
9:42
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. It's so hard.
9:48
I hear this, but it's so hard.
9:53
Next time I'm, I don't know, giving a big presentation, I'm going to hear like, "Oh, something could go wrong.
9:56
You could look really stupid or you could totally forget what you're saying."
10:01
It's hard to really intellectualize, okay, I don't have to listen to this.
10:06
Is there anything more there just how to turn that around and be like, just shut up?
10:11
The shut up usually doesn't work.
10:11
Experiment with all of it.
10:11
To me, 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."
10:21
Because 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 a little kid having a temper tantrum.
10:34
If you listen to it, if you just 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, a teacher.
10:48
It isn't, it's not logical, it's not thoughtful, it's typically not thoughtful, it's usually abusive. It's a lot of fear.
10:58
It's one of my favorites, one of my favorite ways to respond.
11:06
I've tried, I mean, gosh, dozens of ways, and there's a lot of neat effective ways.
11:06
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 that you can never really fail.
11:16
Typically, somebody, like worse with the voice in the head, they fail and they go, "Ah, fuck it."
11:25
Because we have this part of our brain called the habenula, and the habenula basically is the part of our brain that is trying to teach us not to fail over and over again.
11:30
It's the thing that 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's basically what's happening in that part of the brain.
11:48
If you do it as an experimental thing, then you can't lose, you're just learning about yourself.
11:54
You're learning about the voice in your head.
11:54
The way I like thinking about that is people are like, "I understand the problem, but I don't have a solution."
11:59
I'm always like, "If you understood the problem, there would be no question about the solution."
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If you fully understand the problem, you know the solution.
12:08
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.
12:16
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.
12:25
I would be even more subtle than that, which is I really wouldn't care if you think it's helpful to you or not.
12:31
I would just experiment with different ways of interacting with it.
12:31
I wouldn't even do it as a goal of, okay, I want the voice in the head to be nicer to me.
12:38
I would do it with the goal of just, hey, how do I learn?
12:43
How do I understand this thing?
12:43
It's a far more productive self-development.
12:50
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..."
13:11
You're not going to understand it the same way.
13:11
You're going to make some mistakes. Amazing.
13:18
The second bucket that you shared of what you find most often is the root of what's holding people back is the way you described is your relationship with your emotions, which I don't think a lot of people would think of as the thing that's holding them back.
13:29
Can you talk a bit more about what that looks like?
13:31
Yeah, a great way to explain it.
13:31
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."
13:43
It's a neuroscientist who looked at people who had damage in the emotional center of their brain, and they just basically ceased to be able to make decisions.
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Their IQ would stay the same, but it would take them half an hour to decide where to have lunch or decide what color pen to use.
14:05
It would take hours and hours to make simple decisions, so their IQ would stay high, but their entire life would completely fall apart.
14:09
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.
14:15
We use logic to try to figure out how we're going to feel.
14:21
You can see this just by asking yourself the question, how many decisions have you made to feel like a success or to not feel like a failure or to feel happier, to not feel trapped?
14:31
There's these huge buckets of emotions that we are trying to feel and not feel, and we're making decisions based on those.
14:37
There's no such thing as a logical decision.
14:42
That idea is like, I'm just going to be logical and just make a logical decision, it doesn't.
14:47
Neurologically, it's just untrue.
14:47
If you learn to fall in love with all of your emotions, then solution sets become available that you didn't have before.
14:55
If you are like, "Oh, I can't feel like a failure."
15:00
Well, then you're probably not going to take certain risks.
15:00
If you are, "Oh, I want to feel loved and I can't feel unliked by people."
15:06
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.
15:20
I go into my boss, I say my truth, I get fired.
15:20
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.
15:29
If I don't do that, if I'm constantly managing myself, then I'm not going to have that reality.
15:34
It's really important, 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.
15:46
That's like one, there's literally a thousand others.
15:53
Most people, they feel stuck.
15:53
They can have a big emotional release and they don't feel stuck anymore.
15:58
When people feel overwhelmed, it's usually not the amount of crap that they have going on in their life.
16:02
It's the fact that they have emotions that they are not sitting, feeling or expressing.
16:07
That's another huge chunk of stuff.
16:07
Depression is usually unmoved anger, is another example.
16:15
There's so many levels in which people not able to feel really limits their life.
16:15
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.
16:29
Most people aren't like, "Oh, I'm excited."
16:29
If you walked into a Denny's and there was this person, a 60-year-old man and just excited and was excited for 10 minutes, you'd be like, "What's wrong with this person?"
16:39
When we're excited, it's contagious.
16:46
I walk into a meeting and I'm excited, probably other people are going to walk out excited.
16:51
We're limiting just our ability to create collaboration by the fact that we're limited by our excitement. I could go on forever.
16:59
There's so many experiences like this.
17:06
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.
17:11
Because we can't feel it, we just can't break through that. Not quite.
17:17
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 experienced the emotional abuse.
17:26
That might be the case for them.
17:26
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.
17:38
Similarly, people who've experienced emotional abuse can often not tell what the emotions are.
17:45
Now, emotional abuse is, it's a big word.
17:51
Generally, people don't even like equating the two.
17:59
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.
18:04
That's what I mean by emotional abuse.
18:08
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.
18:14
My particular background was that.
18:14
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're 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.
18:30
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.
18:45
It doesn't mean that you lose control.
18:45
As a matter of fact, losing control means that there's still resistance in it.
18:50
The way I think about this is that emotions are like a tube, let's say, and there's water moving through the tube.
18:55
You kink a tube one way, the water comes out a little funny.
19:00
Kink the tube the other way, it comes a little funny.
19:05
Let's say you have anger and that's the tube of, and you kink it one way and it's like, "You son of a bitch.
19:10
You blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
19:10
You kink get another way and it's like, "Nice dress.
19:16
You crank it another way and it's guilt.
19:16
It's like, "Why would you ever do that to me?"
19:23
Then if it's unkinked, then it's like Gandhi or Martin Luther king.
19:23
It's this very loving boundary that's set.
19:30
It's this clarity of purpose.
19:30
That's how I think about it.
19:30
The idea is to get to fluidity, to unkink the hose so that all of the emotional experiences come out with love.
19:44
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.
19:48
A term that's coming up for me is non-judgmental awareness.
19:54
Basically, experiencing the thing you're feeling and just letting it go, not attaching to it, not judging it.
19:58
Is that along the lines of stuff you'd recommend?
20:03
Yeah, it's definitely a huge part of it.
20:03
There's a couple of things that I noticed get in the way, or the translation gets in the way there.
20:08
One is it's like, think about emotions as like kids in your house.
20:13
If a kid came into your house and you're like, "I will be non-judgmentally aware of you."
20:19
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.
20:25
I welcome you in my house."
20:25
The emotions feel different if you're like, "I am non-judgmentally aware of this emotion," or, "Oh, cool. Oh cool, I'm sad. This is fantastic."
20:42
If you have that welcoming invitation.
20:42
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.
20:55
A very joyful life is a life where all the other emotions are deeply welcomed, not accepted, not non-judgmentally aware of.
21:02
I think those are really great steps, don't get me wrong.
21:08
If you can be in non-judgmental awareness of an emotion, fantastic.
21:14
The other thing that's a little bit different about what you said is that emotions do need to be felt.
21:18
If you stop feeling an emotion, you have to constrict your muscles.
21:18
I can watch somebody come in, come up for one of my coaching rapid coaching sessions.
21:26
By the crease in their eyebrow, I can know that there's repressed anger.
21:32
By the hunch in their shoulders, I can tell you about the critical parent that they had.
21:38
The body takes on a shape that's based on the emotions that you've been taught to hold.
21:46
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.
21:59
You can actually just move them.
21:59
You can actually make the sound, move your body. All mammals do it.
22:03
Like mammals releasing fear, they all shake.
22:10
It's part of how we exist.
22:10
That's also a really big part of emotional fluidity.
22:10
It's not just being still and feeling them, it's letting the muscles move, making the sounds.
22:22
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.
22:28
I know this is a lifelong practice and not something you would just hear on a podcast, okay, I've installed this.
22:32
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?
22:40
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.
22:48
The bigger problem is that every step has a different thing.
22:57
If you're in the not aware of emotions, then that step may not be the right step for you.
23:02
Though, if you are aware two or three emotions and you can do emotional inquiry, usually, it'll open up a lot of the other ones.
23:07
There might be a point where you really need expression, and so emotional inquiry is not going to work.
23:17
Just generally, the emotional inquiry practice is a really good one.
23:17
What it is, is imagine you're a little kid and you pick up a toad.
23:23
You're going to pick it up, you're going to look at it, you're going to feel it, you're going to smell it.
23:29
Some little kids are even going to lick it a little bit.
23:34
They're going to 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.
23:46
What happens when you love it.
23:46
What happens when you resist it.
23:51
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.
24:05
Just getting very curious. Yeah, a lot of wonder.
24:09
By the way, the quote you shared about joy being the matriarchy of all the other emotions, imagine people have said this, but inside out too, I think is exactly a representation of what you're talking about, where joy is actually, she's like the protagonist almost.
24:21
I don't know if you've seen it yet.
24:25
I think I've heard about this.
24:25
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.
24:35
Yeah, I have heard about it.
24:36
Anxiety takes over, and then things don't go well.
24:36
Something else that I've noticed listening to a bunch of your conversations, you do these lightning round coaching sessions with people, and so I listen to a bunch of them.
24:46
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.
24:51
I can't do this hard thing I know I need to do."
24:51
Or, "I have imposter syndrome just keeping me from doing this thing I need to do."
24:55
you're often like, "No, that's not actually what's going on here.
25:01
I can see that's not a problem for you.
25:01
It's really this other thing."
25:05
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?
25:12
I'd maybe put it a little bit differently.
25:12
They're living in a story that describes an old version of themselves or they don't see themselves clearly enough to be able to see the whole issue, and so they're just kind of living with a story that's in the past.
25:26
That's a really common thing.
25:31
Oftentimes, if I do that in a coaching session, typically it's because they're showing me right there that it's not true.
25:36
Somebody's like, "I'm so scared, I can't do anything."
25:36
I'm like, "You just got in front of a hundred people to ask me a question.
25:41
Clearly, you're not so scared that you can't do anything, so I'm not buying it."
25:45
I don't do it quite like that, I do it with a lot more love than that.
25:51
Oftentimes, I see that people's stories are a culprit, like how they describe themselves.
25:57
A great way that you can really see this in folks is that nine out of 10 times that you compliment somebody, I really appreciate this thing about you, they're going to go, "Nah."
26:10
Or, "Well, my sister is even more." Or, "If you knew me."
26:19
They're going to do some sort of version like that.
26:19
It basically is one of the indicators that they can't actually feel who they are.
26:26
They would rather, in effect, call you a liar.
26:26
You're lying to me or you're wrong than they would to actually accept the experience of being seen in that way.
26:42
It does a couple of things.
26:42
One of the things it does is it stops people from seeing themselves clearly.
26:46
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.
26:59
Do you have any advice other than working with you and you telling them, "Hey, here's actually going on," for someone to like, okay, maybe revisit, maybe this isn't actually a problem to see what's actually going on?
27:09
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.
27:16
That's a really great way to have people start to see through their stories.
27:23
At the beginning, I said, "Nothing in the critical voice in your head says is true."
27:30
This is how it applies, so typically, there's an assumption that you have to make for the problem to be real.
27:37
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.
27:51
One, you have to assume that the girlfriend doesn't want you to be an asshole, as an example.
27:55
Two, you have to assume that you know what being an asshole actually is.
27:55
It's not just what your mom told you an asshole was.
28:01
Three, there's some validation, there's another assumption, there's some clear thing that says this in the world.
28:06
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 is an asshole and 50% think they're a hero.
28:16
It's something like that.
28:16
Also, 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.
28:31
There's so many assumptions in there.
28:31
If you see through those assumptions, usually the problem starts fading away.
28:36
It's like, "Oh, okay, what do I mean by asshole, exactly? How do I define that?"
28:43
It seems like a silly thing when I am using this example of asshole.
28:49
I remember this moment in my own development, I was in Bodega Bay, out of all places, and this very good friend of mine at the time was like, "Joe, you're an asshole."
29:00
I was like, "No, I'm not."
29:00
He's like, "Why resist it?
29:00
Just fall in love with the fact that you're an asshole.
29:08
Just allow yourself to be an asshole for just a minute, just one minute."
29:13
I 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 I could, "Oh, yeah, okay, I can totally see that I'm an asshole."
29:29
In that scene, not only in the scene of it, but as the shame fell away, oh, this is nothing I have to defend.
29:35
This isn't something that I'm a bad person because of, I don't need to be ashamed of it.
29:41
This is just some actions that I took.
29:47
As that faded away, then and then over the next couple weeks, lo and behold, I became less of an asshole.
29:54
It's a strange thing when you really grok that, that it's often shame that holds bad habits in place.
30:02
Is it a problem that I'm an asshole, or is the problem that I'm ashamed of being an asshole?
30:07
Is the problem that you're a smoker, is the problem that you're ashamed of being a smoker?
30:11
Typically, there's so many assumptions built into everything that we call a problem, and if we look through those assumptions, the problems disappear.
30:19
As in this case, it disappeared for me. Wow, okay. There's a lot there.
30:26
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. What's going on there?
30:46
Since I'm coach executives, let's do an executive example, so conflict avoidant executive.
30:46
I don't want to feel the out of control in this that I do when people argue.
30:53
I don't want to feel that level of out of control, so I am going to be conflict avoidant.
31:02
I'm going to avoid conflict.
31:06
Every way that we go to avoid a feeling, becomes the way that, that feeling gets invited towards us.
31:16
We all know what it's like to work for a conflict-avoidant CEO or a boss, people get really fucking upset.
31:23
Eventually, people get really upset.
31:23
Decisions aren't being made.
31:27
There's all this tension. It's never relieved.
31:27
Then wow, sure enough, the conflict-avoidant CEO is dealing with a whole organization that's tense and they feel completely out of control and the fact that they can't do anything about, so that's an example.
31:38
Or when I was younger, it was emotional abandonment.
31:47
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 dah, dah, dah, dah, dah?"
31:57
Which of course, made them abandon me quicker, or I would try to caretaker people, which would build resentment, which would make people abandon me.
32:04
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 does this happen?
32:16
That doesn't sound right.
32:18
This is counterproductive. It is counterproductive.
32:21
I think that 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, 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.
32:31
What is the thing that you don't want to feel in that argument?
32:39
I don't want to feel ashamed.
32:39
You're getting in arguments because you don't want to feel ashamed, and that's making you feel more ashamed.
32:51
What am I doing at that first time to not feel ashamed? I'm defending myself.
32:51
Oh, and me defending myself is actually the thing that's starting the fight.
32:59
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 feel more ashamed.
33:07
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.
33:20
God damn it, you didn't take out the trash.
33:20
Oh, that's a shame I don't want to feel.
33:20
I'm not going to defend myself.
33:24
I'm going to feel that shame.
33:24
Oh, yeah, 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 don't want to take out the trash.
33:35
I have to defend myself to get in the fight, and then I'm going to feel ashamed.
33:43
You can reverse engineer all your problems this way.
33:43
It's like it's such a cool hack, but it's very hard.
33:46
For somehow or another, it's very simple, but very hard for people to utilize. This is amazing.
33:53
The advice is basically feel the thing and just come to terms with this is the emotion I'm feeling, and maybe, like an example, the asshole.
33:59
Well, maybe I'm an asshole.
34:04
It's 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.
34:12
There's that saying, what we resist persists.
34:17
How do you fall in love with and stop resisting the reality on the ground?
34:24
In doing so, it changes the reality on the ground.
34:30
In this argument with your supposed girlfriend, say you disagree about her perspective on what's going on.
34:35
I guess that's not the root issue here.
34:35
It's your feeling, it's not her perception.
34:41
Hey, sweetheart, I really hear you want me to take out the trash, and that's not my truth.
34:50
That's going to be very different than defending that shame.
34:50
The defending the shame is going to be like, no, it's not my job to take out the chat.
34:56
You're trying not to feel the experience, which is what's going to do it.
35:04
The response isn't the important thing.
35:04
It's really where the response comes from.
35:10
It's so interesting because people are taught constantly, this is something we teach in the connection courses that it's really not about the conversation, it's about where you're at in the conversation.
35:22
For instance, when my friend said to me, "Hey, you're a dick."
35:27
Here's what he didn't do, he's like, he didn't go, "You're a dick. You asshole. You're being an asshole. You're being a dick. Fucking stop it."
35:33
He was like, "Eh, you're a dick, so what? What's the problem?"
35:37
He was coming from a place of love for me, and so I could not be defended in my response to him.
35:43
It's really where you come from.
35:49
It's the emotionally where you come from, that's the important part.
35:49
Not as much what you say.
35:56
You can see this, a perfect example of this is, this happens all the time in my work.
35:56
Let's say there's a person who has a CEO and the person is scared of their CEO.
36:02
Let's say this is the CMO, and they're, "I'm scared of the CEO. I can't say my truth.
36:09
They're always getting upset.
36:09
They're going to yell, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
36:13
I'll say, yeah, there's one person who says it though.
36:17
The answer is always yes.
36:17
That CEO has one person who they don't yell at, who they listen to, who they'll take the objection from, that they don't get angry with.
36:25
It's because there's somebody who doesn't approach them in fear.
36:35
It's because somebody approaches them a different way.
36:39
Not with judgment, but like, "Hey, look, this is what we have to pay attention to."
36:44
It's really about how you're coming at it and not what you're saying typically.
36:52
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36:52
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37:58
I'm very happy with what advice we've already shared and there's more I want to tap into.
38:04
You keep using the word advice, and I just want to, so for anybody who's listening, do not take my advice. Do not, do not, do not. Test it. Experiment.
38:08
Set up an experiment, try it out.
38:16
See if it's true for you.
38:16
It's one, I just made this shit up.
38:16
Somebody else could make up something different.
38:24
It's like Jeff Bezos made up Amazon.
38:24
We make stuff up, but we're humans.
38:24
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. It's in your bones.
38:37
You get to see what's actually real for you.
38:41
What's real for you in this moment might not be real for you what's in the next moment.
38:47
For instance, I could give the advice that says, hey, you can't even control your thoughts.
38:55
You can't even decide what thought you are going to have next is, it's just going to fucking happen.
38:59
you're completely out of control, and so it's all a gift.
38:59
Can you look at life as all a gift?
39:05
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.
39:11
Man, I am totally trapped."
39:16
They might really need at that moment to learn that, "Oh, I have empowerment, I have choice."
39:24
That's the advice that they need to hear.
39:24
Do the experiment, find out what's true for you in this moment.
39:32
If there's a piece of advice, that's the one I want to give.
39:40
let's share more experiments people can run.
39:40
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.
39:48
Feels like that's the core of what you're trying to help people is feel more joy.
39:52
Why is that so important?
39:52
Why is joy so important, so powerful?
39:57
I definitely would not want anyone to feel joy.
39:57
I wouldn't want to push somebody into or like, "Hey, you should feel joy."
40:03
What I would say that's a close cousin to that is that enjoyment is such an important tool for productivity.
40:16
Enjoyment is such an important tool for living a meaningful life.
40:23
Enjoyment is an amazing tool.
40:23
As an example, let's say you drive a Ferrari, you're not going to say, hey, that's an efficient car.
40:32
That's a super-efficient car.
40:32
You're going to say, no, that's a fast car.
40:36
Somehow in our own lives, if we get something done quickly, we're efficient, but that's not efficient.
40:40
You can go and get something done quickly and then you're so exhausted.
40:45
What's efficient is if at the end of whatever you did, you feel like you have more energy, like you're stoked, like, oh, I can't wait to do this again tomorrow.
40:55
That's efficiency, is that you've actually used the least amount of energy to get something done.
41:00
If you say, oh, I'm going to figure out how to enjoy what I do 10% more and you succeed, you are 10% more efficient.
41:13
Not only that, usually, the quality is going to get a lot better too.
41:13
If you enjoy running, you're probably going to run more than if you don't enjoy running.
41:18
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.
41:29
There's something really, really important about enjoyment because it's not only a measure of efficiency, it also has a strong correlation with hire in most things has a strong correlation with how long you're going to do it, your staying power, the quality of what you're going to do, all of that.
41:47
That's one of the reasons that I think enjoyment is really great.
41:47
The other thing is that if you enjoy things, they feel different.
41:54
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, take out the trash, and I'm going to do more things like go on vacation."
42:11
That's not how enjoyment works.
42:11
You can enjoy taking out the trash or you can hate taking out the trash. That's a choice.
42:17
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.
42:27
How do you enjoy it 10% more?
42:27
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.
42:39
They might physically get more comfortable.
42:39
There's a thousand things that they might do to just enjoy the experience 10% more.
42:44
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.
42:58
It's just a really powerful tool.
42:58
What I know the problem to be is that some people will go, "Okay, now I have to enjoy life.
43:02
I'm going to disregard all these negative emotions so that I'm in enjoyment." That doesn't work. It's horrendous.
43:09
It's just a recipe for shit stew.
43:17
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?
43:22
Which one is more powerful?
43:27
I guess, which do you point people to?
43:27
Which experiments do you find people should run more?
43:31
In our society, typically, it's how to enjoy what you're doing more.
43:31
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.
43:44
It's just an order of operations thing.
43:44
As compared to there's people, 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.
44:05
They actually have more power to make everything that they're doing exactly what they want to do, but that doesn't work.
44:11
Flying the jet or buying the island or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, doesn't do it.
44:20
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.
44:31
You start saying, "Oh, wow, enjoyment makes me really effective, and so I'm want to do the things that I enjoy."
44:35
You're more likely to do the things that you enjoy.
44:40
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.
44:46
It's just an order of operations things.
44:46
If you learn to enjoy the things that you're doing, you're going to naturally start doing the things you enjoy.
44:57
If you only do the things you enjoy, you will not learn how to enjoy what you're doing very well.
45:03
You show this tip of how can I enjoy this 10% more?
45:03
Just ask yourself, how can I enjoy this 10% more? Yes, right now.
45:09
Is there anything else that you find helpful for helping?
45:09
Yeah, right now, how can I enjoy this 10% right now? That's right.
45:14
It's not about changing anything in the external world. Got it.
45:19
Internally, what can I do?
45:19
What can I change about the way I'm experiencing this? Yeah.
45:23
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.
45:29
It's actually usually letting go of trying that creates more enjoyment.
45:33
The phrasing can really make or break the question. Enjoy it 10% more.
45:41
Say someone's sitting in a boring meeting that's really sucking their soul, look, they should ask themselves this question, how can I enjoy this 10% more? Well, should, they can.
45:51
They get to, it's a great experiment. It's an experiment. Okay, perfect.
45:58
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.
46:02
If you fail, then you're less likely to try it again.
46:02
That's why the should, it ends up usually in stagnation.
46:10
If you think about the way it feels in your body when you say, I should do something, and there's a stagnation, there's a, hmm.
46:19
whereas if you say something like, oh, I want to do it, or here's an experiment I can do, or here's what I enjoy, there's less stagnation, there's more movement.
46:31
This touches on something else that you talk a lot about, and we've been circling around this idea of authenticity versus improvement, where you help people realize that you are good as you are, you don't need to necessarily improve.
46:41
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?
46:49
My favorite metaphor on this one is at what time in the journey of an oak tree is it perfect?
46:49
Is it when it's an acorn, when it's sprout, when it's 20 years old, 40 years old, 150 years old, 200 years old, depending on the oak tree? Now, I'm perfect. The idea is ridiculous.
47:07
It's a similar thing for us.
47:14
The idea that I need to improve myself, it really disturbs the natural process that's at hand, which is we evolve.
47:24
We as human beings evolve.
47:24
If it's like, oh, I'm evolving and I can enjoy it, and I'm acting from my authenticity, then that has a lot of alacrity. That moves quick.
47:41
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.
47:49
Because there's a lot of emotional stagnation in that.
47:55
There's a lot of should shame.
47:55
There's a lot of stagnation in that, and so you don't actually get that natural flow of life.
48:01
The Taoist talk about this as kind of like a river always finds its way, it just always goes in that direction.
48:11
We are naturally evolving. That is our nature.
48:11
Then to put a whole bunch of shoulds and shits in the way just slows the process down.
48:27
The other thing about authenticity that I think is really important too, is that 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.
48:40
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.
48:48
Let's say you're one of those really successful people, then you have a life for not you.
48:54
Then you have a life of who you think you should be, not for who you actually are.
49:02
If you move from authenticity, naturally, certain things aren't going to work, certain things are going to work.
49:07
Certain people are going to work, certain people aren't going to work.
49:07
Certain jobs are going to work.
49:10
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.
49:15
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, and you just do it.
49:26
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.
49:37
They don't love who you are.
49:37
What kind of marriage is that?
49:45
As opposed to, this is who I am and I'm going to be as genuine.
49:45
I'm going to show you all my parts.
49:50
I'm going to be as genuine as I can with you.
49:50
Then 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.
50:01
How do you hold that idea with I also want to get better, I want to develop myself, I want to feel my emotions more, those sorts of things?
50:08
I love that I want to, the better part is kind of just, gets a little bit in the way.
50:08
We all want to, like a little kid wants to run faster.
50:15
They might want to be a better runner, but the part that they missed, 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.
50:29
The idea is like, yeah, you have this natural want, that want is the thing that moves evolution.
50:35
A plant is like, "Oh, there's sun.
50:35
I want to move in that direction."
50:42
As compared to I should.
50:42
Both of them are human concepts, but the want, it's the thing that what allows us to know that's our evolutionary path.
50:47
Oh, I have this want to be closer to people.
50:56
Oh, I have this want for great sex.
50:56
Oh, I have this want for being able to have a business that supports me.
51:03
These are great wants, and they show where the growth is occurring or wants to occur.
51:11
It's like that's our natural evolution. It's great.
51:11
What makes it need to be better? I want to be better.
51:18
It just slows it down instead of, it's like saying that what I am is broken and therefore, the whole thing slows down.
51:25
We try to word everything as more in the experimental framework, but also, we try to word everything as self-awareness, self-experimentation, self-discovery, instead of self-improvement.
51:41
Because if you understand the problem, then the problem goes away. Just explore it.
51:49
Just understand it as compared 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.
52:10
The experiment here that I'm taking away is think more about your want versus the should, and then things you think you need is okay.
52:20
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.
52:26
Once I do X, Y and Z, then I'm okay.
52:26
Once I do X, Y and Z, I'll be worthy.
52:31
Once I do X, Y and Z, I'll be enlightened, whatever the fuck, the thing is.
52:37
That's just not how it works.
52:37
What works is the person who loves themselves has loving relationships.
52:45
It's not the person who's done X, Y, and Z so that they can be lovable, has loving relationships.
52:50
The people who do X, Y and Z, so they can be lovable have relationships where people are critical and constantly telling them that they have to be better.
53:01
Coming back, you just said this interesting quote that you also shared at the beginning.
53:03
This idea, once we understand the problem, it goes away. Yeah.
53:07
Let's make sure people understand what that means.
53:07
Is it related to this idea once you feel like I'm an asshole, okay, and then like, oh, okay, and then it starts to kind of away, is that the core? I just mean practically.
53:15
It's like, can you really fully understand a problem if you don't understand the solution to it?
53:20
There's a principle, and I can't remember the name of it, like it's Strickland principle or something.
53:27
It's something that this CFO that I used to work with said, and he would say, "Problems get solved if you spend time on them.
53:33
If you just give enough attention to a problem, the problem will solve."
53:39
That's the way it works in business.
53:46
An unsolvable problem, obviously, it's not going to work that way.
53:46
The reason that, that works is because the more you spend time on a problem, the more you understand it.
53:58
Another one, love him or hate him, one of the things that Elon Musk has said that I found it 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 six levels down. You improved sales.
54:20
How did you do that, exactly?
54:20
Well, we improved the pipeline.
54:20
How'd you do that, exactly?
54:24
Oh, well, we made the pipeline more measurable by having things that could be. How did you know?
54:30
What were the seven stages of the pipeline and what made you pick them?
54:30
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. It's the same thing.
54:47
If we just explore a problem enough, the solution is apparent.
54:47
If we understand the problem enough, the solution is apparent.
54:54
Typically, if we come to a problem with a kid's mind, wonder, if we come to it, what could I learn here? What's exciting?
55:04
What are the experiments I can run?
55:10
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 this time and we're going to do it this way.
55:16
Usually, that doesn't work.
55:21
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, just we're more efficient when we're exploring.
55:35
We're more efficient when we're exploring ourselves and understanding ourselves and trying to improve ourselves.
55:46
There's a couple of more experiments I want to help people try to run.
55:46
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?
55:59
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.
56:04
Let's say I want to have all human beings, I want to be a part of a great team.
56:15
Nobody has ever raised their hand and said, "I'd like to be a part of a team."
56:20
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.
56:28
If one of the things you're unwilling to feel is that conflict, that tension, as we talked about if you're conflict avoidant, you're not going to be able to make an A team because there's nothing that is alive doesn't require tension. A cell requires tension.
56:48
Breathing requires tension.
56:48
Playing pickleball requires tension.
56:48
A good team requires tension.
56:55
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.
57:00
To be able to look forward to any emotional experience, creates more and more solution sets for more and more optionality.
57:09
In creating a great team, for instance, you need to be good with people hating you.
57:17
You need to be good with drawing boundaries and having people upset.
57:22
You need to be able to have high expectations.
57:27
You have to be okay with somebody being disappointed with themselves.
57:27
You have to be okay being disappointed with yourself.
57:32
All these emotional experiences have to be available to you if you're going to find the solutions to make an A quality team.
57:37
The more you can fall in love with each emotional experience, the more you have and then the clearer the decision making gets.
57:45
That's one thing for making great decisions.
57:50
The other one that I find really, really useful and very hard to execute on until you really understand it is creating a set of principles to live by.
58:06
We all have a set of principles to live by that we're doing it.
58:06
For a lot of people, those principles are what do I have to do to get likes on Facebook?
58:13
I'm going to make a decision based on getting likes on Facebook.
58:25
I'm going to make decisions based on whatever it is.
58:25
Pretending that I want to get wealthy or trying to get wealthy or there's a series of things.
58:33
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?
58:49
Then experiment with them and then refine those principles and then experiment with them.
58:56
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.
59:01
As an example for this, one of the principles that I live by is embrace intensity.
59:08
It's not create intensity, it's embrace intensity.
59:08
It means that right now, any moment in my body, for instance, there's going to be a sensation that's more intense.
59:22
How do I welcome that sensation?
59:22
At any moment in running my business, there's going to be something that we don't want to talk about.
59:28
How do we lean in and talk about that?
59:28
We start all of our meetings with what are you scared to say in our business?
59:37
What are you scared to say?
59:42
Not all of our meetings, but some of our meetings are started with what are you scared to say?
59:47
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.
59:59
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.
1:00:04
Because of that embrace intensity, if somebody comes to me and says, "You're fucking up this business.
1:00:14
You're doing it all wrong."
1:00:14
I don't have to think about what I'm going to do. I'm like, "Oh, cool.
1:00:19
Tell me what I'm missing."
1:00:19
It's going to be immediate because I live this way.
1:00:26
Maybe I don't want to hear it.
1:00:26
Maybe I'm having a bad day. Whatever it is.
1:00:32
Maybe I'll say, "Hey, I want hear you give me, I'm not able to, give me a day and I'll come back to you."
1:00:37
all of a sudden, my decisions get made automatically if I live by a set of principles and very effective, I find very effective living by a set of principles For someone that wants to create their own set of principles.
1:00:51
Is there a guide you have?
1:00:51
Is there any advice for how to actually go about starting this list, putting it together?
1:00:58
We have a decisions course, which is a large part of it is about how to do that.
1:00:58
It's a difficult one to explain because there's a lot of nuance in it.
1:01:05
Just as 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, very minor thing, but it ends up being incredibly major.
1:01:20
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.
1:01:25
I don't do six, but I keep it to five.
1:01:30
I would test each one of them for five days.
1:01:39
Make your principle and then see if it works for you for five days and then keep on experimenting until you find five.
1:01:45
When you look at those five and you say, "If I do that, if I live by those principles, I am just almost a hundred, if not a hundred percent confident that, that's going to create the life I want if I live by those principles."
1:01:57
Then you have a really good start and make them simple.
1:02:01
Mine are things like embrace intensity or connection first or everything is in iteration.
1:02:09
As soon as I live by them, things work, company works. Amazing.
1:02:20
We'll point folks to that course if they want to take it themselves. Cool.
1:02:24
It's only once a year, so it's a rare one. Oh, wow. When is the next one? January. Okay.
1:02:30
Not too far away for folks to want to wait.
1:02:30
Again, the two pieces of advice you shared, and that's our experiments that we can run to help become better decision makers.
1:02:35
One is create a list of life principles, and there's a course that will point people to, to take that.
1:02:43
The other is the thing you keep coming back to over and over and over, this idea of falling in love with your emotions, embracing your emotions, welcoming your emotions.
1:02:47
There's also, I know you do a lot of work with teams.
1:02:53
I imagine there's very similar advice for how to help your team be more effective.
1:02:58
Principles, I imagine is a part of it, falling in love.
1:03:01
We've run principles for teams, yeah. That's one of them.
1:03:01
Teams would be more effective.
1:03:01
We have a lot of, I mean I think I have, at this point, I have 12 things that I'll go into a company and do with a company.
1:03:15
Typically, the way I like to do it is I will go in and I'll talk to the leader typically and they'll say, "This is what I want."
1:03:26
Then I really want to assess.
1:03:26
Typically, if the person who is a big part of creating the problem has a hard time seeing the way through the problem, or it wouldn't have been created generally.
1:03:39
This is not demeaning any leader, we all have these issues.
1:03:45
Usually, what I like to do is I like to go in and I like to talk to three or four people, see what their perspective, not just the leader's perspective.
1:03:57
Then I like to sit in a meeting or two and just see actually what the dynamic is.
1:03:57
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.
1:04:11
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.
1:04:19
Especially, like Amazon, you got a couple of buildings and some servers.
1:04:27
There's not a lot of hardware there, and they wouldn't be useful without the people anyways.
1:04:36
Anybody, whether you're running a farm or a shoe factory or anybody's successful is going to tell you it's all about the people.
1:04:46
The atomic structure is what are our meetings like and how do we make decisions?
1:04:46
I'll just really pay attention to a meeting.
1:04:54
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?
1:05:01
Literally, how is it that everybody when they walk out of a meeting, they're like, oh, fuck, that was great?
1:05:07
It turns out, we've all been in meetings that are hard as shit, and we've walked out and gone, oh, those are great meetings.
1:05:16
We've all been in meetings where nothing happens and we're like, "Oh, God.
1:05:16
Fuck, another one to just drive a nail through my head.
1:05:21
I don't want to sit there."
1:05:21
What's required to make one of your meetings five stars?
1:05:30
If you do that, that's one of the things we'll do inside of a company is work with them to figure that out.
1:05:35
If you do that, every single problem with your company will come to the surface.
1:05:40
Every single one of them.
1:05:40
I had ten five -tar meetings, but these two meetings sucked.
1:05:47
That tells me exactly where we need to focus as a company.
1:05:53
That tells me exactly where to look for the problem that's happening.
1:05:53
It's the same thing with decisions.
1:06:00
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.
1:06:05
An example of this, I was working with a friend and he's a content person, and we were just talking about how do you make every one of your meetings a five-star meeting?
1:06:21
He's like, "Okay, great."
1:06:27
He's like, "Yeah, I'm never going to do this." I was like, "Really? Tell me why."
1:06:27
He's, "My YouTube meetings fucking suck."
1:06:30
That's not where he makes most of his money, but these YouTube meetings suck.
1:06:36
They're never going to get better.
1:06:36
Luckily, there's a couple other people around at the time and everyone's like, "No, wait, I love my YouTube meetings. What do you mean?
1:06:44
How could this not work for you?"
1:06:44
He noticed, oh, the team didn't, the content, none of it was working for him. None of it was him.
1:06:52
He was just like, "Ugh." He changed it.
1:06:52
He was like, "Okay, I'm going to commit to that.
1:06:57
I'm going to 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."
1:07:02
When he did it, his YouTube numbers went off the charts in a very short period of time. It's just that common.
1:07:14
Wherever the meeting is that sucks, it means there's something else that's a problem that needs to be worked on. That's typically how.
1:07:19
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.
1:07:29
Such a cool way of thinking about where to focus decision-making meetings.
1:07:29
I love that the story comes back to something you shared earlier with the more you enjoy something, the more joy there is, the better it's going to go anyway.
1:07:37
The more you can find those moments and make things enjoyable, the better.
1:07:45
The other cool thing is 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.
1:07:56
Once they've done that, then it's like, how do you make sure all of your teams have five-star meetings?
1:08:00
Usually, it's like within two months and they usually have half the amount of meetings at the end of it.
1:08:12
Half the amount of meetings in their companies are more effective. It's an incredible tool.
1:08:18
I could see why people enjoy that if you were meeting as well.
1:08:18
Is there anything more along those lines before we start to close out our conversation, either around teams or decision-making?
1:08:30
I'll say for anybody who's running a team, Harvard has got a couple of these, but we used to do these tiny pulses.
1:08:37
As a VC, one of the strategies that was really effective that I saw very few VCs doing was I would want these pulse, I would like to read the pulse of teams with these short surveys and stuff.
1:08:48
It was the most effective way of not very happy, didn't want to come to work on Monday.
1:08:59
They weren't going to make their numbers.
1:08:59
The likelihood of them making their numbers is going down.
1:09:02
There was this interesting thing that just about how Drucker, I think said it first and then the Virgin guy. Branson? Branson said it.
1:09:16
He's like, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast," or some such.
1:09:16
If that's true, then it's measurable and it can be a leading indicator, and it absolutely is.
1:09:22
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 know when bad results are coming.
1:09:39
What's interesting to me is most people feel like they can't control the culture, like most people feel like.
1:09:52
Most people, I notice, they feel like, it's more likely for me to hear from a CEO, "God damn it, everybody agrees when I get out of the table.
1:09:59
When I get off the table, everyone's like, yeah, we're going to do it. Then they don't do it.
1:10:02
Why aren't they doing it?"
1:10:02
I'm going to hear that more often than I'm going to hear a CEO say, "Oh, wow.
1:10:07
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..."
1:10:21
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.
1:10:28
it's an amazing thing to me that it's so powerful and yet people feel so out of control with it To give people something they can do, say today or tomorrow to work on a lot of these things we've been talking about.
1:10:45
Is there just one thing you recommend that basically everyone should try to experiment with in the next day, couple of days or weeks, just to help them be better and more successful and happier?
1:11:00
I would do seven minutes, no less than seven minutes.
1:11:00
You can do more than seven minutes.
1:11:08
Seven minutes of gratitude with another person every day.
1:11:08
It can't be, I'm grateful for this, I'm grateful for this, I'm grateful for this.
1:11:16
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.
1:11:28
You're savoring the experience of gratitude and you're going back and forth with another human being.
1:11:34
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 thought.
1:11:50
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.
1:12:02
The practice is you are expressing gratitude to the person you're with.
1:12:09
It can be gratitude for anything in your life.
1:12:09
As a matter of fact, I would say do it for a couple of weeks and then do it on the places where you feel lack.
1:12:13
That's where the superpower comes in.
1:12:22
In my own personal life, I was meditating.
1:12:22
I spent seven, eight hours a day meditating for years. That's a lot of hours.
1:12:32
You can imagine, I didn't have a lot of money.
1:12:32
The joke I used to make is I would meditate and worry about money most of my day.
1:12:38
It's funny, but it's truth.
1:12:38
One day, I was thinking about money and thinking I 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 I'm well enough."
1:13:01
I'm like, "Oh, I have the experience of a billionaire right now."
1:13:05
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. I'm a billionaire."
1:13:14
It tickled me, the idea tickled me.
1:13:14
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?
1:13:29
Which is where the gratitude practice came from.
1:13:29
My wife and I would sit every day and just be grateful for all the physical stuff that we had.
1:13:33
We were living in a hobble, were living 15-year-old year cars. We had no money. I was in debt.
1:13:39
I was in, I think $40,000 in credit card debt or some crazy shit. We just did it.
1:13:47
Literally, was it three months later, my credit card debt was gone.
1:13:54
Six months later, I had $60,000 in the bank.
1:13:54
Entire life changed because I no longer defined myself by somebody who didn't have, I defined myself as somebody who did have.
1:14:10
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."
1:14:17
I look out the window, I'd say somebody made money on that.
1:14:19
Somebody made money on that.
1:14:19
Every fucking thing I looked at, somebody made money on.
1:14:25
20 people, 20 companies made money on the fucking lamppost.
1:14:25
The person who installed it, the energy company, the rubber company, there's just, holy crap, it's all over the place.
1:14:30
Then in that definition, all of a sudden, it became really clear.
1:14:36
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.
1:14:46
If you can really do a gratitude practice on the thing that you lack, there's a superpower in that one, changes everything. Do you still do this? I do gratitude, yes.
1:15:00
Do I do gratitude on stuff I lack?
1:15:00
I don't really have an experience of lack. That's not really...
1:15:07
You still do this gratitude, seven minutes? Of course, yes.
1:15:09
That's like asking if I still have sex.
1:15:09
Why would I give that up? It feels great.
1:15:16
Just to be clear, you find someone seven minutes every morning, probably think about things you're grateful for and share back.
1:15:20
Focus not on your intellectual thing you're grateful for, but just what's coming out of your emotional body. Feel the gratitude. Yeah, then gratitude.
1:15:30
Let the feeling of gratitude speak rather than your mind, so that you get the felt sense of it.
1:15:38
Joe, I'm incredibly grateful for you.
1:15:38
I really appreciate you sharing so many experiments for people to run.
1:15:43
I think this is going to make a real impact on a lot of people's lives. Two final questions.
1:15:45
Where can folks find your courses?
1:15:45
I know you have a podcast.
1:15:50
Where can folks find the stuff they do online, and then how can listeners be useful to you?
1:15:55
First of all, Art of Accomplishment, the podcast, it's Art of Accomplishment with Brett Kistler and Joe Hudson, I think.
1:16:00
Then Art of Accomplishment, the website will show you where all the courses are.
1:16:07
It'll give you a whole bunch of experiments you can run.
1:16:07
There's all sorts of really great information there.
1:16:12
The other thing that we just mentioned also is just that we really want to make sure that you think that the courses are for you.
1:16:19
The way we do courses is that it's a very felt experience thing.
1:16:25
It's not intellectual at all.
1:16:25
It's really in your body.
1:16:30
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.
1:16:36
The foundational course for that is called the Connection Course.
1:16:36
If you want to get into it, go to the Connection Course.
1:16:42
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 it'll give you a taste of what it is that we do because it's like anything that's going on out there.
1:16:53
It's people doing, they're like, "What the hell was that?"
1:17:01
It's just a completely different thing.
1:17:04
It's not like learning in the normal way.
1:17:04
You literally sit down with another person and run experiments face-to-face with how you're being in the moment.
1:17:10
You learn all this stuff through direct experimentation.
1:17:16
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.
1:17:27
There's one coming up in September, I believe.
1:17:30
The Connection Course is coming up in September.
1:17:30
It's a great place to start.
1:17:34
It's foundational for everything else we do.
1:17:37
Then how can listeners be useful to you?
1:17:39
I want my children to grow up in a fantastic world.
1:17:39
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.
1:17:55
Not for them, but for their children and their children's children.
1:18:02
You want to do me a favor and make my daughter's world a better place.
1:18:08
I also just had a son, and so I totally resonate with that. Yeah.
1:18:13
Joe, thank you so much for being here.
1:18:13
What an amazing podcast episode.
1:18:15
This ended up being as I expected. Pleasure. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it, Lenny. Bye, everyone.
1:18:22
Thank you so much for listening.
1:18:22
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1:18:27
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1:18:33
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1:18:38
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