Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - How embracing emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (executive coach, Art of Accomplishment)

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Joe Hudson is one of the most sought-after executive coaches in Silicon Valley. He is the founder of Art of Accomplishment, a transformational coaching program that has helped tens of thousands of people, including many tech executives and founders from companies like Apple, OpenAI, and Google. His unique method of transformation comes from over 25 years of exploring neurological, psychological, and spiritual traditions, tested against real-world challenges. In our conversation, Joe shares:• Why the critical voice in your head is always wrong, and how to change your relationship with that voice• Why authenticity trumps self-improvement• The importance of embracing all of your emotions• How to create more enjoyable and effective meetings• The power of gratitude in transforming your life• Practical experiments for personal growth• Much more—Apply for Joe’s Connection Course:Thousands of students have taken Joe’s most popular experience, the Connection Course. Unlike most online courses, there is no reading, lectures, or written homework. It is a three-week experiential deep dive where you will apply your learnings to real-life problems—how to make your team more productive, communicate more effectively, and resolve conflicts with ease. Apply here and use the code LENNY for $300 off your enrollment: view.life/lenny.—Brought to you by:• BuildBetter—AI for product teams• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs• Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace—Find the transcript and references at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/embracing-your-emotions-joe-hudson—Where to find Joe Hudson:• X: https://x.com/FU_joehudson• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-hudson/• Website: https://www.artofaccomplishment.com/• Podcast: https://www.artofaccomplishment.com/podcast• Linktree: https://linktr.ee/theartofaccomplishment—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Joe’s background(02:31) The critical voice in your head(06:39) Changing your relationship with the critical voice(13:19) Understanding and embracing emotions(19:52) The importance of emotional fluidity(24:40) Questioning assumptions and self-perception(30:25) The consequences of avoiding emotions(36:57) Experimenting with self-improvement(39:42) Understanding efficiency and enjoyment(43:17) The power of enjoyment in daily tasks(45:03) Innate enjoyment vs. learned enjoyment(46:31) Authenticity vs. self-improvement(50:01) Embracing emotional experiences(55:49) How understanding your emotions helps you make better decisions(01:02:53) Creating effective teams and meetings(01:10:40) Gratitude practice for personal growth(01:15:36) Conclusion and final thoughts—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

A lot of the people in my circles may have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try to arrange a life that they enjoy and it doesn't fucking work. What is holding people back? It's the fact that they have emotions that they are not sitting, feeling, or expressing. Whatever emotion that you're trying to avoid, you are inviting into your life in exactly the way that you're trying to avoid it. What the hell? Why would, what is this? You have this really amazing insight. The voice in your head is often telling you bullshit. What most people try to do is they try to stop it and that doesn't.

work very well. I think the best way to work with the voice in the head is to pick an experiment every day and respond to the voice in the head in a new way every day. One of my favorite responses is, oh, I see that you're really scared. Don't worry. I'm right here with you. I got you. You're really big on helping people feel joy. It's like such an important tool for productivity. If you say, I'm going to figure out how to enjoy what I do 10% more and you succeed, you are 10% more efficient. Not only that, usually the quality is going to get a lot better too. Is there just like one thing you recommend that basically everyone try to experiment with. Yeah, it'll change your life dramatically, really quickly. Today, my guest is Joe Hudson. Joe is one of the most sought after executive

coaches amongst tech leaders and has worked with folks from OpenAI, SpaceX, Apple, and other world-class companies. Joe's unique approach to coaching draws from his spiritual, psychological, and neurological practices. And in his intimate courses that he runs a few times a year and in his podcast, he helps people create the life that they want with enjoyment and ease. In our conversation, Joe shares the two things that he finds most often keep people stuck in their life and in their job and how to work on getting these things unstuck. Why the critical voice in your head is always wrong, contradictory, and telling you bullshit, and how to build a different relationship with that voice, why falling in love with your

emotions is so important and so powerful, why you'd be better off focusing on what you want versus what you think you should do or think that you need to do, plus a bunch of amazing advice on how to make better decisions, help your team run more effectively, and why a seven-minute daily gratitude practice will change your life. This episode is basically for every single person, and will make your life and your work better. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.

It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Joe Hudson. Joe, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thanks. Good to be here. It's good to have you. I'm curious if there's any common themes that emerge often in terms of what is holding people back from success or just living the life that they want, especially ambitious tech people, which I know is a lot of the folks that you work with.

They're kind of like archetypes of like here's that they often come up most often and hold people back. A non-specific answer to that question would be. a critical voice in their head and like a, and a relationship with that critical voice that is not, not productive. So oftentimes a critical voice in the head says you need me to be productive, but it's usually a huge detriment to being able to really be successful. And even if you are successful with a really critical voice in your head,

you never get to enjoy it. You like, you might have the money, but then you're like, oh shit, I'm still miserable, you know, or I got the car, I got the house, I got the money, I got the successful career, and like, why am I unhappy all the time? So that would be, I would say, one of the biggest ones. Another really big one that in a large category, I would say is their relationship with emotions is all faucata. They are either trying to pretend they don't have them or compartmentalizing them or trying to manage them rather than harnessing them

and falling in love with them. So that would be another big place. This episode is brought to you by buildbetter.a.i. Back in 2020, when AI was just a toy, Build Better bet that it could cut down on product teams as operational BS. Fast forward to today, 23,000 product teams use purpose-built AI

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Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com. These are awesome. Okay, so the voice in your head, you have this really amazing insight that I heard on one of your podcast episodes. Yeah. That the voice in your head is often wrong, often contradictory, often telling you bullshit. And that your advice is to learn how to work very differently. with this voice in your head, which a lot of people just assume, oh, that's just like what it is. It's telling me, it's trying to help me. But it turns out it's not. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I would say every single time the voice in your head is wrong. So it's not the critical voice in your head. So to be specific, I'm talking about the voice in your head that is critical and repeats.

So, you know, there's the voice that says the same thing over and over. You got to work out more. You got to work out more. You got to work out more. Whatever that is. It's always wrong. And that doesn't mean there isn't truth to what it says, but it's incorrect. So as an example of this, like, you should work out more. You should work out more. You should work out more. Or you need me or you just sit around on the couch. There's a great example of one.

But if I was your boss and I was sitting right next to you and I was criticizing you every couple minutes, there's no way that you would say, wow, I really need you. I couldn't be productive without you. It's a bunch of crap. So, or you should work out, you should work out. Okay, so I see the truth that I'd be healthier if I work out. I get that. Should I?

Is it really a should? There's another question. What makes it not say, oh, hey, why don't you enjoy working out? How do we get you to enjoy working out? What's the, what would motivate you to work? It's not doing any of that. You should work out. You should work out.

So it's never an accurate thing that's happening inside of your head. Until you can see through that, it's hard to work with the voice in your head. You can do it, but until you see through it. The second part that I would say is that if you want to work with your voice in the head a new way, what most people try to do is they try to stop it. They try to control the voice in the head and that doesn't work very well. So instead, I say change the way that you relate to the negative voice in your head. So instead of being, okay, you stop doing that, stop doing that.

Say, oh, I see that you're really scared. and I'm right here with you. Or sing a musical to it. Or go, I don't believe you. As a matter of fact, I think the best way to work with the voice in the head is to pick an experiment every day and respond to the voice in the head in a new way every day, to have an experimental approach and say, oh, what's the relationship I want with this negative voice in my head?

Because right now, what it's typically doing for most people is that it says something and the person's like, yeah, or yeah, but I'm not going to do that so fuck. off or yeah, and yeah, that'll never work. You know, something like that is, it's kind of the response. And so what happens if you change the response to the voice in your head? And that gives you a crap ton of freedom. And it's the beginning of what can be a state where the negative voice in the head disappears, which is really, really quite lovely. Oh, wow. I love this so much because there's so much that comes from this thing in your head, just shooting you down or scaring you about stuff. But it's so hard. Like, I hear this.

but it's so hard. Next time I'm, I don't know, giving a big presentation. I'm going to hear like, oh, you're going to, some could go wrong. You could look really stupid or you could totally forget what you're saying. And it's like hard to really intellectualize. Okay, I don't have to listen to this. Is there anything more there of just like how to turn that around? Be like, just like shut up.

Yes, the shut up usually doesn't work. I mean, experiment with all of it. You know, to me, I would, my, one of my favorite responses is, oh, I see that you're really scared. Don't worry. I'm right here with you. I got you. Because part of the deal is that the voice in the head has assumed the position that it's like the boss, but it's really like a little kid having a temper tantrum. I mean, if you listen to, if you just like dictated everything it said, it sounds like usually like a five-year-old having a temper tantrum.

Or it sounds like the way your mom used to chastise you or the way your dad used to chastise you or whatever, or teacher. But it isn't, it's not logical. It's not thoughtful. it's not typically not thoughtful it's it's usually abusive and so it's a lot of fear so i i like it's one of my favorites one of my favorite ways to respond but i've tried to i mean gosh dozens of ways and there's a lot of like neat effective ways and and and i particularly think it's really good to set up a series of experiments rather than just take the one that i have because the experimental mindset means means you can never really fail so that typically somebody like worse with the voice in the head they fail and they go

oh, fuck it, because we have this part of our brain called the Homenula. And the Hemenula basically is the part of our brain that it's trying to teach us not to fail over and over again. So it's the thing that like when you go on a diet or you go to work out and then you don't do it one day and you say, ah, fuck it, I messed up. And then you don't try anymore or you don't try for a couple weeks or whatever that thing. That's basically what's happening in that part of the brain. So if you do it as an experimental thing, then you actually, you can't lose.

you're just learning about yourself. You're learning about the voice in your head. And the way I like thinking about that is people are like, I understand the problem, but I don't have a solution. And I'm always like, if you understood the problem, there would be no question about the solution. You can't, if you fully understand a problem, you know the solution. So all you have to do is really fully understand the voice in your head

through a series of experiments and the whole thing goes away. So the advice here is next time you're hearing something in your head that you don't think is going to be helpful to you, is try to respond to it in a different way. from what you've been doing. I would be even more subtle than that, which is I wouldn't really wouldn't care if you think it's helpful to you or not.

I would just experiment with different ways of interacting with it. And I wouldn't even do it as a goal of, okay, I want the voice in the head to be nicer to me. I would do it with the goal of just, hey, how do I learn? How do I understand this thing? It's like a far more productive. And self-development generally,

it's far more productive to learn, say, about the river valley by walking through it, putting your feet in the river, going down the river with a canoe, smelling the soil, looking at the plants than it is to, you know, say, okay, I am going to damn this river valley and try to, it's just not going to, you're not going to understand it the same way. You're going to make some mistakes. Amazing. the second bucket that you shared of what you find most often is kind of the root of what's holding people back is the way you described as your relationship with your emotions which i don't think a lot of people would think of it's the thing that's holding them back can you talk a bit more about what that looks like yeah great way to explain it so i'll for the logical folks so in 2012 or so there's a person who wrote a book called decart's error and in decart's error the whole idea is that i think therefore i am and this person's like yeah that's the error and And it's a neuroscientist who looked at people who had damage in the emotional center of their brain.

And they just basically ceased to be able to make decisions. So their IQ would stay the same, but it would take them half an hour to decide where to have lunch or decide what color to pen to use. It would take hours and hours to make simple decisions. So their IQ would stay high, but their entire life would completely fall apart. And what it tells us, and this is not exact. I'm paraphrasing for a podcast, but we make. decisions in the emotional center of our brain, we use logic to try to figure out how we're going to feel. So you can see this just by asking yourself the question, how many decisions have you

made to feel like a success or to not feel like a failure or to feel happier to not feel trapped or to, right? So there's these huge buckets of emotions that we are trying to feel and not feel and we're making decisions based on those. There's no such thing as a logical decision. You know, that idea is like, I'm just going to be logical and just make a logical decision. It doesn't. Neurologically, it's just untrue. So if you learn to fall in love with all of your emotions, then solution sets become available that you didn't have before. So if you are like, oh, I can't feel like a failure, well, then you're probably not going to take certain risks. And if you are, oh, I can't, I want to feel loved and I can't feel unliked by people, well, then you're not going to say your truth.

and then the world is going to not give you the things that are truthful to you, right? I go into my boss, I say my truth. I get fired. Okay, I get fired. But then probably my next boss, I say my truth. I'm going to find a location where my truth is and how I want to be in the world is going to be acceptable. But if I don't do that, if I'm constantly managing myself, then I'm not going to have that reality. And so it's really important just for the decision-making part, how important emotions are to be able to fall in love with each of the emotional experiences, so you're not making decisions based on your inability to feel stuff. That's like one.

There's literally a thousand others. Most people, they feel stuck. They can have a big emotional release and they don't feel stuck anymore. When people feel overwhelmed, it's usually not the amount of crap that they have going on in their life. It's the fact that they have emotions that they are not sitting, feeling, or expressing. That's another huge chunk of stuff. Depression is usually unmoved anger is another example. So there's so many levels in which people not able to feel really limits their life.

Just one that's like almost everybody can relate to is feeling excitement is something that most people can only do for about 10 to 20 seconds. Most people aren't like, oh, like I'm excited. Like if you walked into a Denny's and there was this person, they're a 60 year old man and just excited and was excited for like 10 minutes, you'd be like, what the, what? like what's wrong with this person, right? But when we're excited, it's contagious. You know, I walk into a meeting and I'm excited.

Probably other people are going to walk out excited. And so we're limiting just our ability to create collaboration by the fact that we're limited by our excitement. And I could go on forever. So there's so many experiences like this. So what I'm hearing is the core issues, we're not able to feel our emotion, but there's something there, like we are angry or scared. And because we can't feel it, we just can't break through that.

Yeah, not quite. So if you have somebody who's experienced a lot of emotional abuse in their life, then they might not be able to feel the emotions that they're having. And particularly where you experience the emotional abuse. So that might be the case for them. So for instance, if you had physical abuse and I put a quarter in one of your hands and a key in another one of your hands without telling you which was which, you wouldn't be able to tell me if you'd suffered enough physical abuse.

abuse because you've literally cut that sensation off, right? And so similarly, people who've experienced emotional abuse can often not tell what the emotions are. Now, emotional abuse is, it's a big word. Generally, people don't even like equating the two. But for just to agree on terms here, when I say emotional abuse, I mean you were told that you weren't allowed to have a certain emotion. That's what I mean by emotional abuse. So maybe you got fed every time you got angrier, you got your love removed or you got punished or maybe every time you cried you were made fun of. That, you know, my particular background was that. And so it's when you weren't allowed to feel certain emotions, you were told to cut it off because it wasn't going to be

safe because you were either going to get bribed out of it or punished out of it or loved removed because of it or made fun of or whatever it is. So that might be that. But the place, so that might be a step that one has to take, but the place you want to get to is where the emotions are fluid, where it just moves right through you. It doesn't mean that you lose control. As a matter of fact, losing control means that there's still resistance in it. So the way I think about this is that emotions are like a tube, let's say, and there's water moving through the tube. And you kink a tube one way, the water comes out a little funny. Kink the tube the other way, it comes out a little funny. So let's say you have anger and that's the tube. And you crank it one.

way and it's like, you son of a bitch, you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can't get another way and it's like, nice dress. You know, you crank it another way and it's guilt. It's like, why would you ever do that to me? And then if it's unkinked, then it's like Gandhi or Martin Luther King. It's like this very loving boundary that's said. It's this clarity of purpose. So that's how I think about it. So the idea is to get the fluidity, to unkink the hose so that all of the, the, the emotional experiences come out with with love. I did a meditation retreat, a 10-day silent meditation retreat, which I know is a big part of your practice

and something that led to the work you do now. Yeah. A term that's coming up for me is non-judgmental awareness, basically experiencing the thing you're feeling and just letting it go, not attaching to it, not judging it. Is that kind of along the lines of stuff you'd recommend? Yeah, it's definitely a huge part of it. There's a couple things that I noticed get in the way

or the translation gets in the way there. One is it's like, think about emotions as like kids in your house. And if like a kid came into your house and you're like, I will be non-judgmentally aware of you, you're probably going to get a very different response from the kid than if you're like, oh, I'm so excited to see you. Like I welcome you in my house. And the emotions feel different if you're like, I am non-judgmentally aware of this emotion. Or, oh, cool.

like, oh, cool, I'm sad. This is fantastic. If you have that welcoming invitation. And one of the things that I, one of the quotes that I'm most famous for is joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome. And so like a very joyful life is a life where all the other emotions are deeply welcomed, not accepted, not not judgmentally aware of.

And I think those are really great steps. don't get me wrong. Like if you can be a non-judgmental awareness of an emotion, fantastic. The other thing that's a little bit different about what you said is that emotions do need to be felt. Like they, if you stop feeling an emotion, you have to constrict your muscles. So I can watch somebody come in, come up for one of my coaching, rapid coaching sessions. And by the crease in their eyebrow, I can know that there's repressed anger. By the hunch in their shoulders, I can tell you about the critical parent that they had. So the body takes on a shape that's based on the emotions that you've been taught to hold.

And so you don't just by sitting there, well, it's not entirely true. If you just sit there and feel them in that way without the full expression, they will move eventually, but it might take a couple decades. But if you can actually just move them. You can actually make the sound, move your body. All mammals do it. you know, like mammals releasing fear, they all shake. It's part of how we exist. And so that's also a really big part of emotional fluidity. It's not just being still and feeling them.

It's letting the muscles move, making the sounds. For someone that wants to get better at the skill of feeling emotions, being more in touch with emotions helping their emotions be more fluid. I know this is like a lifelong practice and not something we just hear on a podcast, okay, I'm just all of this. Is there anything tactically you can recommend to a listener of just like, Here's something you could do this week that'll help you along these lines. We have a free audio on our website called Emotional Inquiry, and that would be the easiest way that I would. That's a really good entry level first step into emotional fluidity. But the bigger problem is that every step has a different thing.

So if you're in the not aware of emotions, then that step may not be the right step for you. though if you are aware two or three emotions and you can do emotional inquiry usually it'll open up a lot of the other ones there might be a point where you really need expression and so emotional inquiry is not going to work but just generally the emotional inquiry practice is a really good one and what it is is like imagine you're a little kid and you pick up a toad right you're going to pick it up you're going to look at it you're going to feel it you're going to smell it you some little kids are even going to like lick it a little bit like they're going to like really want to explore this toad and that's what emotional inquiry is is a somatic mental experiencing of an emotional experience in your body and

what is it like and what happens when you welcome it what happens when you love it what happens when you resist it so it's a series of experiments that you're playing with the emotion and and and observations and felt sense of the emotion and and that i find to be incredibly incredibly useful. Just getting very curious. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of wonder.

By the way, the quote you shared about joy being the matriarchy of all the other emotions. I imagine people have said this, but inside out too, I think is exactly a representation of what you're talking about. Where Joy is actually, she's like the protagonist almost. Ah. I don't see that. Oh, you mean, yeah, I think I've heard about this. I haven't watched it. But I think where you think it's all about being happy and you find out that you have to accept everything for happiness.

to really work kind of. Exactly. Yeah. anxiety starts to take over and then things don't go well. Yeah. Something else that I've noticed listening to a bunch of your conversations, you do these kind of like lightning round coaching sessions with people and say listen to a bunch of them. And something that was really interesting to me is that a lot of people come to you and they're like, hey, I have this problem. I'm not doing, I can't do this hard thing I know I need to do. Or I have imposter syndrome and I just keeping me from doing the thing I need to do. And you're often like, no, that's not actually what's going on here.

can see that's not a problem for you. It's really this other thing. Is that super common where people think they need to work on this one thing and it turns out that's not at all. They're actually okay at that and something totally else. I would maybe put it a little bit differently. They're living in a story that describes an old version of themselves and it doesn't or they don't see themselves clearly enough to be able to see the whole issue. And so they're just kind of living with a story that's in the past. So that's a really common thing. So oftentimes if I do that in a coaching session. Typically, it's because they're showing me right there that it's not true. You know, so somebody's like, I'm so scared, I can't do anything. I'm like, you just got in front of a hundred people to ask me a

question. Clearly, you're not so scared that you can't do anything. So I'm not buying it. I don't do it quite like that. I do it with a lot more love than that. But yeah, so oftentimes I see that people's stories are a culprit, like how they describe themselves. And a great way that you can really see. this in folks is that nine out of ten times that you compliment somebody, I really appreciate this thing about you. They're going to go, ah, now, or my, well, my sister is even more or like that, you know, if you knew me, they're going to do some sort of version like that. And it basically is one of the indicators that they can't actually feel who they are. They would rather, in effect, call you a liar, oh, you're lying to me or you're wrong, than they would to actually accept

the experience of being seen in that way. And it does a couple things. One of the things it does is it stops people from seeing themselves clearly. The other thing it does is it makes people forever want to be seen and complimented and acknowledged and validated because they're never, they're getting the food, but they can't digest it. Do you have any advice other than working with you and you telling them, hey, here's what's actually going on for someone to like, okay, maybe revisit. Maybe this is an actually problem to see what's actually going on. So we have a set of five kind of what we think are foundational tools for transformation. And we do these free workshops on them. And one of them is question the assumption.

And that's a really great way to have people start to see through their stories. So at the beginning, I said nothing the critical voice in your head says is true. And this is how it applies. So typically there's an assumption that you have to make for the problem to be real. You know, if somebody says to you, for instance, if somebody comes to me and says, I am an asshole to my girlfriend. Like, that's their problem, right? So one, you have to assume that the girlfriend doesn't want you to be an asshole as an example.

Two, you have to assume that you know what being an asshole actually is, right? It's not just what your mom told you an asshole was. Like, you know, three, there's some validation. This is another assumption. There's some clear thing that says this in the world. Everyone's like, that's an asshole and that's not, rather than what actually happens in the world, which is 50% of the people think that this person's an asshole and 50% think they're a hero, right?

It's something like that. Also, that it's another assumption there is that the problem is that you're an asshole instead of that you're resisting the fact that you are an asshole and therefore it comes out sideways instead of really clear. So there's so many assumptions in there. If you see through those assumptions, usually the problem starts fading away. It's like, oh, okay, what's what's, what do I mean by asshole exactly? How do I define that? And I, the reason I, it seems like a silly thing, right, when I'm using this example of asshole. But I remember this moment in my own development, I was, I was in Bedega Bay out of all places.

And I'm a very good friend of mine at the time was like, Joe, you're an asshole. And I was like, no, I'm not. And he's, why resist it? Just fall in love with the fact that you're an asshole. I mean, just allow yourself to be an asshole for just a minute, just one minute. And I stopped and I could like stop. And I thought of like, I was doing venture capital at the time. And I could think of all the things that I had done that somebody would call an

asshole. and all the ways in which I was unattuned to people and I could, oh, yeah, okay, I can totally see that I'm an asshole. And in that scene, and in that, not only in the scene of it, but as the shame fell away, this is nothing I have to defend. This isn't something that, like, I'm a bad person because of, I don't need to be ashamed of it. This is just some actions that I took. And as that faded away, then and then over the next couple weeks, lo and behold, I became, became less an asshole. So it's a strange thing when you really grok that, that it's often shame

that holds bad habits in place. And so is the problem that I'm an asshole or is the problem that I'm ashamed of being an asshole? Is the problem that you're a smoker? Is the problem that you're ashamed of being a smoker? And so typically, like there's so many assumptions built into everything that we call a problem. And if we look through those assumptions, the problems disappear as in this case it disappeared for me. Wow. Okay. There's a lot there. It connects to something I know you recently talked about, which is the emotion we want to avoid is the thing we end up experiencing a lot by trying to avoid it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's going on there? Okay. Yeah, so I, let's take a, since I'm

at coach executives, let's do an executive example. So conflict avoidant executive. I don't want to feel the out of controlness that I do when people argue. So I don't want to feel that level of out of control. So I am going to be conflict avoidant. I'm going to avoid conflict. Every way that we go to avoid a feeling becomes the way that that feeling gets invited towards us. So we all know what it's like to work for a conflict avoidant CEO or boss. People get really fucking upset. Eventually people get really upset. Decisions aren't being made.

There's all this tension. It's never relieved. We never get. And then, wow, sure enough, the conflict avoidant CEO is dealing with a whole organization that's tense and they feel completely out of control in the fact that they can't do anything about. So that's an example. Or when I was when I was younger.

you know, it was emotional abandonment. My dad was an alcoholic and I didn't want to feel that emotional abandonment again. And so I would get really hard when I felt like people were leaving me. I'd be like, what the, which of course made them abandon me quicker. Or I would try to caretake people, which would build resentment, which would make people abandon me. So whatever emotion that you're trying to avoid, you are inviting into your life in exactly the way that you're trying to avoid it. What the hell? Why would it? Why does this happen? Yeah, that doesn't sound right. It just doesn't counterproductive.

It is counterproductive. But I think the really cool thing about it is you can look at any issue that you're having in your life. So you can say, oh, like one of the problems that I have in my life is that I am constantly in an argument with my girlfriend or boyfriend, let's say. Okay, so you're constantly in a, what is the thing that you don't want to feel in that argument? Oh, I don't want to feel ashamed. Okay, so you're getting in arguments because you don't want to feel ashamed and that's making you feel more ashamed. And, okay, so what am I doing at that first time to not feel ashamed? Oh, I'm defending myself.

Oh, and me defending myself is actually the thing that's starting the fight. So you can backward engineer it to, oh, I don't want to feel ashamed. Therefore, I'm going to defend myself, which creates the fight, which makes me feel more ashamed. So any problem that you're having, you can actually backwards engineer it and see, oh, I don't I can solve that problem by just being okay with that feeling. God damn, you didn't take out the trash. Oh, that's the shame I don't want to feel. I'm not going to defend myself.

I'm going to feel that shame. Oh, yeah. Then maybe I'm going to say, I'm sorry. I didn't take out the trash or I'm going to say, I don't feel ashamed. I don't want to take out the trash. But I have to defend myself to get in the fight. And then I'm going to feel ashamed. So you can reverse engineer all your problems.

this way. It's like it's such a cool hack, but it, you know, it's very hard for some, for somehow another. It's very simple, but very hard for people to utilize. This is amazing. So the advice is basically feel the thing and just kind of come to terms with this is the emotion I'm feeling. And maybe this, like an example, the asshole. Maybe I'm an asshole and just. Yeah, it's to, what's required for you to love and accept yourself would be. And love and accept the, the emotion that you're having in the moment instead of resist it. You know, there's that saying what we resist persists. It's how do you how do you fall in love with and stop resisting the reality on the ground? And in doing so, it changes the reality on the ground. Okay, but in this argument with

your supposed girlfriend, say you disagree about her perspective on what's going on. I guess that's not the root issue here. It's like it's your feeling. Right. Well, oh yeah. Hey sweetheart, I really hear you want me to take out the trash. And I, you know, that's not my truth. That's going to be very different than, you know, defending that shame. The defending the shame is going to be like, wow, you know, no, it's not my job to take out the trap. You're the thing, you're trying not to feel the experience, which is what's going to do it. So it doesn't really, the response isn't the important thing. It's, it's really where the response comes from. It's so interesting because people are constantly, this is something we teach in our, in our, um, the connection course is that it's really

not about the conversation. It's about where you're at in the conversation. So for instance, when my friend said to me, hey, you're a dick. Here's what he didn't do. He's like, you didn't go, you're a dick. You asshole. Like you're being an asshole. You're being a dick. Fucking stop it. He was like, yeah, you're a dick. So what? What's the problem? He was, he was coming from a place of love for me. And so I could not be defended in my response to him. And so it's really where you come from. It's the emotionally where you come from. That's the important part, not as much what you say. And you can see this. A perfect example of this is this happens all the time in my work. So let's say there's a person who has a CEO and the person is scared of their CEO.

Let's say this is the CMO in there. I'm scared of the CEO. I can't say my truth. They're always getting upset. they're going to yell blah blah blah blah blah blah and i'll and i'll say yeah there's one person who says it though right the answer is always yes there's you that person has that CEO has one person who they don't yell at who they listen to who they who they'll they'll they'll take the objection from that they don't get angry with it's because there's somebody who doesn't approach them in fear it's because somebody approaches them a different way not with judgment but like hey look this is what we have to pay attention to. And so it's really about how you're coming at it and not what you're saying typically.

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Test it. Experiment. Set up an experiment. Try it out. See if it's true for you. It's one, you know, I just made this shit up. Somebody else could make up something different. It's like, like, you know, Jeff Bezos made up Amazon. We make stuff up, but we're humans. But two is if you instead of just listen to it as a sound bite, if you actually do it and make an experiment out of it, you get to learn, like it's in your bones. You get to see what's actually real for you. And what's real for you in this moment might not be real for you what's in the next moment. So for instance, like I could give the advice that says, hey, every, you can't even control your thoughts. You can't even, you can't even decide what thought you are going to have next is.

It's just going to fucking happen. So you're completely out of control. And so it's all a gift. Can you look at life as all a gift? And that would go, wow, that could be really useful for one person. But the other person, they feel so disempowered that they're like, I can't even control my own thoughts, man. I am totally trapped. And they might really need at that moment to learn that, oh, I have empowerment. I have choice. And that's what they, that's the advice that they need to hear. And so like, do the experiment. Find out what's true for you in this moment. That, that's my, if there's a piece of advice, that's the one I want to give. Okay, so let's share more experiments.

People can run. Another is this thread that I feel comes up a lot in your work is you're just really big on helping people feel joy. It feels like that's the core of what you're trying to help people is feel more joy. Why is that so important? Why is joy so important, so powerful? So I definitely would not want anyone to feel joy. Like I wouldn't want to push somebody into or like, hey, you should feel joy.

But what I would say that's like a close cousin to that is that enjoyment is like such an important tool for productivity. Enjoyment is such a important tool for living a meaningful life. So enjoyment is like an amazing tool. So as an example, let's say you drive a Ferrari. You're not going to say, hey, that's an efficient car. that's a that that's a super efficient car you're going to say no that's a that's a fast car but somehow in our own lives if we get something done quickly we're efficient but that's not efficient you can go

and get something done quickly and then you're so exhausted what's efficient is if at the end of whatever you did you feel like you have more energy like you're stoked like oh I can't wait to do this again tomorrow that that's efficiency is that you've actually used the least amount of energy to get something done. So if you say, oh, I'm going to figure out how to enjoy what I do 10% more than you and you succeed, you are 10% more efficient. Not only that, usually the quality is going to get a lot better too. If you enjoy running, you're probably going to run more than if you don't enjoy running. If you enjoy doing a podcast, you're probably going to make a better podcast and you're going to do it for longer if you enjoy doing it. So that, so there's,

something really, really important about enjoyment because it's not only a measure of efficiency, it also has a strong correlation with higher, in most things has a strong correlation with how long you're going to do it, your stain power, the quality of what you're going to do, all of that. So that's one of the reasons that I think enjoyment is really great. The other thing is that if you enjoy things, they feel different. And it doesn't require that, I think one of the things that people do is that, they say this, they say, I want to enjoy my life more. So I'm going to do less things like take out the trash and I'm going to do more things like go on vacation.

But that's not how enjoyment works. And you can enjoy taking out the trash or you can hate taking out the trash. That's a choice. And right now, somebody listening to this as an experiment that they can run is like, okay, you're going to stay listening to this for the next minute. How do you enjoy it 10% more? And typically what will happen is somebody will take a deeper breath. They'll settle into their body a little bit more.

They'll relax a little bit more. They might physically get more comfortable. There's a thousand things that they might do to just enjoy the experience 10% more. And in that, they're becoming more efficient. In that, the quality is getting better. In that, they're hearing what I'm saying differently. And so that it's just a really powerful tool. what I know the problem to be is that some people will go, okay, now I have to enjoy life.

I'm going to like disregard all these negative emotions so that I'm in enjoyment. And that doesn't work. It's horrendous. You know, it's just it's just a recipe for shit stew. Along these lines, how much of the work is learning to enjoy the thing you're doing more versus finding something that you innately enjoy? Which one's more powerful, I guess, which do you point people to, which experiments do you find people should run more. In our society, typically it's how to enjoy what you're doing more. What happens typically is that if you find a way to enjoy the thing that you're doing more,

you're more likely to do the things that you enjoy. So it's just like it's just a order of operations thing. As compared to, there's people, you know, a lot of the people in my circles because of who I coach and everything. They're billionaires. And they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try to arrange life that they enjoy. And it doesn't fucking work. So they actually have more power to make everything that they're doing exactly what they want to do. But that doesn't work.

It doesn't, you know, flying the jet or buying the island or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, doesn't do it. So whereas if you really learn to enjoy. what's in front of you, all of a sudden, one thing that happens is that you're not as scared of enjoyment. Like, you start saying, oh, wow, enjoyment makes me really effective. And so I'm one to do the things that I enjoy. And so you're more likely to do the things that you enjoy. Instead of having this story, I have to do X, Y, and Z so that at one point in the future, I can do what I enjoy. And so that it's just an order of operations things. If you learn to do the thing you enjoy,

if you learn to enjoy the things that you're doing, you're going to naturally start doing the things you enjoy. If you only do the things you enjoy, you will not learn how to enjoy what you're doing very well. So you show this tip of how can I enjoy this 10% more? Just like ask yourself, how can I enjoy this 10% more? Is there anything else that you find helpful for helping? Oh, yeah, right now. How can I enjoy this time? So it's not about changing anything in the, in the external world. Got it. Like internally, what can I do? What can I change about the way I'm experiencing this? Yeah. Just or I like to ask, is how do you enjoy a 10% more?

Because if it's what can I change, then there's trying. Trying is usually not more enjoyment. It's actually usually letting go of trying that creates more enjoyment. So the phrasing can really make or break the question. I enjoy 10% more. So say someone's sitting in a boring meeting that's like really suck in their soul, they should ask themselves this question. How can I enjoy this 10% more?

Yeah, should. They can. They get to. It's a great experiment. It's an experiment. Okay, perfect. Yeah, the reason I do the should thing is that as soon as you say you should and then you don't, then you can fail.

And if you fail, then you're less likely to try it again. That's why the should just, it ends up usually in stagnation. Should like if you, if you like think about the way it feels in your body and when you say, I should do something, there's like a stagnation. There's a, whereas if you say something like, oh, I want to do it. or here's an experiment I can do or here's what I enjoy, there's less stagnation, there's more movement. This touches on something else that you talk a lot about.

We've kind of been circling around this idea of authenticity versus improvement, where you help people realize that you are good as you are. You don't need to necessarily improve. We've talked a lot about these sorts of things already, but just what else can you share there, just how to help people learn this? Yeah, I mean, my favorite metaphor on this one is like at what time and the journey of an oak tree is it perfect is it like when it's an acorn when it's a sprout when it's 20 years old 40 years old 150 years old 200 years old depending on the oak tree like when now I'm perfect is the idea is ridiculous

so it's a similar thing for us so the idea that I need to improve myself it it really disturbs the natural process that's at hand which is we evolve. We as human beings evolve. And if it's like, oh, I'm evolving and I can enjoy it and I'm acting from my authenticity, then that's a very, that has a lot of alacrity. That moves quick.

If it's, I need to improve, there's something wrong with me. I need to improve. I should do it. That all goes really fucking slow, right? Because there's a lot of emotional stagnation in that. There's a lot of should, shame. There's a lot of stagnation in that. And so you don't actually get that natural flow of life.

And so the Taoist talk about this is kind of like a river always finds its way. It doesn't need, like it just always goes in that direction. And so that's, we are naturally evolving. Like that is our nature. And then to put a whole bunch of shoulds and shit in the way, just slows the process down. The other thing about authenticity that I think is really important to is that if you're success, if you are one of the few people, I'd say 10, 15% who can say, I should be this way, this way, and this way, and then you do it, which is very few people can actually do that.

What most people do is they say, I should do this, should do that, should do that, and then a decade later, they're still saying they should do the same things. But let's say you're one of those really successful people, then you have a life for not you. Then you have a life of who you think you should be, not for who you actually are. And so if you move from authenticity, naturally certain things aren't going to work, certain things are going to work. Certain things are going to work. Certain people are going to work. Certain jobs are going to work. But the ones that you end up with over time are going to be the ones that are right for you, not right for who you think you should be. Right. So if you, the most obvious of this is you meet a woman and you're like, oh, this is how I should be for them

to love me. And you're, you just do it. You just do everything that you think you should do to, and then you get married. And then they love, not you. They love who you think you should be. They love, they don't love who you are. And so what kind of marriage is? that. As opposed to, this is who I am and I'm going to be as genuine. I'm going to show you all my parts. I'm going to be as genuine as I can with you. Then if you do get married, you're married to the right person. You're married to the person who actually sees all that and loves that and wants that. How do you hold that idea with, I also want to get better. I want to, you know, develop myself. I want to feel my emotions more, those sorts of things. I love that I want to. The better part is

kind of just gets a little bit in the way. So right. Yeah, we all want to like a little kid wants to run faster. And they might want to be a better runner. But the part that they miss, the reason that they develop so fucking quickly is because they don't think they're going to be a better person if they run faster. It's the, it's the idea is like, yeah, you have this natural want. That want is the thing that moves evolution. Like a plant is like, oh, their son, I want to move in that direction as compared to like I should. Both of them are human concepts. But the want is like it's the thing that it's what allows us to know that's our evolutionary path. Oh, I have this want to be closer to people. Oh, I have this want for great sex.

Oh, I have this want for being able to have a business that supports me. These are great wants. And they kind of show where the growth is occurring or wants to occur. It's like that's our natural evolution. It's great. What makes it need to be better? What I want to be better? It just slows it down instead of it's like saying that what I am is broken and therefore the whole thing slows down. So we try to word everything as, you know, more in the experimental framework, but also we try to word everything as like self-awareness, self-experimentation, self-discovery instead of self-improvement. Because if you understand the problem, then the problem goes away. So just explore it, like just understand it as composed to making a list of things that you should do to get better that you will event. eventually fail and then you'll just be stuck in this should loop where you beat yourself up and

where most people hang out a lot. So the experiment here that I'm taking away is think more about your want versus the should and things you think you need. Yeah. Right? It's okay. Yeah. Because typically when you say I want to improve, it means the subtext in that is once I do X, Y and Z then I'm lovable. once I do X, Y, and Z, then I'm okay. Once I do X, Y, and Z I'll be worthy. Once I do X, Y, and Z, I'll be enlightened, whatever the fuck the thing is. But that's just not how it works. What works is the person who loves themselves has loving relationships.

It's not the person who's done X, Y, and Z so that they can be lovable, has loving relationships. The people who do X, Y, and Z so they can be lovable, have relationships where people are critical and constantly trying to get. telling them that they have to be better. Coming back, you just said this interesting quote that you also shared at the beginning this idea, once we understand the problem, it goes away. Yeah.

Let's make sure people understand what that means. Is it related to this idea once you feel like, I'm an asshole? Okay. And then like, oh, okay. And then it starts to kind of fade away. Is that the core? I just mean it practically. You know, it's like, can you really fully understand a problem if you don't

understand the solution to it? I don't, you're right? So if there's a principle and I can't remember the name of it, like it's Strickland principle or something, but it's something that you, that this CFO that I used to work with said. He would say like, problems get solved if you spend time on them. Like if you just give attention, enough attention to a problem, the problems will solve. Like that's, that's the way it works in business. An unsolvable problem, obviously, that's, it's not going to work that way. But the reason that that works is because the more you spend time on a problem, the more you understand it. And

And another one, like, love him or hate him, you know, one of the things that Elon Musk has said that I find, that I found very valuable in my time is that if you really want to interview somebody and they claim that they've done something, you ask them like kind of six levels down. So you improve sales. How did you do that exactly? While we improved the pipeline, okay, how did you do that exactly? Oh, well, we made the pipeline more measurable by having things that could be very, okay, yeah. And so how did you know what were the seven stages of the pipeline and what made you pick them?

You go six levels down and you can really understand if somebody was the person who solved the problem or if they're the person who is claiming that they solved the problem. So it's the same thing. It's the same thing. It's if we just explore a problem enough, the solution is apparent. if we understand the problem enough, the solution is a parent. And so typically, if we come to a problem with a kid's mind, wonder, if we come to it, like, what could I learn here? What's exciting?

What are the experiments I can run? Then typically, that's the most efficient way, enjoyable way to solve a problem as compared to, I have to get to this problem by this time and we're going to do it this way and do, like, usually that doesn't work. And, you know, I could geek out on why that lets democracies win over autocracies because they're far more experimental by nature and it's not one person saying how things are going. But it's just generally that just we're more efficient when we're exploring. And so we're more efficient when we're exploring ourselves and understanding ourselves and trying

to improve ourselves. There's a couple more experiments I want to help people try to run. One is you have some really good advice around. on decision making and how emotions and getting better at understanding and working with your emotions helps you make better decisions. Can you talk about that? That's similar to what I said before, which is if you learn to fall in love with the emotional experiences, then you have more solution sets. So let's say I want to have like all human beings. I want to be a part of a great team. There's no, nobody has ever like raised their hand and said, I'd like to be a part of a shitty team.

And yet, grand majority of people at their work right now have shitty teams or not A teams, not great teams, even though nobody wants that. If one of the things you're unwilling to feel is that conflict, that tension, as we talked about, if you're conflict avoidant, you're not going to be able to make an A team because there's nothing that is alive doesn't require tension. A cell requires tension. breathing requires tension, playing pickleball requires tension, a good team requires tension. So if you're going to avoid that experience, you're not going to be as easily, if at all,

be able to create an A quality team. So to be able to look forward to any emotional experience creates more and more solution sets for us, more and more optionality. So in creating a great team, for instance, you need to be good with people hating you. You need to be good with drawing boundaries and having people upset. You need to be able to have high expectations, even if somebody's just, you have to be okay with somebody being disappointed with themselves. You have to be okay, being disappointed with yourself.

All these emotional experiences have to have to be available to you if you're going to find the solutions to make an A-quality team. And so the more you can find. in love with each emotional experience, the more you have and then that clear the decision-making gets. So that's one thing for making great decisions. The other one that I find really, really useful and very hard to execute onto you really understand it is creating a set of principles to live by. So we all have a set of principles to live by that we're doing it, right? So for a lot of people, those principles are, you know, what do I have to do to get likes on Facebook? What do I have to do to,

like, I'm going to do whatever. I'm going to make a decision based on getting likes on Facebook. I'm going to make decisions based on whatever it is. pretending that I want to get wealthy or trying to get wealthy. There's a series of things. But if you really take a look at what it is you're making your decisions on and then really think about, well, what would be the five or six things that if I made decisions with these principles, I'm guaranteed success and then experiment with them and then refine those principles and then experiment with them. And then there'll be these moments where you don't want to do it, but those are your principles so you're going to go and do it.

So as an example for this, one of the principles that I live by is a very, you're embrace intensity. So it's not create intensity. It's embrace intensity. It means that right now, any moment in my body, for instance, there's going to be a sensation that's more intense. How do I welcome that sensation? At any moment in running my business, there's going to be something that we don't want to talk about. How do we lean in and talk about that? And so we start all of our meetings with what are you scared to say in our business? What are you scared to say? Not all of our means, but some of our meetings are started with what are you scared to say? Because we want to embrace that intensity because we know that if we lean into the thing that we're trying to

avoid, our life is going to get better, our business is going to get better. And so if you can make, if you can see what those principles are for you and then run experiments to see if they work and then refine them every once in a while. And so because of that, because of that embrace intensity. If somebody comes to me and says, you're fucking of this business, you're doing it all wrong. I don't have to think about what I'm going to do. I'm like, oh, cool, tell me what I'm missing.

It's going to be immediate because I live this way. Whether I don't, maybe I don't want to hear it. Maybe I'm like, I'm having a bad day, whatever it is. Maybe I'll say, hey, I want to hear you. Give me, I'm not able to. Give me, you know, a day and I'll come. back to you. But all of a sudden, my decisions get made automatically if I live by a set of principles. And I find very effective, I find very effective living by a set of principles.

For someone that wants to create their own set of principles, is there a guide you have? Is there any advice for how to actually go about starting this list, putting it together? We have a decisions course, which is like a large part of it is about how to do that. Awesome. It's a difficult one to explain because there's a lot of nuance in it. Just as a, for instance, one of the nuances is defining the principles not just by what it is, but what it isn't is a really significant, very minor thing, but it ends up being incredibly major. But if you're going to do your set of principles and you want to do them on your own, the main thing

I would say is keep it to five. I wouldn't even do six. I don't do six, but I keep it to five. and I would test each one of them for like five days. So make your principle and then see if it works for you for like five days. And then keep on experimenting until you find five. And when you look at those five and you say, if I do that, if I live by those principles, I am just almost 100, if not 100 percent confident that that's going to create the life I want. If I live by those principles, then you have a really good story. art and make them simple.

They're like minor things like embrace intensity or connection first or everything's in iteration, all these things that I, as soon as I live by them, things work, company works. Amazing. And we'll point folks to that course if they want to take it themselves. Cool. It's only once a year. So it's a rare one. Oh, wow.

When is the next one? January. Okay. Not too far away. for folks to want to wait. So again, the two pieces of advice you shared, and that's our experiments that we can run to help become better decision makers. One is create a list of life principles and there's a course that will appoint people to take that. The other is the thing you keep coming back to over and over and over, this idea of falling in love with your emotions,

embracing your emotions. Yeah. There's also, I know you do a lot of work with teams. I imagine there's very similar advice for how to help your team be more effective principles, I imagine as a part of it. We've run principles for teams. Yeah. Yeah. That's one of them. Teams be more effective.

We have a lot of. I mean, I think I have like, at this point I have 12 things that I'll go into a company and do with a company. So typically, the way I like to do it is I will go in

and I will talk to some, like I'll talk to the leader typically and they'll say this is what I want. And then I really want to assess. Like typically if the person who is, you know, a big part of creating the problem has a hard time seeing the way through the problem or they wouldn't have been created generally. And we all, this is not demeaning any leader. We all have these issues. So usually what I like to do is I like to go in and I like to talk to three or four people, see what, you know, their perspective, not just the leader's perspective.

And then I like to sit in in a meeting or two and just see actually, what the dynamic is. And one of the things I like to say about how to change a company is that the atomic structure of a company is the meetings and the decisions. So it's particularly true in Silicon Valley, but it's really true in all businesses that all we are as a company is a group of people's relationships and ideas. It's it. Especially like Amazon, like what you got a couple of buildings.

buildings and some servers. There's not, you know, there's like not a lot of hardware there and they wouldn't be useful without the people anyways. Anybody, whether you're running a farm or a shoe factory or anybody who's successful is going to tell you it's all about the people. And so the atomic structure is what are our meetings like and what, how do we make decisions? And so I'll just really pay attention to a meeting. And one of the things we do is we talk about what we call five-star meetings, which is how do you make every meeting enjoyable? Literally, like, how is it that everybody, when they walk out of a meeting, they're like, oh, fuck, I loved that. That was great. As it turns out, we've all been in meetings that are like hard as shit. And we've walked out

and got, oh, those are great meetings. And we've all been in meetings where like nothing happens. And we're like, oh, God, fuck. Another one of like just drive a nail through my head. I don't want to sit there. So what's required to make every one of your meetings five stars? And if you do that, that's one of the things we'll do inside of a company is like work with them to figure that out. If you do that, every single problem with your company will come to the surface, every single one of them. I had 10, five star meetings, but these two meetings sucked. That tells me exactly where we need to focus as a company. That tells me exactly where to look for the problem that's happening. And so it's like this, and it's the same thing with decisions. If you really start unpacking

how the decisions are made, where people are frustrated in the decision making process, you're going to find exactly the problems in the company. An example of this, I was working with a friend and he's a content person and he, and we were just talking about, about how do you make every one of your meetings, a five-star meeting? He's like, okay, great. I'm going to do this. I was like, really, tell me why. My YouTube meetings fucking suck.

It's not where he makes most of his money, but he's like, this YouTube meetings suck. They're never going to get better. And luckily there's a couple other people around at the time. And everyone's like, no, wait, I love my YouTube meetings. What do you mean? Like, how could this not work for you? And so he noticed like, oh, like the team didn't, the content, none of it was working for him.

None of it was him. He was just like, ugh. And so he changed it. He was like, okay, I'm going to commit to them. I'm going to see what it's like for me to just say, every one of my YouTube meetings have to be something that's super enjoyable to me. And when he did it, like his YouTube numbers went off the charts in like a very short period of time.

It's just that common. Like wherever the meeting is that sucks, it means there's something else that's a problem that needs to be worked on. So that's typically how. So I can just look at, usually sit in any team meeting and see at least three or four of the major problems that are happening in the company. Such a cool way of thinking about where to focus, decision making meetings. And I love that the story comes back to something you shared earlier with.

The more you enjoy something, the more joy there is, the better it's going to go anyway. And so the more you can find those moments and make things enjoyable, the better old. You have to. And the other cool thing is, like, most of the executives or the CEOs that I've worked with, when they get to a point, and it usually takes them, like, we always have the goal of a month. It usually takes two months to make sure every one of their meetings is five-star meetings. And once they've done that, then it's like, how do you make sure all of your teams have five-star meetings? But if you, usually it's like within two months, and they usually have half the amount of meetings at the end of it.

Half the amount of meetings and their companies are more effective. It's an incredible tool. I could see why people enjoy that fewer meetings as well. Is there anything more along those lines before we start to close out our conversation, either around teams or decision-making? I'll say for anybody who's running a team, Harvard's got a couple of these, but we used to do these tiny pulses. There's a VC.

One of the strategies that was really effective that I saw very few VCs doing was I would want these like pulse. I would like to read the pulse of teams with these like short surveys and stuff. And it was the most effective way of not very happy. Didn't want to come to work on Monday. They weren't going to make their numbers. Like, the likelihood of them making their numbers is like going down. So there was this interesting thing that just about how, you know, Drecker, I think, said it first.

And then the virgin guy. Branson. Branson said it. He's like culture eat strategy for breakfast or some such. but if that's true then it's measurable and it can be a leading indicator and it absolutely is like if you really if you really pay attention to the culture on a team by team basis it's an amazing very effective way to drive results but also a very effective way to to know when bad results are coming yeah and what's what's interesting to me is most people feel like they can't control the culture

Like most people feel like most people I notice they feel like, you know, it's more likely for me to hear from a CEO. God damn it. Like everybody agrees when I get out of the table. When I get off the table, everyone's like, yeah, we're going to do it. And then they don't do it. Why aren't they fucking doing it? Is more, I'm going to hear that more often than I'm going to hear a CEO say, oh, wow, I, you know, I really noticed that the way the email system was working in our. company, we were disempowering people by not requiring an action after every, you know, like,

I'm going to hear more complaints about why shit isn't working than I'm going to hear about strategies, like very gentle, simple strategies to change the culture. And so it's an amazing thing to me that it's so powerful and yet people feel so out of control with it. To give people something they can do, say today or tomorrow, to work on a lot of these things we've been talking about is there just like one thing you recommend that basically everyone should try to experiment with in the next day, a couple days or weeks just to help them be better and more successful and happier? So I would do seven minutes, not no less than seven minutes. You can do more than seven minutes, but seven minutes of gratitude with another person every day. But it can't be

I'm grateful for this, I'm grateful for this, I'm grateful for this. It has to be feeling the gratitude and then seeing what comes out of your mouth when you're coming from the felt sense of gratitude and doing it back and forth. And so you're savoring the experience of gratitude and you're going back and forth with another human being. So call mom, dad, sister, brother, business partner, friend. And every day just express gratitude. back and forth for seven minutes coming from the feeling, not from the, not from the thought.

And if you have a full body sensation of gratitude and you experience that for seven minutes a day, it'll change your life dramatically really quickly, really, really quickly. Wow. I already feel it. And the practice is you are expressing gratitude to the person you're with? It can be gratitude for anything in your life. As a matter of fact, I would say do it for a couple weeks and then do it on the places where you feel lack. That's like the that's where the superpower comes in. So you know, I was in my own personal

life, I was meditating for like I spent like seven, eight hours a day meditating for like years. And so you can imagine I didn't have a lot of money. So I was like I was so the way I'm the joke I used to make is I would meditate and worry about money most of my day. And truth to it. It's funny, but it's truth. And one day I was like thinking about money and thinking I was driving in my car and I was thinking about this billionaire I knew. And I was thinking about how I didn't have enough. And then I thought, oh, this billionaire doesn't think they have enough either. I know them well enough. I'm like, oh, I have the experience of a billionaire right now. I was my, I was like, I'm, he's probably driving in a car somewhere thinking he doesn't have enough and I'm driving in a car somewhere.

we're thinking, I don't have enough, this is great. Like, I'm a billionaire. And it tickled me. The idea tickled me. And then I was like, well, what happens if I start focusing on everything I do have instead of focusing on what I don't have, which is where the gratitude practice came from. So my wife and I would sit every day and just be grateful for all the physical stuff that we had. You know, we were living in a hovel. We were living 15-year-old year of cars. We were like we had no money. I was in debt. I was in like a big $40,000 in credit card debt or some crazy shit. And we just did it. And literally, what was the three months later? My credit card was debt was gone. Six months later. I had $60,000 in the bank. I like entire life changed because I no longer defined myself by somebody who didn't have. I defined myself as somebody who did have. And so all of a sudden, I could look out the window.

and it wasn't, oh, shit, I can't have that, I can't have that, I can't have that. Look out the window, I'd say, somebody made money on that, somebody made money on that. Every fucking thing I looked at, somebody made money on. 20 people, 20 companies made money on the fucking lamppost. The person who installed it, the energy company, the rubber company, like, there's just, holy crap, it's all over the place. And then in that definition, all of a sudden it became really clear. Oh.

And so it doesn't matter if the thing that you feel like you lack is, or the thing that you feel like you lack is love or the thing that you feel like you lack is money. If you can really do a gratitude practice on the thing that you lack, there's a superpower in that one. It changes everything. Do you still do this?

I do gratitude, yes. Do I do gratitude on stuff I lack? I don't really have an experience of lack. That's not really. But you still do those gratitude seven years. Of course. Yes. That's like asking if I still have sex.

Like why would I give that? that up. It feels great. Okay. So just to be clear, you find someone seven minutes every morning, probably think about things you're grateful for and share back. Focus not on your intellectual thing you're grateful for, but just like what's coming out of your emotional body. Yeah, feel the gratitude. Let the feeling of gratitude speak rather than your mind. Wow. Yeah. Joe, so that you get the felt sense of it. Yeah. Joe, I'm incredibly grateful for you. I really appreciate you sharing so many experiments for people to run. I think this is going to make a real impact in a lot of people's lives. Two final questions. Where can folks find your courses? I know you have a

podcast. Where can folks find the stuff they do online? And then how can listeners be useful to you? First of one, art of accomplishment, the podcast, it's art of accomplishment with Brett Kisler and Joe Hudson, I think. And then Art of Accomplishment, the website will show you where all the courses are. It'll give you a whole bunch of experiments you can run. There's all sorts of like really great information there. The other thing that we just mentioned also is just we really want you to make sure, we really want to make sure that you think that the courses are for you. The courses are, the way we do courses is that it's a very felt experience thing. It's not intellectual at all. It's really in your body. And what the way we like doing it is that you bring

real problems that you're having and you use the tools that we teach you for the. And the foundational course for that is called the connection course. So if you want to get into it, go to the connection course to find out if it's right for you, if you're not already know that it's right for you, do we do these little hour and a half free workshops and they'll give you a taste of what it is that we do because it's unlike anything that's going on out there. It's people do and they're like, what the hell was that? It's just a completely different thing. It's not like learning in the normal way. You literally sit down with another person and run experiments face to face with how you're being in the moment. And so you learn all this stuff through direct experimentation.

And so if you find out it's right for you, you can do it through these workshops. And I'm sure there'll be a place where they can find out where to go for that. And there's one coming up in September. Yeah, the connection course is coming up in September. And so that would be, it's a great place to start. It's foundational for everything else we do. Oh, and then how can listeners be useful to you? I want my children to grow up in a fantastic world.

And the best way that that can happen is that if the people listening to this discover who they are and their nature and the truth of how they operate, not for them, but for their children and their children's children. So you want to do me a favor and make my daughter's world's a better place. Wow. I also just had a son, and so I totally resonate with that. Yeah. Joe, thank you so much for being here. What an amazing podcast episode to send that it being, as I expected.

Pleasure. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it, Lenny. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.