The Art Of Mastering Your Emotions - Joe Hudson

I have been falling in love with your work over the last few months I feel like it's been very timely for me as I try to feel feelings and tap into emotions and you're the guy so I've scraped some of my favorite tweets and quotes from you that I've picked up and I want to go through some of those with you okay first one how to see the Matrix one name an unwanted emotion in your life two list the ways you try to avoid it three notice that every way you try to avoid it you actually create it yeah yeah it's a yeah I call that I have an episode on that one it's called the Golden algorithm and uh it's basically this idea that the emotion that we don't want to feel is the emotion that we invite invite in the exact way that we try to avoid it so the perfect example of this in my life was I you know had this experience of being emotionally abandoned as a kid and so I would just keep on finding emotional abandonment everywhere I looked you know it was like uh you know the guy who's like close their close their eyes at a bar throw a dart behind their back and they're always going to hit the Wounded Woman and like they're going to be attracted to one another and that's how it's going to work like it was so I always you know F created this abandonment and so when I thought it was coming when I saw the abandonment even though maybe it wasn't there I would harden up I would like you know get angry or something which of course creates a more like likelihood of Abandonment so I would try to not feel it and in the way of not feeling it or I would like really try to caretake somebody and that would create resentment in them and then then they would abandon me so every way that I tried to avoid it I was recreating it in my life that just goes across the board everywhere so whether I'm working with a CEO who's like trying to avoid their shame I can like guarantee that they will do something to create shame and then have to deal with it in the in the terms of their company for instance so this is this is one of the realities of our lives and it's an amazing thing because intellectually you can get it but what I think people don't get is you can just literally look at every single place where you have pain and you can backwards engineer it you can go backwards and go oh hey right so what am I trying to avoid how am I avoiding it how that's how I'm creating it and backwards engineer it why is it so reliable that the way you try to avoid it creates it like to me it doesn't seem from first principles like that could be the case you could avoid it in a way that doesn't create it yeah um you know there's that the famous saying that which we resist persists so so it's it's acting under the same principle so it's not that it's not that so for for instance if it's it has to have the emotional catch of like you really don't want it and so therefore the way to change the algorithm is to actually go I can't wait to be abandoned I can't wait uh for someone to be angry at me I can't wait to feel scared I can't wait to have anxiety and then fall in love with those emotional experiences and then the pattern all goes away the thing that creates it isn't the fact that you're like oh that's not something that I want it's the fact that you're avoiding it it is the oh I I don't want to feel that so think about it in a workout context if you never want to feel challenged physically you are going to be challenged physically you on the other hand you're like i' like to be feel CH and therefore you're going to have a longer happier lifespan of not being challenged physically so any kind of complex ecosystem and I think there's a great Quark in the Jaguar which was written by a Nobel scientist I think that's the name of it talks about this and so does um you know who else talks about it is uh the guy who did Black Swan nothing yeah and he talks about basically like every Eco every kind of complex ecosystem it needs to be challenged it needs to have like a certain kind of like a like it needs to have the strain for it to to stay healthy and so it's the same thing it's the same principle in action if you are not leaning into the difficult emotions and learning to enjoy them and finding the gifts in them then you're just you're inviting them in the same way you would would be with pain physical pain I've got an example story uh that involves a horse from uh last Saturday so I went to a retreat called miraval miraval uh so there's one out here in Austin and for the people that don't know it's pretty cool it's like a sort of holistic health five-star hotel meet Meditation Retreat kind of all rolled into one and they've got a million different activities one of them was Equine Therapy uh Whitney Cummings told me that e like horses can sense when you're stressed and you can't be angry around a horse and stuff and I thought this sounds cool [ __ ] it eoin I I don't have horses on hand I'll do eoin therapy I kept calling it horse meditation and the instructor lady really uh didn't like the fact that I kept calling it horse meditation but eoin therapy just seemed too wanky for me so I called it horse meditation and um she uh she introduced you to all the horse I for the people that haven't been around a horse these things are huge it sounds like such a d and people that are around horses will go duh yeah of course these things are massive right and it is it is intimidating especially for the bigger ones to be around them anyway I found myself sort of quite calm after a little while they were all super chill you know they just stand there and look they they're not doing anything they it doesn't even look like they're breathing or alive if it wasn't for the fact they were warm you wouldn't even know it was alive anyway the lady was um well educated so of psychologically she definitely done her work and we go back into the circle afterward and she asks what came up and there was one point where you had to try and get the horse to lift its leg and you sort of do this by putting your hand on its upper shoulder and then you sort of ride it down the leg and you give it a little tug and if it wants to it'll show you its hoof and you can use it to clean the hoof with a a little pick thing and uh I noticed that as I was approaching the horse I wanted the horse to like me I really really wanted this horse to like me and I'd already set up a success failure algorithm in my mind that if I couldn't get the horse to do this thing which the lady had said you know it's about being calm and it's about asking for this from the horse it's like you know if this horse doesn't lift its foot up that's I mean that's just classic me that's such a comment on how I am as a person I'm like yo do not use a horse lifting its foot as the barometer for whether you're a piece of [ __ ] or not alas here I here I am like hoping that the horse likes me and I mentioned it I mentioned it to the group and it's really stuck with me like kind of a silly example but I think um name an unwanted emotion in your life I want people to like me list the ways that you try to avoid it and like that certainly in childhood and probably now in adulthood um it is definitely something that I could see uh it just happened to manifest in the middle of horse meditation yeah yeah there it's funny that you said there somebody recently was watching me do uh the kind of quick coaching that I do in courses and we have some videos on them and and she was she was a horse whisperer you know someone who basically works with like unmanageable horses and and she's like oh you do what I do with people it was an amazing I was like what like how and and and for her the whole thing was like that Attunement like the energetic Attunement or like nervous system Attunement I is a better way to say it like a nervous system Attunement to the person and and there's no place you can see that more clearly with like than raising kids if if and when you ever rais them uh you walk into the house stressed and your kid will take like one or two chances to try to like get you unstressed if you miss them they're going to be stressed it's only going to make the whole situation a [ __ ] ton worse kids are like horses so it's Joe Hudson all right next one next one the spiritual path for so many is just another way to say I am not good enough yet yeah yeah yeah yeah so you know from my that comes from that comes from my own experience uh you know I got into medit so my story was that I had a Meditation Retreat I didn't do it because of any reason but I thought it would be a challenge I had this like amazing experience in this Meditation Retreat and then I spent a whole bunch of time trying to get it back and so meditation started to started for me as a like a form of management which is absolute [ __ ] hell like I was trying to manage myself into becoming better and and that's just like that that has to start with the assumption that I'm not good enough and so so much of this work is like oh there's this a deep shame somewhere that says I'm not good enough and I need to fix my I'm broken somehow and I need to fix myself whether it's and they call it self-improvement right where the other way of looking at it would be oh there's an oak tree like at what point in its life what point of its evolution of its development is it not perfect just like it it wouldn't particularly make sense there's a our nature is to evolve is to grow is to change but it doesn't make us bad before something that is essentially wrong that we have to fix as a matter of fact that concept is what slows down the process probably more than anything else I see these days is people thinking that there's something broken with them instead of just noticing that there's Evolution that to happen I have been kind of obsessed with I think this question which is this balance between being and becoming this sort of delicate um interplay between wanting to leave it all out on the field of play in life to you know get toward the end of it and think yeah like I [ __ ] did it like I did things I tried my best I strived I I I worked hard and I'm proud of the outcomes I got whilst also not wanting to whip yourself through through the experience so much that you don't ever end up enjoying it and I did this series of live shows last year and um probably the most common or one of the most common questions one of them was I don't know if the thing I'm doing in my life in the direction I'm going into is the right one and the other one was I know that happiness is to be found in the present but I keep working very hard and kind of castigating myself with a a tyrannical innervoice for the future and this the spiritual path for so many is just another way to say I am not good enough yet this sort of Perpetual I also have this Theory I'd love to get your take on this that personal development assuages our low self-esteem because it convinces us that we're not the finished product so we don't ever have have to actually judge ourselves it's like yeah I might be a piece of [ __ ] today I might not have any self-esteem right now but I know that I'm moving forward therefore tomorrow or next month or next year maybe all of this development and the trajectory that I'm on will mean that I'm finally I finally feel good enough to myself yeah so when I hear that the I I want to give you my opinion on the second thing you asked but the the first thing that struck my my attention was the difference between being and becoming if one can't exist without the other there's no difference so the idea that there's a difference is is just fully just conceptual and you once talked about this thing you called thought superposition or something like that where you had cognitive superposition yeah so cogn superposition being and becoming and hold them both for a moment and then that whole Duality just kind of disappears so that's the first one like that that and and I don't think there's really any way that you would not strive like there's no way that I could convince you to not strive that's because that's part of like how you're wired and and I don't know any human being that doesn't like is isn't drawn to Evolution to evolving the question is can you you know how much can you enjoy that process that's really the question and one of the best ways to enjoy the process is not to believe that there's like a that there's an end right that that's part of like the problem with a lot of a lot of versions is that they they they sell you an end that doesn't really ever exist there's no you know there's no billionaire well there are actually a something but but there's no time where you're like that's enough money or that's enough power or that's enough spiritual progress it doesn't work like that the there's just a choice that you're making that you get to make at any time about how you want to spend your time and how much you want to enjoy it and the for me I really care about efficiency and enjoyment is just like this amazing way to measure efficiency so if I'm driving a car and and it's really really really fast car I don't call that an efficient car the efficient car is a car that moves from A to B with the least amount of energy and somehow or another like when we think about our lives efficiency is speed but if you really think about like oh I just did that thing and I came out with more energy than when I went in I did just did that thing and I had so much enjoyment of it that I left feeling freaking great that to me is like that's efficiency and and that's the enjoyment that that enjoyment is a great measurement of it and so what I notice is the more I focus on my enjoyment and not just me like people I coach people in the in the courses I do I'll see so many people who are stuck and I'll just be like yeah just focus on the enjoyment like make that the priority and their productivity just goes off the charts because everything else will be you swimming Downstream from there that's right yeah so it's like I would say that the question you ask being and becoming is not an it's not a real question and or it's a real question but it's it's it's not a real context and the and the answer so to speak would be enjoy like how do you enjoy this journey the most and that rather than you know how do you get there because there's no there the presumption is that the process of becoming can't be enjoyable and the process of being is enjoyable that's the dichotomy right in the process of becoming I posit an ideal I compare myself to that ideal I find myself lacking that drives me to become better like that's that's the Assumption right that there is no becoming that is enjoyable right yeah that's that's right and the other assumption in there that's baked in is that if you just focus on being you're not going to become which is just like y right every meditation teacher in the world will tell you well any good one is going to tell you that's [ __ ] because we're just GNA ask you to sit here and be and then that's what's going to help you become you know so both of them both of the two assumptions are false do you think about that idea of uh I'm not yet the finished product therefore my low self-esteem and like subconscious self-hatred is assuaged yeah that's the second part so so I think the thanks for reminding me of that yeah so I my experience of that is um the low self-esteem is there's nothing that the critical voice in the head says to you is true and so you can do anything you want to do but until you see that fact you're you're you're [ __ ] so not to say there isn't truth to it but there is no [ __ ] truth and so one of the main things that the critical voice in the head says if I wasn't here you would just sit around and drink beer and and [ __ ] off and so you need me like that as an example would be one of the things almost everybody's critical voice in the head says so great I tell you what I'm gon to sit I'm going to be your boss for the next like three months and every two minutes I'm going to tell you I'm going to criticize you right and then you tell me that's [ __ ] effective you tell me that you get more motivated tell me that you're like excited to be doing the work that you're doing that you want to work with me that you need me there's no way you're going to do it everything that the critical voice in the head says there's a falseness to it and and when you can see that it's like the cognitive superposition again it's just to me it's not holding two realities as true at the same time it's holding all of them as true and not true at the same time and so when that critical voice in your head goes off and you can just see like oh you're just scared that that's when this this the safety comes there is no there is no self-esteem that gets built by listening to the critical voice in the head and doing what it says it doesn't work if it worked we would all be [ __ ] very very have a lot of great self-esteem but that's not the case the more that that thing is loud and brutal the less self-esteem that people have Robert Glover said a couple of weeks ago that uh he knows a very few people who have managed to convince themselves to change uh from a place of hatred like just self self-hatred is a a potent but toxic fuel especially if you use it for too long absolutely yeah that's that's a great way to say it that's lovely yeah it's also just I mean think about this like mental experience experiment for a second you're now going to you're stuck on an island and you're the only people there are Saints you and a whole bunch of Saints and the thing about them saints is they're not perfect people or anything like that they just love you unconditionally they love themselves each other in you unconditionally you've got food you've got [ __ ] you've got everything you need but you're stuck there and you're going to be stuck there for a decade when you walk out how how are you what's changing about you and yet the critical voice in the head says no well you can't love yourself yet you've got a blah blah blah before you deserve that but we all know that if we were on that island we would walk out just completely different we would be the thing that we hope to become with all that criticism that's that's the mental experiment if you run it you just see it right away like oh yeah that that you're not going to get to where you want to go through being a really shitty boss to yourself just rounding out your idea of uh enjoyment as a measure of efficiency or I guess uh energy return as a measure of efficiency and enjoyment as kind of the the signal that tells you when it's working right you say when I when I do things with enjoyment I use very little energy and often get energy from the doing correct is that so is it your position that leaning into to enjoyment will not only help you to by Design enjoy the process but also get you better results on on the backside is that as simple as it is yes it's as simple as it is I think there's there's a there's a subtlety to it though there's two ways to enjoy yourself one is choose what you do that's enjoyable but the other one is learn how to enjoy whatever you're doing so right now you and I are having a conversation if we both said let's how do we enjoy this 10% more this conversation for me immediately I put some attention into my body I'm like I feel more deeply connected with you you went drank some water you're like oh you took care of yourself and so there's that too so there's an enjoyment one part of the process of enjoyment is how do I not change anything and just enjoy it more and the other one is how do I do the things that are enjoyable or do things in a way that are enjoyable and and so you have to hit it on both those levels if you only try to do the things that are enjoyable you're [ __ ] because that's actually an avoidance and that avoidance is going to bring the thing that you're trying to avoid to bear so so it has to be like both of those two things to get there one of the most common answers around the friends that are at kind of my level at the moment when we're talking about sort of what do you want to do with your you know everyone's in their 30s some degree of sort of Financial and Professional Freedom um and a lot of the you ask you know what is it that you're hoping to really do the the most common by the most common answer by far is I just don't want to do things I don't want to do anymore like that's the most common and that is the uh either the first or the second version it's um limit gearing your life and the activities within your life toward things that you enjoy more so uh but you're right that there there is a whole other world of first off inevitable things like you're going to have a kid the kid's going to go to hospital like what are you going to do you're going to be sat in the waiting room for 6 hours and no one's going to give you an answer you you need that skill set because yes there's a kind of fragility to an over optimized enjoyable life because you never actually end up building the skill to be able to enjoy things that aren't enjoyable by Design but I think that on the other side um there is like a Puritan work ethic that a lot of people in the UK will resonate with where uh life being enjoyable or choosing things that are enjoyable feels like you're undeserving of it your needs your desires you know you shouldn't have them subjugate them who the [ __ ] are you this you know that that's that's not for you um suffer and be and be grateful for it right yeah if you don't if you don't suffer you're not actually you don't you don't deserve it that kind of thing yeah both of them are super toxic I mean if you look at like who like who's least likely to recover from alcoholism they're going to be the an addiction it's going to be independently wealthy people who can CH who don't have to there's right yeah there's no flaming field so to speak there's no and you see this with I mean because I work with a lot of billionaires you see this trap that happens where it's like oh I can buy myself out of anything that I don't enjoy and and there's a con there's a consequence to that the perfect example that I think about is when I meet somebody who's like dedicated more than five years of their life to caring for somebody like a mom that has Alzheimer's or a kid who's you know born with some sort of thing that requires them to be cared for full-time there's a softness to those people I can recognize it like I I I I can say to them oh wow who did you care for for so long I can see that in you it's the only way you're going to get that some version of that is the only way you're going to get that that kind of softness that peace that they have like I know many people meditated for years who don't have that like there's you know I hitchhiked up to to Alaska which is a really hard thing to do I have experiences that I could only get that way and that's that was extremely uncomfortable for like we would sit on the road side for like at the time like five hours straight like waiting for someone to give us a ride um so there's just something that like if you are avoidant of things that you don't enjoy there's something really toxic about that and if you think that you have to you can't enjoy life and so it feels like it's the the solution to that problem is how do I enjoy what's happening right now are there any uh cues or mantras or or or practices that you fall back on when you think what are the sort of fundamental components of maximizing enjoyment yeah so so the way that like the the work that I do in the world I try to create as much of it as a set of experiments right so because I don't nobody really believes like I'm going to have a talk with you now we're going to have there's may maybe two that resonates with somebody who's listening to this thing they're going to be that's cool maybe they remember them maybe they don't that's kind of what intellectual understanding gets you whereas if you do an experiment and you run it you're going to understand stuff very differently and so and and because I had massive Authority issues when I was in my 20s I didn't I didn't want to listen to anybody so I just like ran these experiments and um so the experiment I ran is how do I I the first thing experiment I ran was I'm going to go two weeks and not do anything I don't enjoy and somewhere like on day seven or eight I was sitting in front of the garbage can it smelt like [ __ ] I did not want it in the house but I did not enjoy taking out the garbage and I just sat there I was sitting there just sitting there like what the [ __ ] do I do I have I have committed to this thing and I was like I'm like the only way that I'm going to get through this is to figure out how to enjoy taking the garbage out m and and that was like the first lesson to me that oh enjoyment was a state of mind as much as anything else and and so how do how do I enjoy things and then that became this new skill set so to me the most of my Mantra is coming questions and because questions leave the Mind open instead of like closed and it leaves the mind in Wonder so for me I the would be the mantas if I wouldn't call that but would be how do I enjoy this 10% more just a little bit more and then that just builds over time and just like working out like you're not going to get you're not going to get all buffed and ripped by you know saying how do I get to 100% right now it's like how do I just like increase the weights a little bit yeah I I had a very similar conversation to this one a year ago with Sam Harris and um he gave me inspiration for a realistic path to enlightenment which I think is way way better than most of the sort of permanent non-dual blist out ideas that we presume you need to go to a cave for and um his was just stringing together a few moments of peace throughout the day you know okay you know if I can have my my my mind and my feet rest in the same spot just just three times today okay and then maybe you know in a couple of weeks maybe that starts to become five whatever triggers you want I've got Post-it notes around the house um uh and when you realize that just that sequence back to back to back and it's the same as this it do it like are you going to be able to make everything permanently enjoyable no probably not but what would this be like if it was a bit more fun what would this be like if it was a little bit more enjoyable if it was a little bit more easy yeah yeah there's also just to give you a couple of other ones in that like to to kind of doveet tail off of what uh Mr Harris said was uh like here's like a really cool trick it's like you're looking at me we're hanging out we're just having our conversation something that makes my life more enjoyable is the question what's looking out behind my eyes so if you like but keep your eyes open and look like and we're having the conversation you still understand everything I'm saying but you just have this question oh what's looking at yeah say I see the smile on your yeah it's just like what what like that just that thing can create the peace in the moment in and it doesn't even require you to like go off and sit down and blah blah blah blah like there's these little tricks like that paying attention to your inner ear when you're listening to somebody it creates like this presence in the conversation and a and a lot of the work that I do is how do you have something like meditation relationally like how is it that like when we're in a conversation when we're connecting with people and we're parenting or being a boss or whatever we're doing how does that become our practice rather than our practice is something that we do and then we try to like maintain it during life it doesn't [ __ ] work it didn't work for me it works for some doesn't work for me yeah taking meditation off the cushion as it's called has been uh a bit of a difficulty for me I'm almost I almost feel like I'm uh Bruce Wayne and Batman with uh you know where I who I am on a morning when I'm sat down a journal breath work meditate read get up and go about my day and there's that me and then there's the sort of dopamine caffeine neut Tropic fueled version of me fights fires throughout the day and reads things but reads them with a purpose of kind of bringing them back up and blah blah blah it's very very very interesting I want to come back to it I want to get some more of your questions but I got another one here so Letting Go doesn't happen by telling yourself to let go Letting Go happens when it is ready yeah yeah that's a that's how to explain that one uh I would say um there's this there's this thing that I do where like I ask people to put their hands together like this and I and I say okay try to pull your pinkies apart and so go ahead and try but that's doing it I don't want you to do it I want you to try to do it right and then feel that whole feeling in your body that in that feeling of trying and then just feel the opposite of it yeah so the so we think that we can get to where we want to go through effort and there's a but there's another place that is like that but the idea of surrender or the idea of receiving whatever words work for you that allows for a whole secondary thing to get done and sometimes that's far more effective than effort and so um I mean like so like when I'm lifting weights I keep on using weights example because I know you're you're into it but um like when you're really doing like a really good set of reps there's the effort part of the rep and then there's the stretch part of the rep if you try to apply effort to the stretch you [ __ ] the stretch like it's it's about the opp you know it's like that moment where the weight is hanging and it's like stretching out the arm it's ripping the muscles and it's a similar thing that there's there's something that you that has to be received into or surrendered into for it for it to be effective and work and so what I notice is a lot of people try to let go and you it doesn't work well that was you right finding this peak experience in meditation and then that's right gripping tightly onto the desire which immediately creates this success failure with and the entire it was your first one first meditation ret where it all went right yeah well you had no expectation you had no yeah blah blah blah that's right yeah yeah that's right and and then a thousand other times you know like the the too much effort a thousand other times yeah I mean that's fueled by the critical voice in the head right dude I think about this all the time so um there's basically no scenario in life that I've ever looked at or at least for maybe like the last 10 years where I haven't thought more effort will not make this better every single thing that is put in front of me if I just work harder apply more itive horsepower focus better if I just lean in if I grip more tightly yeah this thing will work and I I kind of have a um okay so can you show me then U how that works with enjoyment [ __ ] enjoy it [ __ ] enjoy it okay you're going to enjoy this it's like the uh it's like the sort of slightly outraged mother on a subpar holiday telling her children we're having fun why aren you SM we're all having fun why aren't you smiling yeah yeah yeah Smile Smile this is fun yeah this is fun this is fun exactly but yeah I mean just thinking about that that sort of gripping so tightly to things and and assuming that that is the outcome that you're trying to achieve assuming that that's the thing on the other side of it uh I've got a it's not fully fleshed out so I might I might Bumble this but I'll see if I can get it across to you I got the kind of um building out a uh an idea about hard work and about why it's so seductive in the modern world the way that I I think is that most people most advice is charitably given to people who probably do need to work harder many more people perhaps on average need tightening up than loosening off therefore the advice the David Goggins jocker willink you know stay hard get up early and and stop hitting snooze and doing all the rest of it maybe does on average improve the lives of most people but there is a very big cohort of people for whom that gripping more tightly mentality pushes them further into the exact thing that they need to stop doing that they're already trying to control all of the outcomes they're gripping so tightly to all of the things that they're doing and um I I I I think the reason that hard work is so seductive is that it reliably makes most things a bit better but can actually for a very big number of people over the longer term make it way worse yes I would I would put a like a slight spin on that I I don't disagree with your what you're saying and then I would spin it a little bit so I would say the thing that's seductive about like like let's work harder is or let let me inspire you to work harder is one is it it rhymes with the voice in the head so that like it's like I believe so if you think about the voice in the head as a tyrant most of us relate to the voice in the head like we're you know like their their the the the absolute person person who believes in them right like so pick whatever political figure you like think about the person that you hate on the other side the the person that the sorry think about the political figure that you hate and then think about the person who buys into everything they say that Tyrant is the voice in our head and we are the person who believes everything they say and so when somebody says you need to work harder they're like yes check I knew I needed to work harder I've been telling myself I was a piece that's so good it's it's like a like psychological conf bias like an internal confirmation bias so that's half of the thing the other half is this feeling of empowerment most people in our society feel very disempowered they feel like they're scared of the consequences of the actions that they want to take they're scared of the consequences of of following their truth and so they feel very disempowered and so this gives them a feeling of oh I I I can have empowerment and so it's very sexy and very and the empowerment side I think is absolutely right like that that is actually you need to have that um this agency you have agency over the outcomes yeah but once you actually figured out that you actually have agency and empowerment then the move is love then the move is learning to love yourself love others be unconditional in your love and and what you start to find out is that the unconditional love and empowerment they can't really exist without one another you can't really what what we call love that doesn't have empowerment is like codependence it's like how do I make you happy so that I can feel safe it's a fear-based action and empowerment without love is actually just power and there's you'll never get enough of it and it can always be taken from you and so it's really it's like those two things become one eventually but so so so I would say that love would help anybody on that whole Spectrum but the sexy thing is and the thing that they that they are going to go for is the you can be better you can be empowered dude you're blowing my mind all of these are are really really great all right next one the desire to be special can only exist if you don't know who you are wow man You' have been on my Twitter um picking picking all of the headlines today yeah yeah yeah uh yeah Fant um yeah so there's this idea that basically if you're trying to be special then that comes from a place of um low self-esteem or that comes from a place of an of wanting to improve wanting to be better and if you actually know who you are that like that it you just couldn't you just could it wouldn't it's not a possibility there's a great Tibetan saying if you're if you think somebody's better than you then that's comparative mind that's misery if you think somebody's beneath you that's comparative mind that's misery if you think somebody's equal to you that's comparative mind and that's misery um our society is Fallen a little bit into the equality thing now but but if I'm not better if I'm not worse and I'm not and I'm not equal then I'm special and so then then I know who I I know that would be me knowing who I am as long as I'm in a comparative mind I don't I I can't know who I am that's that's basically what it's pointing to why would you be special if you're not better worse or equal well I mean that makes me if I can't be better than anybody or worse than or you I have to be unique I have to be I have to be something that's not those things so I read that I read um the desire to be special can only exist if you don't know who you are I maybe maybe it maybe it does does Dove tale that basically the desire to be special is kind of a fruitless Pursuit because by virtue of the fact that the chance of you being here is so infinitesimally [ __ ] unlikely and that no one else will ever be born in the exact same space at the exact same time with your genetics and your experiences um and that the most that you can ever hope to know of any other person even your best friend or wife that you've known for your entire life and shared everything with is one trillionth daily of what you get to see of yourself the sort of specialness is imbued in your own experience the depth of experience you have of yourself is so asymmetric compared with that that you get from other people that the desire to be special is chasing a thing which is already there yeah it's not what I meant by it but it's really beautiful yeah I can't disagree with that I I think the way that I would say it is more like if you go back to Sam Harris like in the process of understanding yourself of what some people would call Awakening you know there's the moment of I am nothing and there's the moment of I am everything and when you see yourself clearly in that way that you are the same as everything like you and God you and nature you and Humanity you are the same and when you see that you're nothing like how does the idea of not being special and or being special like can how can it even exist that would be another way to say it why do you think people want to be special where do you think that drive comes from they weren't loved as kids in a way that was deeply attuned that they were told that they had to be of value that they couldn't cry that they couldn't get angry that they whatever that that that who they were was needed to be managed and so that they are looking for somebody to say I I I love you but then it never works out because even when you get it you become the Superstar everybody loves you but then it doesn't work out and so it's the only way it really works out is when you learn to love all those parts of yourself and therefore love all those parts of other people only get there I've got the word enough coming up as you say that like someone you are enough you as you are no more no augmentations no accolades no Fanfare no nothing you as a child you as an adult you are enough is this thing even the idea of enoughness seems like there is limited in some way I don't know how to explain it there's this thing that it's it's similar to you know one of the teachings that they have I think it's a mistranslation of like oh accept your emotional experience the idea that you're supposed to accept yourself and that doesn't like that at least in my language that doesn't really fulfill what fulfills is welcome like I can't wait to have the experience of being abandoned I I welcome it I have a a quote that's Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome and and it's welcome it's not accept where you accept her children you know what I mean who who are the children of joy the family of emotion so all of them so the more that people are willing to welcome that anger the fear the the the helplessness the sadness the grief the excitement which is also incredibly hard for people to feel um the more that you can welcome those the more joy just as a natural part of existence one of my favorite story it's a dark story but one of my favorite stories is about Tiger Woods and um his father was very tyrannical especially when he was a kid sort of this this guy who just drove tiger to be the best that he could at golf and there's an a video of tiger I think he's maybe two and a half or three playing golf on some late night TV show uh and his dad would during uh coaching and training he would racially abuse him on the golf course he would say these white people are never going to let you let you play here you're not like it's you're not performing well like real just heavy heavy heavy but they had a safe word like you do during rough sex and he said just if you ever need me to stop just say the ew say the e-word and it'll all be over and I'll stop doing it and he never once said it throughout all of childhood and the e-word was enough terrifying man and look at what came out look at what came out you know you have a guy potentially one of the greatest golfers of all time but a broken human yeah yeah yeah I mean this is the right and and and then we tell the story that that's what's necessary to be the greatest of all time and there's definitely counter examples of it who like it um I mean okay so to say that no human has trauma I wouldn't go that far so there's always like levels of trauma but there's not that level of trauma racial abuse on the golf course for exactly so uh there's a guy met recently he's now like a boy I'm sorry I can't I can't from he's a work he was with the Warriors he was a really great player in the Warriors and he um but didn't start playing basketball he's from Africa and now he's a news C broadcaster I'm sorry I can't remember his name um but I was at a party and I met him and his story was like I just wanted to go to college and I came from Africa and so I played basketball till my fingers bled so that I could get the scholarship and tells this story and he tells about like the love of his parents and how that pursued him how that and I don't know too much about like a LeBron James but my understanding that his mother and his relationship was definitely not Tiger Woods and his father's relationship so there's definitely places where that that level of trauma is not required to well this this question um sort of I guess the the power of low self-esteem or the the the the power of this need uh is probably the thing that's obs assess me the most over the last few years because when you look at someone like tiger and you think well you know look at what he achieved and you go okay but your definition of achievement is so the art of achievement the art of accomplishment uh is is so narrowly defined it's just within this very one small domain is that what you want for your life and I'm watching um tour def France Unchained on Netflix at the moment you seen this no no not at all I highly recommend watching it if you're obsessed with sort of human performance and The Narrative it's like a behind the scenes kind of like that Formula One drive to survive Series yeah and um you just see these guys that are sacrificing everything a guy died in 20 last year on the uh guo Italia like the the Italian one he died because these guys are doing you know nearly a 100 kilometers an hour downhill on wheels that are wow that that thick wearing Lyra if they come off at the very least there's broken bones and there's skin grafts that are needed and all sorts of Stu and this guy died uh the point being if you want to become the absolute best within a narrowly defined Pursuit there are a lot of weird externalities and prices and really what you're looking at is a game of who is prepared to who is prepared to sacrifice everything else in their life the most in order to be able to win at this one thing yeah I think also so I obviously work with a lot of incredibly High performing people in the business context and and and so I think with Athletics I think we like to use that like Athletics and Navy Seals like I think we like to use that place and and I think that's it's true but it's also only one example of greatness is physical greatness and we're in a day and we're in a modern time where there's like you're competing with seven billion people for that particular kind of greatness and so I think and there's only 5% of the top 100% that are ever going to be known for their greatness and so so I think that that's a particular thing whereas something like business or art or like I'm not sure if that same kind of thing is required um like I would if if I was if I wanted to bet on an artist that would going to be succeed and for me it be the person who would like more likely enjoy their work and when I work with super high-powered CEOs my experience is that when they start learning to enjoy what they're doing they become far more effective what's interesting is I don't think that's like I think that if you're in certain bureaucratic positions you might not rise to the ranks as quickly you may you might just leave but particularly the CEO position or the sea level position of a company that say doing more than 100 million in rev those folks when they when they turn that switch on it totally because they're not they're not in there they get to control a lot of their day and what they choose to do to be effective so I think there's something about the physical performance in particular that's nuanced there that maybe it's that it's that hard work thing again right it's that gripping tightly it's the assumption that in a domain where performance is uh easy to quantify um there are established rules around working hard and game tape and diet and sort of thinking about it 3 365 24/7 um but you're you're totally correct like if you were to look at take podcasting um the best podcasters in the world and not the ones that live and breathe podcasting they're the ones that have sufficiently interesting lives that they can actually talk about it on a podcast there's work to be done you know and networking and and conversational skill was there also like the best biathlete in the world if I have this right I don't I was told the story I don't know if it's true but some Norwegian guy and like he sits on the couch like six hours a day because he's like my body needs to rest if I'm going to be high performance that wouldn't surprise me but and the further that you get away from that uh into poetry into art into any any creative Endeavor those those things business those things don't come about through sort of force of will even writing I know that whatever uh inspiration is for amateurs professionals just show up and do the work like that's true I think for the fact that most writers maybe need tightening up not not loosening off but also where does their inspiration come from their inspiration comes during the walk that they have or the nap that they needed in the middle of the afternoon yeah exactly so yeah so it's an interesting balance of like how how tight does a string need to be in your particular profession and but there's also the question of like you said so I know plenty of people who woke up at 60 who were like I'm a billionaire I'm successful and I'm absolutely [ __ ] miserable that's a nightmare that's I that's the future that everybody should fear yeah and it's and it's it's incredibly prevalent I I like I I I I have another quote that's um the problem with managing your life is that you have a life that you need to manage and and that's that I just see that happen for folks is that they've like managed themselves into this area and now to maintain it they have to continue managing themselves and then that at some point they're like that that hurts it sucks I don't want that anymore people who repress their emotional experience are fragile they get stuck on decisions more easily and they are slower to heal from experiences why yeah so we talked about the at the beginning we talked about the Matrix and the golden algorithm so the reason that I came up with that is because I was looking for effective ways to get people out of patterns or habits that they were in and so including myself and so what I noticed is that when people all of a sudden welcome like in my case the abandonment then the pattern stops and so the the way the way that we like if you have emotional stagnation shame is one of the best forms of emotional stagnation guilt another form of emotional stagnation judgment another form of emotional stagnation when you don't have that emotional fluidity then you're going to start repeating these patterns over and over and over again and um and so as far as the decision-making one which is slightly different so there's a book 2012 book called dart's ER by neuroscientist who basically it's now become more nuanced but I'm going to do the unnuanced version of it which is basically the the the decision-making part of our brain is the emotional center of our brain if you take the emotional center of the brain out of your body your IQ stays the same but your life falls apart because it takes you a long time to decide what color pen it takes you oh i' I've heard there was a guy there was a guy didn't you have to choose a a date for an appointment and the um interviewers or whatever were just looking at him and it took him 45 minutes because he has no value set that's right yeah so so we make emotional decisions it's really easy to see in your own life not that way but like how many emotion how many decisions did you make to not feel rejected or to feel loved or to feel like a success or to not feel abandoned or rejected you know what I mean there's so you so we make all these decisions on an emotional basis we don't make logical decisions we use logic as a way to try to figure out how we'll feel based on a decision and so so I noticed that like the the proof is in the pudding if somebody is having a hard time making a decision we find out what they don't want to feel they feel it the decision gets made I cannot tell you how many people who are you know slightly depressed and feel stuck when they get angry they have absolute Clarity on the other side of the anger just like boom it just it they they they've been black and white thinking binary thinking for you know months on a subject they get angry and and it's like 100% clear so there so what we're doing is we're trying to avoid an emotion by in the decision that we make and if we love all of the emotions we have Clarity in our decision- making yeah I'm okay with the fact that some people might hate me on that I'm okay with the fact that I might be abandoned I'm going to follow my truth and I'm going to be okay with the consequences which is the real empowerment that we were talking about and so that's why and so if we it doesn't matter if you're like you know a world leader or the a billionaire with a massive thing if you're trying to avoid certain emotional experiences you like you're predictable it's easy to beat you and and like and and you're going to be stuck in that pattern I get the sense as well that a lot of people that are high performers rely so much on their cognitive cerebral horsepower and it's proven in the past look at all the things it's got you look at how great your models are should my models I mean you had if you had access to my model if you your life would as well yeah yeah so you know you have this um very sterile approach to decision- making and to moving through life uh and then you're told the exact thing that you're scared of doing you have no experience in doing yes you now to need to stop being the fourth degree black belt in this particular modality go back to being worse than a white belt like absolute beginner at this thing that you don't even have any evidence that it's going to be good up against all of this evidence from fourth deegree black belt modality that says that look at how [ __ ] impressive I am the world loves me yeah yeah that you're describing like my first meeting with a ton of clients yeah so so the intellect is amazing and I love it and it's really really really useful and it's not your whole intelligence so like if you my work really has an idea that there's like the mental intelligence Loosely prefrontal cortex human emotional intelligence emotional fluidity Loosely meleon and the kind of the the gut intelligence which is more like in The Reptilian side of things and and if you really want to have change in change yourself you you work on all three you don't work on one or the other but most of us are highly developed in one not very developed in the other so you get a lot more transformation for the buck focused on the place that you suck so it's not abandoning the models but hey learn to go from zero to one in emotions and that's going to 10x your models as compared to you know go from 100 to 101 in your model like it's good but but eventually it's like U the way I think about it is it's like three pencils with rubber bands and there's always tension between them so if one's really low at some point it's just you are holding more and more tension and so for me it's you have to work on all three if you want real transformation the emotional experience is just the one that is mostly abandoned by our society we've been told be logical don't have don't make emotional decisions and we've experienced as something that was bad that made us feel out of control that hurt our relationships and so we immediately went to trying to manage them instead of learning how to harness them instead of learning like the beauty of them and and how they actually work because they don't work rationally like how many people have I worked with who are like yeah I'm angry but it's not rational it's like yeah that's a that's [ __ ] emotions man like they are none of them are rational but they are incredibly wise if you know how to listen to them I I've been big into evolutionary psychology for the last four years or so and have had a lot of conversations about relationships mating Dynamics and stuff like that and um I've got a uh blog Post Brewing in me about how even evolutionary psychology that tries to be all-encompassing when it comes to mating and mate selection misses the most important thing which is the phenomenon of falling in love with somebody because it's not rational and you know the way that I and all of my friends and colleagues have talked about this for forever is in terms of mate value and exchanges and mate guarding and you know par male parental uncertainty and it's you know it's this amount for that it's trading resources for safety and blah so on and so forth and you go yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's nice that's nice and I can put it on a spreadsheet and all the rest of it but what about the way it feels and you know how many times I'm I I went through a a a breakup a couple of months ago so I'm kind of slowly reintegrating myself back into the dating scene there's so many times I've found with friends that are dating uh and myself as well I'm like dude on paper this chick's amazing like so all of the tick tick tick tick tick all of the different things why why don't I feel like this is a something that can continue why don't I feel like this is something that works you go well because you don't get to choose that you don't get to choose that that's not so much I'm going to argue there I think you do but it's not a short-term choice so there's two thought processes one I love what you're saying about evolutionary psychology and and I have this model that I use for like emotional Evolution like how we evolve emotionally and and we can get get into that because there's so little literature done on there's like this is how emotions work and this is what we can measure but there's not like here's how you develop cognitively that is out there PJ and hundred others but there's no like here's how we develop emotionally but but on the love thing so so here's what I notic is people fall in love with the folks who have the pattern that they need to heal in them so you had a critical mom say then there's a good chance you're going to fall in love with a critical woman and that like that's where the Heat's going to be that's and and I've listened to people have their first dates and I'm like you're just listing off what you're going to do to each other like it's an amazing experience if you're listening to it from that they're telling each other about themselves but they're really saying this is how I'm going to relate with you and this is how I'm going to this is like we're going to just paint this all forward if you heal that stuff then you're going to be attracted to other people you're not going to be attracted to that anymore and so my experience is like a a good relationship is it starts with here's my trauma this is your trauma they're well M we have something to learn from each other the exact thing we're here to learn and we're both willing to do the work on ourselves to learn it and you you put those two things together and you have a long-term successful relationship without them it's questionable yeah aland Boton says that uh on your first date you should ask there's one question that should always be asked which is in what ways are you crazy I think that's a short shorter version of what what you're asking exactly are you might kind of crazy yeah yeah and I mean for me marriage was marriage and child raising were the most important spiritual practices of my life or self-development practices of my life like I like we we ter and I just got really lucky and Tara was really the person who like when when I asked her to marry me she said yeah we're going to travel through southeast Asia for six months together in backpacks if we can survive that we're gonna see a therapist and we're going to do a Meditation Retreat if we're going to get married these were like the requirements like your Navy SE L week but just attracted a little bit more and it was just like this beautiful thing that set the course for our relationship as a way to understand ourselves grow and to grow and then that that was always the purpose of our relationship and and the love was there and the love just has only deepened and it's no longer like a it's not like the kind of hot love of the first three to five months but it's like so much better yeah I I even had that I was on the bike this morning thinking about this idea for uh what evolutionary psychology gets wrong about relationships and one of the things that came up was you know you describing this transition from passionate to companionate systems and blah blah blah and you go yeah I know but what does it feel like tell me what it feels like stop describing it in terms that can be written in a journal and you know I guess this is maybe where you know the limits of science actually in some ways do and maybe you need to look elsewhere maybe you need to look to Art and music and and and conversation and poetry and and things like that experiences all right next one if you can't say no easily yeah you can't be trusted why so we have this experiment we run in some of our Retreats where your job is to try to get someone to do something and and at the end of it we'll ask you know was there anybody who who didn't get a no and there's always somebody where someone said yes to them so they're impairs and somebody's like will you do this and they have to ask you to do something that can do right there in the moment will you do a push-up will you blah blah blah blah and somebody always doesn't say no and you'll ask them hey do you trust them they're like no you can't trust somebody like if they say no to you then you know they're in their truth otherwise you're like what's actually happening under there what's actually what's actually going on for you and so it's just as simple as that I thought the quote you were going to say was um if you can't say no then you can't find your yes which is also something that I say and I think they're completely related it's like if you're hanging out with somebody and your experience of them is that they're always there to please you then you can't trust them because you don't know them you can't like because they they don't even know themselves enough they've like completely lost themselves in you and anytime that that relationship happens it always ends in resentment there's no relationship where somebody loses themselves and somebody else and there's not resentment that follows Neil Strauss last year the best quote of 2023 unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments that's a good one [ __ ] monster Ah that's a great quote why is it you know we we're often told uh especially as kids but as we grow up as well about the dangers of being selfish and and and and uh focusing on ourselves too much in that we must give so on and so forth if that's the case why do we find it so hard to make our own needs a priority why do we subjugate our desires and the things that we need in order to please other people how do we hold these two things at the same time can you repeat that question I think I heard you but I want to make sure did you say we're told not to be selfish yeah when we're growing up like stop being so selfish you know give give the toy to your little brother time with them your world of solipsistic narcissists and all the rest of it and yet in the same sentence we're somehow often subjugating our needs desires don't matter I don't make myself a priority please please just like me love me it's because we learn from mimicry more than we learn from what we're told and when a parent says to their kid you're being selfish it's the parent being selfish but your parent never says to a kid you're being selfish unless they're not doing what they want them to do that's when you call a kid selfish so with the so verbally they're saying don't be selfish but the emotional system the gut system the gutal system is saying be selfish like me right now this is what adults do we're selfish as a matter we're so [ __ ] selfish we're going to tell you we're going to shame you because you're not doing what I want so we have that conflict inside of us and and then it just like goes everywhere in our life because we haven't actually resolved that internal conflict of oh I had a a great example of this is I had a friend who was Catholic and um he had just a Wonder F tradition of faith in him but at one point he said to me he said uh Joe I I have a hard time knowing when I'm supposed to take care of myself or if I'm supposed to um sacrifice for others and I don't know when I'm supposed to do that and I said oh oh I didn't know your God's a SATA masochist set up a world where there's a difference between those two things that makes no [ __ ] sense to me and my experience is that when I'm truly doing what's best for me I'm also being highly compassionate for other people like there's there's very little time like occasionally like in business deals where it's like it's just not arbitrary about how much money is going to who like the the principles of it had worked out there's a couple places like that but in almost all situations if I'm really really taking care of myself it is also the compassionate thing to do for others that includes saying no oh exactly Mo almost most importantly it is saying no because then I'm not breeding a relationship of resentment so so and so what typically people mistake for being compassionate is is like did I make the person uncomfortable am I being nice it's not compassion at all like a compassionate act might make somebody really really uncomfortable and so usually when people are saying don't be selfish they're saying like make me comfortable and so but being actually when you're doing what's actually best for you it's just not always going to feel good if you're doing what's actually best for other people it's not going to feel good in the moment long term it will but in the moment it isn't people don't want you to be perfect what they want is to feel connected with you yeah yeah so that's the weird part right so I don't know how many people get uh they get they get so hung up around the axle being perfect first the first thing about perfection is there is no such thing there's like your idea of perfection my idea of perfection so it's an unachievable place and and if you notice with a critical voice in your head the idea of of perfection it's a moving Target like and typically if you really start listening closely to the voice in your head it'll tell you contradictory things it'll say like um you know you really have to work hard if you're going to get your goals and then it'll say you're abandoning your mom and dad because you're working too hard like there'll be all these kind if you really like write down all the [ __ ] it says and you look for the contradiction it's amazing just like that politician we were talking about and the person's like yeah yeah whatever you say like they're contradicting themselves all over the place as well and so and so that so since you can't hit the target you're never going to get there but somehow we think if we get it right then we'll be loved but people actually want to feel connected great products great podcasts great friendships great marriages great businesses all are built on connection great athletic performance is built on connection to yourself to your body there's no way someone's going to have athletic intelligence without a deep connection to their body so connection is the thing that actually but somehow or another in our minds because of the voice in the head we think that Perfection is going to get us somewhere it doesn't and and if you literally do that work of saying okay like how do I make this podcast more connected Ive with me and with other people it'll be a better podcast so true when I first started doing this six years ago I thought that the job of a podcaster was to be this sort of Ruthless indexer of information that basically the goal was to kind of extract as much wisdom from the guests as possible and then put it on the internet like like a live version of blinkist I guess uh and it took I don't know probably 400 episodes for me to realize that you're much closer to a Vibe architect than you are to a synthesizer or essentialize of information and um the more that's one of the beautiful things about Pursuits that are a little bit more Artful that there isn't perfect and that's one of the problems again of using uh sport as a rubric there's very tightly defined rules right we know what 300 kilos on the bar if you pick it up and I don't pick it up you win in powerlifting okay like hooray that's we know exactly what that is but what does it mean to say that this was a better blog post so this is a better piece of music what does that even mean uh and there's even sports stuff like bodybuilding in which it's not so much about the quantifiable metrics it's about this sort of weird like ethereal way that it's all put together into an experience and there's the the movement and there's the song choice and there's the you know the [ __ ] color of the tiny pants all of the different bits and pieces but yeah um first off that I love that idea um of of of perfection and then the second one I had this idea about uh reverse Charisma uh there's this famous um story about Winston Churchill's wife I think who gets to meet the two presidential candidates for America and she says that she left the first dinner with the first one feeling like he was the smartest person on the planet and she left the second dinner with the other saying that she felt like she was the most interesting smartest person on the planet and um yep I realized I realized that uh what we think we want when it comes to Charisma and being around a table what we think that other people want from us is for us to be impressive and and sharp and witty and cool and funny and all of the rest of it but when I think about the people that I like having around my dinner table the most it's not those people it's the ones that make me feel like I'm that person yeah and if you go okay well if that's how if that's what I want from other people I can just be that to other people and reverse Charisma is way easier to achieve actual Charisma reverse Charisma is just being interested in the other person so yeah that that I think uh so much from that people don't want you to be perfect what they want is to feel connected with you yeah and that's the that's the place where I talk about love so like if you learn to Unconditionally Love all the parts of yourself it's really easy to Unconditionally Love the parts of others and so all of that benefit of what you call reverse Charisma comes with it which is really quite which is really quite sweet but it also comes with it not from a place of like oh look what I got which always falls apart like it's not like oh I've accomplished a goal it's just like life is a dream that I never thought possible coming true it's a whole different thing you know the thing about reaching a goal and having happiness there is it's only happiness because there's a moment where you don't have a goal that you're defining Yourself by that's why you get that happiness when you reach that goal but there's this other kind of goal which is like I'm I don't Define Myself by what I do I do [ __ ] I do it well I like it I enjoy it it's fantastic but I'm not defined by that and then some sort of Joy comes from that back to that original prompt of of of how I forgot gosh you had a quote that you used of mine but I can't remember what it was which one the the spiritual path for so many I am not good enough yet yes exactly yeah exactly back to that quote about spiritual path being not good enough mhm yeah one of the uh my business partner in the productivity drink that I make James took some siloc cybin and sat on a a cliff in Australia and this question came to him which was does the world love you for who you are or for what you do and then uh I told this to Mark Manson and he said here's an even harder question do you love you for who you are or for what you do and um that that's really stuck with me it's a very very difficult question to answer right you know you you almost promise you feel like you've been promised this value trade with the world if only I can be sufficiently impressive if only I can be smart or rich or sexy or successful or admirable or or or kind or giving or whatever the [ __ ] it is then dot dot dot then only half the people will hate me like like look at all those people half the people hate them like it's just like yeah there the story that I have that's like that is um was told to me by a guy who like started these big Retreat centers His Name Escapes me but he it was talking about like this near-death experience he had and he had these two people walking towards him in the light and he's like oh they're gonna they're going to judge me I'm here to be judged I wonder if I'm good enough and when they got there they basically looked at him and said so have you been good enough and it it's like I remember how much chills it gave me at the time because it's like right yeah this is this is the moment isn't it's it's there's no outside that's going to give you any kind of validation there's you know like look at look at the people who have all the validation in the world like they're and in horrific rap battles doing just's trying to get a horse to lift its foot up trying to get a horse to lift its foot up that's right uh yeah so one of the big Journeys that I've been doing for the last sort of seven or eight months now um facilitated through therapy uh but required by the rest of my life was trying to feel feelings properly trying to fully connect with emotions and tap into that just from a basic level what is it about feeling feelings and emotions that's caused so many of us to struggle to just get there yeah so there's a couple of things that get in the way so if you're a kid who was physically abused and I put um a quarter in one hand and a key in another hand without telling you what's in what you wouldn't be able to know because you're you've killed the sensations in your body enough because it was too intense for you to feel so if you had enough physical violence you can't feel your body the same way anymore so it's the same thing with emotions so like when I was a kid as an example when I was a kid I would be made fun of every time I cried and um I was uh 20 something years old and I was going through a photo album and there was a picture of me crying and I remember I was like crying my parents threw a pity party to make fun of me they even took a picture and then they put it in the photo album to be like you know see that you don't want to be that I was like oh [ __ ] that's probably why I haven't cried in like 16 years so I took the photo from the photo album I put it on my desk and I was like I'm going to learn how to to cry again I 6 months eight months later I still hadn't learned how to cry I was like I didn't have any you know internet was just getting started I didn't really have any resources and so I um I would go I lived in Los Angeles at the time I'd go up to 10,000 feet and then I would like hike on a trail and then I'd hike off Trail so where nobody me and i' practice crying I would fake it I'd be like I'm an actor just trying to cry and I did that for like three months twice a week until finally like it broke and I could actually have authentic tears so the first one is that we just suffered some sort of a abuse and that abuse could be really outward like what happened to me but it could also just be like every time you're sad mom fed you every time you were Boys Don't Cry girls don't get angry you got ignored you got you know bribed out of them whatever so so very few parents are just like oh cool going to sit with you while you're having a big emotional experience and and being loving attention of that and attune to you it's a very rare thing great if you're parent go to um get a book called listen it's a fantastic book on this and one of the greatest for parenting yeah yeah for parenting it's also really good for CEOs do you know who it's by yeah Patty whiffler yeah she's a she's a dear friend she's amazing um yeah the book is listening the the the organization is called hand-in-hand parenting and it'll it's really great five tool super easy to use anyways easy to easy to understand hard as [ __ ] to use um but so anyways so that so that's one reason is that we were emotionally abused and so we cut off the feelings of the emotion then the second reason is that and I use emotional abuse because it doesn't no one else is going to call it that but I use emotional abuse because I want to just like call it what it is which is like you are trying to aggressively change somebody else's emotions whether it's passive aggressive or aggressive you're like and then the second reason is that all of us had this experience of losing control with an emotion at some point right like I was jealous and I [ __ ] couldn't help myself and therefore the woman left or I got so angry at this party and then I lost these friends like we all have this experience or just I'm 12 years old I want to [ __ ] pee myself I'm having se you know I feel so out of control and so that's the second when we have that experience and the and the natural stage of development is like okay I need to learn how to control my emotions often times that second part only comes because of the first part meaning like I have two daughters and they have incredible emotional control at 13 years old because their entire life we've been present with them in their emotional temper tantrums and everything and so there's like there's no discipline required there's no shame required they're just like they know know what it is to feel connected and to feel good and they want to feel that way what does it look like to be present with a child or another person in their emotions ah yeah I'll give you an example of that so it's being with them without being in them and um for a child a great example so my daughter was having this really bad time when she was three years old and we're at a Whole Foods and she's just like ah having this temper tantrum I'm like all right here we go and I like sit down I'm containing her making sure she doesn't hurt anybody not hurting the food and I live in this like somewhat hippie town and this uh Little Hippie woman came over and she's like are you okay dear and my daughter's like ah I'm just having my emotions ah so it's just being present with somebody and not judging them and not trying to fix them not trying to make them better oh it's G to be okay I'm gonna smile like none of that crap it's just like oh yeah this is how you are fantastic let's I can be with that I can be with your fear or your anger or whatever it is without trying to change it without trying to change it I mean I will depending on who I'm working with but sometimes I like I might say not at me like I don't want your fear at me I don't want your anger at me I don't want your sadness at me but I'm happy to be here with it with the sadness or the anger so that's what so it's just letting them have the full emotional experience while sitting with them and being present and loving them as they are in that experience which is the thing that very few of us got as kids and if you don't get that then there's these big moments of feeling completely loss of control under an emotion and and so then you're like [ __ ] I've got to manage the [ __ ] out of this and so you start really trying to manage it and then these fears arise which is the third thing that makes it difficult I'm scared that if I'm sad I'll be sad forever I'm scared if I get angry I'll destroy everything I love I'm scared that if I'm if I'm fearful I'm gonna actually be helpless if I feel the fear I'm going to actually be not able to do anything and those are kind of the three things that we have those are the three fears they're completely [ __ ] wrong but they're the things that we tell the stories we tell about those emotions just go back through them again sadness is going to last forever if I really open up this sadness I'm G to be sad forever I'm going to be depressed if I'm angry I'm going to like destroy everything I love and or destroy things that are important to me and if I'm scared I'm going to be if I allow myself to feel the fear I'm going to be paralyzed not going to be able to be competent I'm going to be help but it's not true like we all know anybody who's cried knows that in the other side of a good cry you feel [ __ ] better right like if you feel your anger you become more determined like in in the in the Tibetan philosophy they talk about I think it's the five the five poisons and the five virtues and everything like that and then later on in the scripture they talk about how they're the same thing and my experience is that like Ang is like a hose right so you think about anger as a hose and this is the energy that's running through it and you kink it this way and it's nice dress and you kink it this way and it's you [ __ ] I [ __ ] baah blah blah you kink it another way it's like fine I'll be okay you know like you can Kink it different ways when that hose is unkinked it's it's Martin Luther King it's it's Gandhi it's it's it's a clarity and determination and a and a boundary and that's that's what unkinked anger looks like it's it is that Clarity and determination and so that's the virtue that's on the other side of the anger to me I call that all anger and so because of these things that stop us we never get to feel what happens when that when that emotion is moves through us unresisted when we have what I call emotional fluidity and so we don't get to that like that kind of deter we don't get to that that kind of determination there's other kinds but we don't get to the the joy and the and the excitement of Life yeah I was I was going to say so you've mentioned uh a bunch of emotions there that are negative what I also think that people wish that they could feel more excitement or or en enjoyment or Elation yeah that's another fallacy it's an absolute [ __ ] fallacy they want to like mentally they're like yeah I want to feel that but like like if you just like if I ask someone like if I'm in a retreat and I say to some people okay we're going to release some anger let's move some anger 10 15 minutes later eight out of 10 of them are going to be going they're going to still be releasing that emotion if I say okay hey let's release some excitement most people are done in 3 minutes there it is really scary because the really positive emotions if you allow them to fully fill you up it really dissipates the sense of self the identity starts moving like collapsing in on itself and so they're they're actually very hard for I mean we want them but if we feel them for too long we're like what the like it gets a little bit wonky for us for most people and it's like anything it's like learning to feel those emotions it's like it only really comes after you've learned how to feel the negative ones and then there's the work of actually feeling and being in those really positive emotions and it's why you can meet people who are like meditators for years and they peace they can feel but they'll still be suffering with depression that joy that kind of like big heartfelt open Joy like that's a harder thing to feel than like a nice aquanus peace that's interesting it's definitely less safe yeah um yeah oh my God this could be taken away from me oh my God what the [ __ ] happening who am I in this because it's so big it's so expansive those feelings that the idea of self just [ __ ] can't compete but there are still so for all of me saying that people struggle to connect with their emotions a lot of people listening to this show will uh be familiar with the cerebral horsepower praying at the sort of altar of cognition thing um but there's also still a bunch of emotions that are just kind of less exciting and more Dow that everybody is familiar with anxiety you know this sort of ambient sense of a little bit of fear that's going on it's not full fear it's not gripping you but it's you know uh anxiety worry concern uh insufficiency shame um so we we're connecting with some emotions one subset of them is there a way are you thinking about how they get alchemized or moved around is there a way that you think about this yeah so yeah so if I think about emotional development um the like the end of emotional not end but like kind of like the more mature areas of emotional development is like all those feelings they're be they become hard to distinguish between the two any or between any of them and so um so that's that that's an interesting piece to it the other interesting piece is that a lot of what's happening is repressed emotions so somebody has like chronic anxiety like I've worked with people say with OCD and oftentimes there's an event that started the OCD where they felt deeply out of control over a situation and unsupported out of control and unsupported if they can go and feel and they couldn't feel it at the time it was not possible to feel because Mom was dying dad was dying blah blah blah something the parents were violent whatever there was some way they could not feel if we can go back and feel that emotion that didn't get felt that OCD starts dissipating as an example I know people like often times people super depressed not super like not not depressed like where they're having visions but like a Damia level of depression where the negative self talk is through the roof if they really can feel the anger that they weren't allowed to feel as kids that all went inwards towards themselves that depression starts subsiding so oftentimes the emotional those little emotions that we're living with every day that aren't Joy is because an emotion is stuck because that there's an emotion that wasn't welcome and so Joy can't hang out there when all the emotions are welcome if we can go back and feel those feelings that we're not allowed to be felt and we can welcome them that thus like the welcoming of Abandonment then the patterns change and then we can feel the joy and that Joy can be scary it I have not seen one person when that Joy first [ __ ] shows up that it's not scary for them because it's just alien it's [ __ ] big man Joy is like it's just big like that you're like we know ourselves by our contrast we know ourselves by what we compare ourselves to and and joy like the comparison the contrast starts going away and so it's like oh you become like a a like a a speck of dust and a notion of Joy when it when it's really allow yeah it's a very unmar feeling yeah deep levels of Joy yeah it sounds great the the you know again people can use their intellect and rationality as I am right now to go sounds fantastic feel feelings yeah understood go back and and hear the thing but you know this what does it look like what does integrating emotions embracing them feeling feelings what what does the process of going from cerebral performative artist to actual fully integrated human look like yeah um so yeah so there's different levels depending on like where exactly it got stuck so if you are so we have a a tool called emotional inquiry which is basically like you think about your if you're like a little kid and you pick up a a um frog and you're like what the hell is going on here and you're like kind of really investigating it you're investigating your emotional experience with that same with that same um level of Wonder so it's just this guided audio that we have and we have a course in the decisions course because it's all about emotional understanding because that's what clarifies decision- making we ask people to do that once or twice a day the transformation is like where can people go if they want to pick up this course um well the course is called Art of accomplishment is the course I think we have a site for you called view. life modern WI slod wisdom but it'll be in the links I'll find it I'll get it off you and I'll put it in the link yeah yeah yeah um but it's called the Great decisions course um but but that emotional inquiry thing we have for free you can you can there's we have a podcast where you can look it and it tells you how to use it and then you can go and download it so that's all free and but the but with emotional so emotional inquiry is one way to do it expression is really really good and very critical to actually express your emotions so for instance when people think about expressing anger it's such a weird thing they're so scared of it that whenever we're scared we think about things in a binary way it's like this way or that way so they're so scared of anger typically it's like I'm either gonna hold my anger back or I'm gonna get angry at somebody and they never think oh I can just get angry and not at anybody I can just like move my anger and not not get angry at anybody and not do it at somebody meaning that they're you're getting angry at somebody but they're not in the room they're not feeling it they don't have to know about it and so so you can actually just Express ex the emotions that you have and if you can't figure out how to express them then you can fake it till you make it it's a very slow way to do it we have things in our courses that take you through it but that we can't get for free because it's just we want to make sure we're monitoring people as they go through it um so that's another thing that it looks like the other thing that it looks like is there's this thing that happens where you're T you're gut tightens you're like and I don't want to feel that and you push it away so my example of this is like we got kicked out of a house at some point when our second was very young and and every time I drove by the house which I had to do on a weekly basis I would feel like this punch in my gut like and I was like oh so I started driving by the house and I'd sit there and I'd just feel the [ __ ] out of that feeling like what is that what's going on and so there's that other thing when you feel that thing our immediate movement is like oh let's let me move away from that it's like no let's attend to that let's actually feel what that is just talk talk to me I think that's a really lovely cue um that that people can probably quite quickly pick up on just take me through that step by step that someone has just like the echo of a a sensation that that continues to come up when when they see a person or whatever a situation that they're in just walk me through you feel that tension in your what are you looking for in the body in the mind what what fantastic so everybody will do it a little differently like I was so cerebral when I started doing this I noticed the mental reactions to fear before I actually knew what it felt like in the body but there's some great research that actually shows like through heat maps that there's very similar physical experiences we have with different emotions um generally the way that I think about it is or the way that I I I talk about it is is that emotions are held in the muscles so if I look at somebody I can tell you pretty quickly and it's like when I'm Co people people go how do you do that it's because just by looking at somebody's face or whatever I can tell what emotions are being held so like oh that's the critical parent hunch or that's the repressed anger line in the eye or whatever it is you know so you can see how people are holding their emotional experience so it's all held in the muscles so there's a physical Sensation that comes along with an emotional experience and the job is to get really curious about it why am I avoiding that so like if you're lifting weights and you feel that burn bur and you try to avoid it you're not going to lift weights for as long as if you're like o how do I like really get into that burn it's the exact same experience so you you get that cook and you go okay what is how big is that how round is how thick is that how dense is it how is it moving like what's going on here and so you just put your attention on the sematic experience of of the emotion that's happening so that's like the most basic that's like the most basic way to start getting into it at some point the expression is really necessary because you can't unhold the emotion that like the the musculature holding can't happen until unhappen until you've actually done some expression so we do this like weeklong Workshop it's like it's it's off record it's very hard to get it we only do like 36 people a year and it's in groups of 12 and the and like they call it like they people feel like had a facelift they literally you can take shots before and after and their face looks different because the emotional holding has changed and so I only coach people who have been through that experience because when they've been through that experience I don't have to justify emotional awareness they know it they know the benefits of it they've seen the other side of it and so so that that's another thing but expression is really important at some point and if you're expressing fear really important to have that with loving attention to not do that alone when you talk about expressing what you mean so anger expresses usually with like a lot of yell anger moving particularly of the chest the um so it's you know like it's because it's closed the a held anger is held in shame and so the opening of the chest is a really important part of the expression of it similarly um fear is done with shaking so if you look at a deer that just has been captured by a mountain lion and then escapes they do this like shake off thing you can notice that like horses are kind of doing it dogs are kind of doing it consistently like they're getting that like lowlevel anxiety off of their system on a regular basis so shrieking and shaking is a big part of the of the fear release process sadness and grief different sadnesses tears with a lot of gut shaking but the but grief is can like usually flows from all three if you're like in a full grief reliefs I was in this funeral for instance with my friend who had passed and everybody was like sad and sad and sad and you could just feel like the energy was not it was stagnant it was like he wasn't actually fully being grieved and I was like I'm [ __ ] pissed and I got really angry and then other people got angry and then like you could see so much move so much of the grief moved and if you look at those kind of indigenous grief rituals anger is often a part of it you know it's not just sobbing it's like H it's like hitting the wall it's there's like a there's another part of it so grief is like some sadness with some fear and some and some anger but this is expressing it it doesn't necessarily need to be to a person if you're angry does it need to be to the person that you're angry at no no definitely not I would I I highly recommend not angry at somebody else's an emotional abuse it's like it's it's it's saying I'm going to try to control you with my anger it's horrible um unless you have permission so there would be moments like with Taran I I'm like I really would like to express some anger you know and she'll give me permission or not but the but like with the kids as an example with the kids so I'm making my Sunday pancakes the kids are you know knowing oh this is the time when Dad is like most focused and D so we're going to ask him like 20 questions and getting a fight you know like the whole thing and I'm like H and it's like perfect timing and I stop everything I jump up and down I'm like I'm angry I'm angry I'm angry I'm angry and my eight-year-old looks at me she goes that was some pretty good anger dad because she knew that I wasn't angry at her like I wasn't I was angry but I don't need to put it on her I can just move that anger and then get back to to being a good parent you know and and and she wasn't scared of it it wasn't like I was the 200 100 pound man who was like yelling at like a two foot tall kid or three foot tall kid or whatever how do you think about this sort of relationship between brain and emotions and body and sort of moving out of and and and between those is there a hierarchy is there an interplay is there a they're all part of the same system I I I make the distinction between head heart and gut in transformation just because it's a good way to figure out if you're holistically achieving it or not but I haven't found anything that makes it so that you're it's better to do one than the other first or anything like that what I notice is that [Music] um people who are more one way are going to start there like I was more head related you know I thought I everything in my head because of the emotional abuse I was high in my head and so that's where I started um and the people people like dancers who are like deeply in their body the sematic work is usually like the first thing that they're going to go to but they're going to believe their stories for a lot longer than I did so it's just like it's where your inclination is people playing to their strengths almost or the typically and it's where they get the lace bang for the buck but it's usually yeah as you said you're going from 100 to 101 as opposed to zero to one yeah exactly yeah exactly I think a lot of people will be familiar with meditation I guess probably everybody listening to this has tried it uh or maybe as an experienced meditator yeah talk to me about the difference between you know this is a new modality I think emotional work it's not even something that I'd really heard of until pretty recently and I'm deep in the personal development World um you know stuff like what you guys do art of accomplishment Hoffman process um and then we've got sort of all of the therapeutic talk therapy uh sort of psychodynamic stuff psychoanalysis and then we've got mindfulness what what's the difference between let's say mindfulness emotional work uh and therapy and stuff like that how do these piece together and how are they similar and different yeah so again like some most work kind of hits on all three levels the nervous system level the emotional level and the and the head level but they usually have one that's like a strength to the others and so one's going to emphasize one more than the other and so the emotional work that we do is unique but it's not the only thing we do but it's what we're known for often because it's the hardest thing to find in the world you know so but we're working on the mental and we're working on the on the nervous system as well and so I would say each one of those things has a strength in there but you even you say like um mindfulness like there's mindfulness that you know like if you look at like the terot and Buddhism out of Burma that's like going to be a very sematic experience of like it's like moving your attention from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet it's going to be very sematic oriented whereas other forms of mindfulness are not going to be as thematically you know and so you're looking for the tool that fits the job and that fits you and so that that's typically how you do it and so so for instance like when right now I'm doing the master class and so people will ask me questions and I'll assign experiments and one of the ways that I decide the experiment that I would assign to the person is like how headyy were they how emotionally aware were they in what they were doing and so that's you're just looking for that it's very hard to describe how to know which one except for if you know you're really hey go to the sematic if you know you know um the one that I think is actually more um is more is just starting to come in to the light is more of the nervous system stuff like how do you I I would say the best practice for nervous system is the gut is is pleasure it's knowing that you can find that pleasure or enjoyment anywhere at any time that it's just watching the sensations of your body move and that there's like can be a deep enjoyment and and that part I find is is like often times a place that will help people more than any other because they they're so disregulated most of their life that they can't actually settle enough to make the other work useful that's that's interesting do you consider it kind of a foundation that the other two sit on on top of just not no I don't I think they're all equally important I I think they're it's just for in in today's Compu in today's society it's one of like the onoff like have you turned the thing on and off I don't know have I like turn the thing like okay let's just relax the nervous system and then see see if all the rest of the tools will work um like that I've got Johnny Miller coming on the show at some point soon I know he's been on your guys's your guys' show yeah so that world of nervous system regulation sort of sematic work um sematic therapy something else one of my friends aon's doing at the moment um yeah it's a whole a whole new world um but if I'm looking at you it's deconstruction of the negative voice in the head it's finding a place where you can and you can cut this but um if I'm looking at you it's it's the deconstructing the voice in the head would be the intellectual work and the um and the uh nervous system work would be like having a feeling of deep pleasure just in the existence of being alive I would like really want to strengthen that muscle and then the emotional work is um release probably fear would be the place I would start you're a good judge of character let's go back to the the negative selft talk stuff because I think a critical harsh judging in a monologue is uh something that lots of people are all too familiar with what is there to know about that where does it come from typically comes because we learned that's how to talk to us but that we learned it from our our parents that's typically or not just parents but like caregivers teachers Etc I remember I did a a podcast on The Voice in the head and my daughter listened to it and she's like my voice in the head comes from this teacher and this grandmother and it's like so so I think that that and she was like nine or something at the time and 10 maybe and and so typically that's what we've learned some of the stuff we made up as a way to like we learned it to prevent a certain kind of experience emotional experience that we're having um but I think that the the the part that's most useful to know about it is that the you try to stop it it won't [ __ ] work like you can't you can't just be like I'm G to stop that you can kind of modify it that way what's important is how you react to it so if you come into my shop every day and I yell at you you're G to treat me one way and if you come into my shop every day and I'm like oh my God so good to see you you're going to treat me another way it's this it's any different with emotions and so or with the voice in the head excuse me and so so the voice in the head comes in and does its thing and if you react like okay you're right I should do that then you're gonna get one thing if you're like oh I I really see that you're scared and I'm right here with you you're G to get a different thing if you sing it a musical like you know or if you're like wow you're a shitty boss or like there's a thousand reactions and what typically what we're doing is we're trying to control the voice in the head rather than think about all the different way running experiments about how we re we react to it so there's a lot of flexibility to go this week I'm G to react to the voice in the head this way this week I'm G to react to the voice in the head this way this week I'm G to react to the voice in the head and running those experiments starts to teach you how you want to relate to it how it wants to be related to and and and you'll notice that like there is care in it like it does want you to succeed it does want you to like there's there's quite sweet it's just really incompetent misguided it's yeah and so it's like it's and so if you take it that way and you're like oh you have good intentions you just don't know how to do it let me work with you it's like a that's that it's going to show up differently in your life and then there is a point where just like most of it goes away like there's not a where there's not really repetitive negative selft talk wow so in your experience either with you or with your clients you've been able to get them to a stage where that drops off I think for very many people it's such a staple part of the texture of their daily mind experience that it that's like saying oh and what my heart would stop beating right yeah um so I would not say I get them to it but I would say that that happens that is an experience that happens for a lot of people in in and around the work for sure and um the way I look at it it's actually a natural stage of develop vment and that if you just take the things that have blocked development it'll happen naturally it's it's as natural as like a a a tree growing a branch that allows its leaves to be at the sun it's just it's an incredibly natural process and it just H it's just that so many people get stunted that it doesn't happen naturally I've kind of got this got it in my head about the this blending of ambition and peace that we've talked about where and this very typical trajectory that I see among a lot of my friends um high standards desire for high standards which leads to positing an ideal comparing myself to that ideal inevitably falling short fearing that if I don't reach the ideal that I'm not going to be accepted safe wanted loved validated by the world so critical self voice comes in which is the motivator that's the charioteer whipping you as you have a Bridal in your mouth and you try and run along and run faster faster faster but then there's a another stage which I certainly know intimately well and I think a bunch of my friends do too which is Shame about being critical to yourself yes yeah yeah yeah God how [ __ ] pitiful how how how stupid am I that I can't even have high standards without being critical and then thinking oh my God look at me I'm being critical about me being critical and it's just this infinite regress of sort of self self-castigation yeah yeah yeah that's what the I think the Zen talk talk about it like it's like asking it's like asking the asking the ego to get rid of the ego is like ask asking a thief to is like asking a thief to take care of your house it's never going to [ __ ] work and so it's a similar thing it's like the the negative selft talk starts becoming starts working on itself and it it just doesn't [ __ ] work and the antidote is is you know loving a attention I the amazing thing is aware just loving awareness can change so [ __ ] much like like just sit with next time you're on a on a on a plane flight and you're sitting there and somebody just ask them a question and give them loving attention and like you just like un [ __ ] amounts of transformation can happen in an hour I did that once and I literally like asked one question in an hour and just listened with loving attention and like here are my problems and then oh wait here are some solutions to the problem and oh I hadn't thought about it that way and they're like and they just needed someone to just like be there in loving attention same thing goes for ourselves Like Loving attention can like solve a lot of [ __ ] oftentimes I see people have this recognition in our work where they'll whatever they'll pop through something they'll be like oh my God and then the first thing they go is how do I keep it it's like that's the exact wrong question like how do I keep keep it is is is saying that I am scared that it's going to go away it's like and that like how is that going to help you instead of like oh I'm so grateful for this moment oh let me land it in my body let me really feel this what does this mean for my life let me absorb it let me digest it how am I going to keep it and it's and it and it's back to me driving the thing and you know where instead of just being in loving attention of the thing itself what else is there to say around shame um the emotional stagnation piece is really important um it is an emotion that stagnates like the the rest of the emotions is the way that I see it so and it's also it's also this is this gets on a t a touchy subject but you know you had that podcast on morality recently which kind of dovetails into it um so let's distinguish guilt and shame guilt being I've done something that I'm not proud of that doesn't feel right in my system and I don't want to do it again and shame is there's something [ __ ] wrong with me I'm like I'm I'm bad as a human being I'm broken there I'm flawed or something like that um shame when you feel like you're flawed then how do you fix yourself like it's like like the the there's it really slows the entire process down and then you're ashamed of all the emotional experiences or some of the emotional experiences that you have so you don't you can't let them move and therefore you can't get to Clarity and so it's a it's a shame is is that shame is on the mental level on the on the prefrontal cortex level it's negative selft talk on the um Heart level it's a stagnation of emotion on a gut level it's I'm not safe and you're basically if you're constantly being attacked in the head then your nervous system never feels safe you know you [ __ ] need to work harder does not make the the human body feels safe and therefore you're you're never in that place of renewal where you can actually rest and recover and therefore grow and feel nourished and transformed like you know with working out you need both the effort and the and the rest you don't work the same muscle group out every day because it doesn't work as well and so it's the same thing you need that rest um and so that's what's happening on the on the on the shame on shame it's the those three things and that's how hit in the different categories of the of the mind or however you want to call it yeah it's um it's very interesting that some of the people who have got the most admirable lives have the least admirable internal states that people who are unbelievably successful in sort of worldly ways uh there's if you were actually given the opportunity to trade and you knew the full price that you would have to pay in order to be them it's probably one that you wouldn't fot the bill for even if the benefit was a a billion dollar Fortune yeah it a and we and then we make a story that we need to be that neurotic and [ __ ] up to be successful because some successful people are that but it's I I I definitely know a lot of successful people who aren't like that so it's also there's a false narrative that that's a price you have to pay typically and and we and it's just like a great way for the voice in the head to justify itself how do you think about um the tension or the relationship between self-improvement and finding out who you are I I think the tension isn't there I think if you find out finding out who self-realization leads to to Evolution there's no like you can't not do that when you see when you see that the voice in the head is not you when you see the thing that you see for a second when you ask what's looking out behind my eyes like and and when you see that like there's like a lot of like a certain amount of fear is going to drop away which is going to help you evolve in a more quicker more enjoyable way as an example like there's no way like Sam Harris is like it's not like he has not improved and his like he's done all this self-awareness stuff I'm sure we could say how have all the ways your life gotten better and he could tell you what they are so I don't think there's a dichotomy I just think if it's like if I'm playing music and I focus on I want to really impress people and be great at music I am not going to make as much progress in my music as if I say I want to get lost in it or I want to be the best rapper or if I have something that's beyond like like I have a goal beyond the music right the best people the people who make the most most successful businesses aren't doing it because they want to make money they're doing it because they have a vision or they want to win or they want to be like they want to compete they have something that's beyond the money and the money is just a necessary aspect to the their particular form of art same thing if we want to be really successful at at understanding ourselves or having more peace or Joy or whatever the thing underneath self-improvement is you're going to get there quick not by saying how do I improve my I'm wrong and how do I improve myself you're going to get there quicker by how do I understand myself you're going to get there quicker by um how do I fall in love with myself those there's just just just better approaches you you can you can make some progress the other way don't get me wrong it's just it's just not as efficient and your definition of efficiency again is return on energy Joy during the process yeah it's interesting with the efficiency point the you know that eyes and how a matrix you probably come across this I I don't uh so it's a a way that um you can PRI you can look at tasks so you have things that are important not important urgent and not urgent yeah and it's a m a matrix that you can come up with and I as far as I can tell people are continually being pushed into the Urgent more and more and more which by Design pushes you away from the important that's not to say that urgent things can't also be important but that they tend to Urgent stuff tends to be urgent in and of itself and it's like uh important necessary but not sufficient in order to be able to get yourself through so do dopamine addiction is a huge part of that too it's like that crazy like I see people do this all the time it's like they want to press enter it so the email is done enter enter enter enter enter but everyone every email if you would have put a little more thought or consideration not delegated the thought or whatever it is you would have twice as few emails but you're so into the enter enter enter enter correct yeah that's interesting that we almost create our own urgent environment correct in that way it's the golden algorithm again and going back to I'm thinking a lot about this at the moment sort of going slower to go fast so I've had to put a ton of stuff on hold because the level of complexity that was happening kind of internally with the show and and and I've got this product that I'm trying to release and there's a live tour happening at the end of the year and there's a book happening next year and all of this stuff it's like look I can continue to spin all of these plates but the likelihood of one of them dropping and the pain that I go along the way okay so I needed to kick the book another year down the road paused a ton of stuff that I was working on and I was like I just want to really enjoy the show I really want to have fun when I have these conversations and I don't want to turn up having just been on five calls back to back and then this slack thing and then I get a couple of emails in and then I'll read the guest's book and then I'll like go and I'll do the episode and then I'll get straight back out because I've got that call to do that like this is not this is not [ __ ] like it's not what I want to do so that's required everything to basically stop that isn't just show and now rebuild all of the operations from the ground floor up so that everything runs nice and smoothly and that's important it wasn't urgent it was never going to be urgent but eventually it would have been one of those things that some Fisher would have been cracked through and a huge [ __ ] explosion and I would have had a mental breakdown and I still May um and uh but yeah thinking an awful lot about trying to prioritize the important over the Urgent and it feels like the what you were talking about there this sort of um you can brute force your way through this you can grip really really tightly and should maybe you'll get some great outcomes but they're going to be less efficient in terms of return on energy and enjoyment they're going to be less effective and you're probably going to be way more miserable the whole wa and like what's the point like what are we doing this for we're doing this presumably to just be in an enjoyable emotional state the whole time in any case so the quicker route to doing all of those things is to just focus on the important stuff in any case yeah yeah and that's the that's the other cool thing about enjoyment is that if I so I do this thing in enjoyment called the five star meeting and so I ask all my Executives to to rank every one of their meetings one to Five Stars based on how much energy it gave them and then once they've done that for a the job is to make sure that you have a week in the next month or two where all of your meetings are festar meetings the two things that it does is one it it usually halfs the amount of meetings they have which is fascinating but the other things that it does is it shows them every single place that their company is having issues because that that's the symptom a bad meeting is the symptom of so just in so it's the same thing it's like oh you could see in the future and say oh this isn't going to be enjoyable this is that you know so what do I have to do and what you said was oh I have to make sure I've got a good foundation and so you're actually building the capacity for a bigger Longer term more sustainable success and and you don't you get that from enjoyment you get that from like oh was that an enjoyable how will I make this enjoyable for me is there an equivalent of uh the five star meeting experiment but for people's personal lives that's a great question I mean the 10% better I don't no I don't have one because it's like there's so the thing about a a company is that there's really only two things a company has they have the relationships in the company and they have the ideas that come from the company so the atomic structure is meetings and decision- making and it's those two things if you get those two things right your company's going to be fine but I don't know what that atomic structure would be for a personal life um that's a great question I definitely think about it thank you for that question it's great you've mentioned a couple of times s danced around the word of accomplishment I've always been interested in the title of art of accomplishment yeah is accomplishment an art yeah there's this great saying that's um the um that the peak of a businessman's career he's a poet and the peak of a poet's career he's a businessman have you ever heard that no I love that I don't know I don't know who to put that that was told to me by my friend Steve um I love that quote and so you can get things done in a lot of ways you can build a house in a lot of ways but if it if you do it in an artistic way there's just a lot of joy and pleasure the reason we titled it this way was because um I really I was really interested in in teaching self realization self-development whatever you want to call it um but I wanted it to be really applied because that was my journey like I was I sat for eight years in a room meditating and at some point I like had no money I'd like gone into debt I was like $40,000 in debt living in the [ __ ] hole in in Silver Lake Los Angeles and and I was like oh time to have a family and was married I'm like okay well I gotta and I knew that I would fail at whatever I did if I wasn't if it wasn't about self-discovery and so I became a venture capitalist and well did that for 15 years and I and I ran this philanthropic organization and and I needed to find how each of these things would help me become more self-aware the business was the was a a form of was a form of self self-discovery that I needed that and what I found out was that I mean the Tibetans call it skillful means but like what I found out is that like I sold better if the person I was selling to or I fundraised better if the two of us were like learning about ourselves in the process there was connection instead of perfection and if I had connection it worked better and I found out if I connected to people better there was like more better product that was created and I all of a sudden I learned that like all all these business tools if you use them as a form of self-discovery become better business tools and they also help you learn about yourself and so it was incredibly rewarding for me and so I wanted our organiz ization to to be practical I wanted it I wanted you to be able to walk away with tools that not only helped you understand yourself better but helped you build businesses that were going to be more successful and and create actually fulfillment instead of just a [ __ ] storm of bigger problems yeah I I really appreciate the fact that you guys get tactical with it um I think there's a big transition happening at the moment with online content I think we're out of kind of the first wave of personal development information on the internet I think that maybe you could have said that sort of Tony Robbins and that kind of era late NS early sort of teens and then but the real big wave I think that hit a lot of people was more Jordan Peterson alander baton from the school of life it was that kind of wave that really sort of opened people's eyes to oh my God this you know sort of valid philosophical insights out there which are um imbued with meaning and seem to be timeless and Evergreen you know like different people different perspectives or whatever but largely pick your favorite [ __ ] Wisdom dispenser of choice like they someone said something over the last 10 years that's gone like oh my God that's how I see myself in the world and that's great but there's definitely been because lots of this stuff can sound fantastic but never actually get stress tested in the real world what it allows is for a lot of sort of fluffy aphorisms to to sweep through and a a cool Insight that doesn't Okay that that sounds great but like what does this grow any [ __ ] corn like show me what this does and how do I make it do it to me um so I think we are and this is happening in many many areas we're moving away from the MR beastify of YouTube I think this much more stripb approach when it comes to vlogging relatability authenticity um that that people are trying to to Really tap into is all a a huge re ution it's a it's a counter movement away from what we had before which was uh more polished it didn't feel quite as raw and it wasn't as spit and sis that you couldn't sort of grab it with your hands so the fact that you've got questions to ask yourself like that like you know how could this be 10% more enjoyable like what a lovely you know that's a tactical thing one of my favorite ones was um realizing that you never focus on the peripherals of your vision this is your inside of the ear you've given me the uh auditory equalent of this that you're looking at stuff the entire time but if you just take a tiny little second and realize I've got all of this Vision out here and immediately down regul by like 10 or 20% it's crazy how much that opens up and I was like [ __ ] like I love those practices and those those have been things they were the things that were the most meaningful and impactful to me when I first started doing this and I think that there's a huge gap I think what what you're doing this blending of you know like robust evidence-backed insights about human nature with a little bit of art but then just really getting straight into the Tactical stuff I think that's where things are moving I think that's what people want not platitudes yeah I think that the the one of the reasons it's effective especially with like the experimental philosophy that we go for is at some point in the development of a human it's really important to realize that you have a choice as an example I have a choice it gives me a sense of empowerment and agency at some point it's really important to realize I don't have a choice I I can't even decide what [ __ ] my next thought is I like it's all been a [ __ ] gift it's all been a GI that I can't even like I'm I wasn't in control of all of it and this is just an amazing gift for me one platitude is going to hit one person one platitude is going to hit another person but if you give them an experiment to run and you let them like discover that for themselves it's going to like land in their body they're going to see the thing it's G to it's going to be visceral and it's going to actually move them through anything else is just like it's like a short-term Epiphany it's it's kind of the the sugar of of like of selfawareness instead of the like oh i' like I put this in my body I've tried it nourishing meal exactly yeah but it's really good for like flipping through YouTube yeah well dude I mean you know I've I I I've contributed my fair share of watch hours to to that stuff but uh and I think that you know that is there's only so many different modalities that you can do that are really impactful and that you can do for free on your own with it like there's not an endless number of those but there are a lot of insights that spoken at the right time in the right way will hit with somebody that's different so you know I'm all for I'm all for a aphorism porn as as as much as it's needed but I'm you know I'm consciously making an myself to try and find tactical tactical things to rely on so we've gone through a few in in spirit of that we've gone through a bunch of um interesting questions today yeah what what are some things that people can go away with in terms of little questions that they can ask themselves we can recap some of the stuff that you've already said or anything that you think these are things I rely on an awful lot what should people what should people leave with yeah so just on the on the stuff that we've covered already um change the way you respond to the voice in your head do that experiment and change every week the way you respond to the voice in your head that would just actually respond to the voice in your head is a really good one um and how do I enjoy things 10% more and like the best way to do that is there's an app called Yap and you set a reminder I don't have any sound on my phone except for Yap and so when I run an experiment with myself I will set use that as a reminder and be like Oh and then I ask that question so it's really good if you find a concrete way to remind yourself of the question um other cool thing and then the other one that we did was um was just ask yourself who's looking out Behind These Eyes like on a regular basis like in the middle of conversation that's a really good one uh other experiments to run uh I literally have like a hundred uh one one of the ones that I find really effective is and um we have a like we do a workshop on this and we have a a a podcast so it's really easy to all free and um it's do a gratitude practice with a friend every day seven minutes so it's saying out loud what you're grateful for back and forth and um but do it from the feeling of gratitude you it that you have to feel the Gratitude and then speak from the Gratitude rather than I'm going to think of something I'm grateful for and say it so it's an emotional experience and you move it that way particularly if there's people who are like having struggles with money it's really effective to be grateful for all the physical stuff like all the materialistic stuff you have in the world the reason that this is such a great practice it one is usually we solve problems with what's wrong how do we fix it rather than what's right and how do I grow it what's right how do I grow it is is half of the solution set and so really really effective way of of approaching your life secondly it changes who you think you are so if I'm walking around constantly going I don't have enough of this I don't have enough of this I'm not I'm not working hard enough then I walk around with lack which is why there's like many billionaires that you and I have spoken to that are walking around going I still don't have enough because but if you can actually Define yourself as what like oh I I'm the person who has all this [ __ ] then you change the way that you approach the world and you change who you think you are is incredibly effective if you if you actually have the felt sense of it rather than just the words incredibly effective I have been pretty sort of open about doing a a lot of gratitude journaling uh maybe [ __ ] hell 12 12 six Monon gratitude journals filled in in some house in Newcastle somewhere but absolutely if I look back on that uh so much of bit is me just answering a question it's like okay I've got to get up and here's the thing and I've got to do it and what am I grateful for today I had a nice morning walk and I do the thing and it's like it's just another thing on the task to do as opposed to the actual goal which is to [ __ ] feel the gratitude exactly the goal was not to write a list of three a day for like [ __ ] six years like however many that is like a number of that wasn't the goal and if you do it with somebody else then you get the mirror neuron action of them feeling the Gratitude you feeling the Gratitude is just this uh important to do in person rather than over the film Zoom works really well okay but you want to see the person yeah you want to have the you want to have the shared emotional experience and you want to like vibe off of each other it's like the difference between playing tennis and playing against a wall it's just I'm going to guess that silence is okay if you're not going to just be able to spontaneously feel and come up with stuff like bing bing bing bing bing bing bing yeah silence is really important savoring the Gratitude is really important taking your time is really important and um and feeling the Gratitude before you speak those are all parts of the things we have we have a instructions on it that like I think you can find in our in our on our website instru for but that that's that's a really incredibly powerful one another one if you find yourself like just at the beginning of the emotional stage than just being able to label the emotions that you're having five times a day what's the emotional experience I'm having right now and checking in and just doing that process can be incredibly useful for folks um just being able to label and the the weird thing is that we've never had the same emotional experience twice meaning like it's always nuanced it's always different and so some people will not even be able to they can't identify how they feel they're like I don't know I feel fine I feel good that's thing so a trick to that is you can make the sound like how do you feel like that's actually the feeling a better representation of the feeling than I feel slightly disappointed with 10% you know whatever so um but to actually like make a sound or label the emotion that you're having like five 10 times a day is a great way to start the emotional awareness process just to like oh I this thing is controlling me at least I should be aware of what what is controlling me um so or it's it maybe control is not the right word but you know it's it's it's influencing me and I should know how it's influencing me so that's another great experience go go or go and stun next to a horse a little while exactly realize you have or a baby [ __ ] irrational desire for the horse to like you Joe dude let's let's bring this one into land I I really love your work I think that uh what you're doing is genuinely novel and I'm so glad that my friend Charlie introduced me to what it is that you guys do everyone's going to be interested to keep up to date with all of the stuff you've got going on where where should they go uh art of accomplishment. comom or view. lifeod wisdom one word will be a great way for them to find out what doing oh yeah and there's there's all sorts of just by the way we have a podcast on a whole we have like 100 episodes on different topics we have a [ __ ] ton of experiments you can access we have like we we're really trying to give a tremendous amount of free stuff out there because we want it to be accessed by everybody including five re free workshops one like on gratitude so there's all sorts of ways that you can participate for no money hell yeah well I'll uh I'm Keen to bring you back on to talk about your view framework and there's probably like a million other things that we need to talk about as well but for now dude I really appreciate you thank you so much what a pleasure thank you yeah thank you very much if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give them a watch