The Art of Accomplishment: Recent Episodes
Joe Hudson and Brett Kistler
Welcome to the Art of Accomplishment, where we explore a way of communicating and building connection in business, personal and internal life.
In this special episode, Joe and Brett engage directly with the audience by reading and responding to comments from their recent episode on narcissism. They navigate what's true in the pushback as well as what they'd want to add or clarify.
It's an honest, unscripted conversation about the limits of framing narcissism as a spectrum, the difference between abuse and narcissistic personality disorder, and the long journey from victimhood to empowered compassion.
Together, they explore:
- The critical distinction between narcissism as a trait and narcissistic personality disorder
- The pros and cons of framing narcissism as a spectrum
- Why the natural progression often goes from "I'm the problem" to "you're the problem" before real healing becomes possible
- The difference between engaging with narcissism in the workplace vs. in an abusive relationship
- Why any love that makes you feel ashamed or turn away from yourself may not be love worth keeping
- Rebuilding a relationship with a narcissistic parent
- Why compassion and boundaries actually go together, not in opposition
- What abuse survivors actually need
- Why the option to leave isn't psychologically available until certain internal work is done
- Joe's story of meeting a mother in a homeless shelter and what it revealed about capacity and choice
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
What does it actually take to build a marriage that lasts? In this special episode, Joe sits down with his wife Tara for an honest, unfiltered conversation about the 29 years of their relationship: how it started, what they got wrong, what they figured out, and the lessons only decades of shared life can teach.
Together, they explore:
- The single want that mattered most: someone who would grow with them
- Tara's three non-negotiables before saying yes
- The moment they learned they couldn't change each other
- Why the person questioning the relationship is often having a "me" issue, not a "them" issue
- What it actually means to "get in your body"
- How love gets wired with guilt, criticism, or abuse
- The dynamic where one partner is "the better one" and one is "the problem"
- The pivot from litigating who's right to honoring each other's realities
- Aggressive vs. passive-aggressive anger as mirror images of the same shame
- Marriage (and kids) as the fastest way to peel the onion of identity
- What they'd do differently: bringing more consciousness to vision and creating the practices together
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Learn to have a better relationship to your inner critic - the Connection Course: https://yt.artofaccomplishment.com/inner-critic-cc
That voice in your head that's constantly riding you — telling you you're not enough, reminding you of every mistake, nagging you while you're trying to focus — where did it actually come from? And why do you still listen to it? In this video, Joe Hudson breaks down the inner critic: its origins, why you think you need it, and how changing the way you relate to it can quietly transform your life. You'll learn a simple practice you can try today, and why the critic's power dissolves the moment you stop treating it like your boss.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The word "narcissist" has been thrown around so casually that it has effectively replaced calling someone an "asshole." However, this reflexive labeling often prevents the very thing that could actually heal the dynamic. In this episode, Joe and Brett offer a different lens on narcissism: not as a category of "bad people," but as a spectrum we are all on, rooted in an inability to feel.
Together, they explore what's actually happening underneath narcissistic behavior, why the person on the receiving end is often doing very similar internal work, and how genuine healing happens on both sides of the dynamic.
They discuss:
- Why "narcissist" has become a defensive way to call someone an asshole
- Alexander Lowen's definition: narcissism as the inability to feel
- The spectrum from aggressive to passive narcissism (and how everyone lands somewhere on it)
- Why the "I'm more humble than you" move is still narcissism
- The role healthy narcissism plays in leadership, art, and building anything meaningful
- Containing vs. confronting: how to hold a loving boundary that doesn't trigger shame
- Why so many people who get called assholes actually want to be met with a boundary
- The symbiotic pull: why some people go through life looking for a narcissist to attach to
- Handing off your doubt as the seductive comfort of narcissistic relationships
- Why healed narcissism becomes the leadership we all actually want
- Working with your own anger to meet the attack without collapse or counter-attack
- Owning your own narcissism: the shadow work required on both sides
- Seeing the innocence: the child who was never cared for, built for war
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Something unlocks in this session when she lets herself speak from the discomfort instead of past it. Connection Course is 3 weeks of practicing exactly this: https://yt.artofaccomplishment.com/rapid-coaching/beingseen
In this session, Joe works with a woman who is struggling with allowing herself to be seen and share her story. Through the coaching session, she finds out what's underneath it.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
What's it actually like to be raised by two parents who teach emotional work for a living? In this special episode, Joe sits down with his 17-year-old daughter, Oona for an honest, unfiltered conversation about what she thinks he and her mom got right, what they got wrong, and what her generation is really navigating right now.
They talk about being seen by a whole community of adults, what it's like to have parents recognized in coffee shops, the voice in her head that got mad about an A minus, and why she thinks trust and boundaries are what her generation needs most.
Together, they explore:
- Five words to describe how she was raised and why "I'm so proud of you" was never one of them
- The unexpected pros and cons of being pointed back to yourself instead of praised
- What it's like to be deeply seen at home and struggle to find that connection with peers
- Being coached by people who watch the podcast (and why she hates it)
- Growing up with a community of aunties and uncles
- Seeing patterns in strangers at restaurants without realizing it's unusual
- The voice in her head, the A minus, and the moment she recognized her inner critic
- Why she chooses discomfort
- How she's watched her parents grow (and fight differently) over the years
- Why she thinks kids her age are so hard on themselves
- Trust and boundaries as the missing pieces for her generation
- Phones, shame, and the dopamine spiral kids are aware of but can't escape
- Watching her parents navigate a sudden wave of public recognition
- Learning to let strangers' gratitude actually land
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Joe tells the story of his whole life with money: where it started, what he turned it into, and the shifts that took him from debt to plenty.
→ The key insights from this episode - and the practices to try them yourself - on a single page: https://yt.artofaccomplishment.com/transform-your-money
→ The shifts in this story aren't something you think your way into - it's something you practice. That's what the Connection Course is for: https://yt.artofaccomplishment.com/transform-money-cc
It's less a money story than a story about what we make money stand in for, and what's left when we stop. Where it ends might not be where you'd expect. And hopefully, watching it, will help you transform your relationship to money for the better.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Why do so many of us self-sabotage right when we're on the verge of success? Bands break up right after getting signed. Entrepreneurs burn out the moment they hit their goal. Athletes choke when they realize they're winning. In this episode, Joe and Brett explore the surprising mechanics behind the fear of success — and why it turns out to be nearly identical to the fear of failure.
Brett opens with a personal story from a base jumping world championship where he realized mid-competition he was winning — and immediately couldn't hit the target again. From there, they unpack what's actually happening in the head, heart, and nervous system when we get close to what we want, and why expanding your capacity to feel is the real key to sustainable success.
Together, they explore:
- Why bands often break up right after getting signed
- The identity crisis that gets triggered by winning
- Why success and failure are both states of nervous system arousal
- The window of tolerance — and why too much pleasure can feel as threatening as too much pain
- How the same emotional avoidance shows up on both sides of a decision
- Why billionaires often burn out and can't get out of their pajamas
- Letting success obliterate identity (instead of inflating it)
- "Don't let success go to your head" vs. fully feeling success in your body
- Clean fuel vs. dirty fuel — letting in the reinforcement loop of why you do the work
- Why fear of success is really fear of life
- The difference between humility as smallness and humility as a deep bow
- Concrete practices: visualizing both complete failure and complete success, emotional inquiry on the avoided feeling, expanding your nervous system's capacity for pleasurable arousal, and deconstructing who you think you'll be on the other side
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
7 patterns. Almost everyone I've ever coached.
For about six months, Joe wrote down the stuck point he saw at the end of every coaching session, then sorted them. Thousands of sessions collapsed into seven categories. In this video he walks through each one in order. The order matters.
Each pattern comes with a story from Joe's own life — the friend who taught him the difference between dirty fuel and clean fuel, the day at 24 he went out into the woods and learned to cry again, the list he wrote of everything he didn't like about himself and what changed eight months later, the friend who wouldn't let him defend himself.
How Connection Can Change Your Life (Joe Hudson & Ali Abdaal)
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
"Should I stay or should I go?" is one of the most common questions people bring to coaching, whether about a relationship, a job, or any major commitment. What if the hang-up is in the question itself? In this episode, Joe and Brett explore what's really being asked underneath the surface and why the path forward rarely lies in pros and cons lists.
Together, they unpack two distinct versions of this question, the deeper fear that drives it, and what it actually looks like to commit to something without losing yourself in the process.
Together, they explore:
- The two types of people asking this question: chronic askers vs. those facing it for the first time
- Why this question is really about enmeshment vs. self-abandonment
- How childhood experiences of being asked to please a parent create fear of commitment
- Doubt as the surface emotion
- "Will I get more growth if I stay or if I leave?" when this is wisdom and when it's avoidance
- Why idealizing the future (staying or leaving) keeps you stuck in the present
- The Buckminster Fuller move: showing up uncompromisingly as yourself
- The trap of "being yourself" with a chip on your shoulder
- What real commitment actually means — and what it doesn't
- Drawing boundaries without closing your heart
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Most of us say we want love. So why do we push it away the moment it arrives? In this episode, Joe and Brett explore the surprisingly complex reasons we sabotage the very thing we say we want most; and why love, more than almost any other emotion, requires a nervous system that can tolerate it.
Together, they unpack five core patterns that get in the way of receiving love, and offer concrete practices for expanding your capacity to give and receive it.
Together, they explore:
- The stone-faced baby experiments and how attachment becomes attention-seeking
- Why "love" in adulthood is often just the attention strategies that worked in childhood
- Jealousy as the perfect example of pushing love away while demanding it
- Wired together, fired together: how love gets fused with criticism, abuse, or engulfment
- Why receiving adoration you don't feel worthy of makes you physically uncomfortable
- The identity-level confirmation bias that keeps us seeing rejection over love
- How love can dissolve the sense of self and why that's terrifying
- Why positive emotions are often harder to feel than negative ones
- "Love is a light shined into a dark ocean". Why everything unloved surfaces when love arrives
- Self-compassion as a better predictor of healthy relationships than self-esteem
- Practical experiments: emotional inquiry, opening your heart in reps, identifying what's wired with love, and noticing care you've been missing
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
In this episode, Joe and Brett unpack the fear of being seen. They examine why this pattern is so often rooted in shame, how it quietly erodes intimacy and careers, and what to actually do when you find yourself frozen, hiding, or performing.
Together, they explore:
- The two flavors of fear of being seen: acute avoidance and the universal existential version
- How childhood and culture teach us that being seen isn't safe
- Why this pattern is devastating in romantic relationships
- The "golden algorithm" — how hiding creates the very rejection you fear
- How fear of being seen shows up in the head, heart, and nervous system
- The internal "eye of Sauron" and why self-criticism amplifies the freeze
- Soul dysmorphia: why we can't see ourselves clearly
- Asking "what do I need?" as an antidote to worrying what others think
- Why opening your heart to the other person dissolves the fear of their judgment
- Shifting from outcome-focus to "how do I want to show up?"
- Exposure, sharing shame, and the cure for loneliness
- What to do in the moment when you feel yourself freezing or disappearing
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Most leaders think delegation is about telling people what to do. But what if the real bottleneck isn't your team's capacity but your relationship with control, perfectionism, and hard conversations?
In this episode, Brett shares his own struggle with delegation across multiple growing businesses, and Joe offers a framework for moving from vision to execution without falling into the traps of micromanagement or hands-off abandonment.
Together, they explore:
- Why the leader's job is not to take care of everybody
- Distilling strategy and vision into the "one thing" that makes everything else easier or irrelevant
- Solution criteria: how to delegate without dictating or abandoning
- Why alignment comes from handling objections, not convincing
- Making it safe (and expected) for your team to say no
- Why "management" is often a symptom of missing trust
- Holding people accountable without making it about "trouble"
- Scheduling hard conversations on your calendar (literally)
- Institutionalizing appreciation without making it cheesy
- Why your company is a reflection of your own consciousness
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
In this episode, Joe and Brett break down a simple but powerful method for turning recognition into lasting behavior change. Joe walks through a real example from his own company, where he caught himself being "too helpful" in a way that was actually disempowering everyone around him, and explains how he used the Four A's to shift the pattern quickly and cleanly. Along the way, they explore why most behavior change fails, what makes this approach different, and why you have to feel a whole lot of stuff to do it right.
They discuss:
- The Four A's: Announce, Apologize, Ask, Act
- What makes an apology upright rather than shame-driven
- How asking for help breaks the isolation that holds patterns in place
- Why you need five contrary actions, not just one
- The difference between recognition and "should"
- Where this method works, and where it doesn't
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
As intelligence becomes something we can outsource, what becomes of us? In this episode, Joe and Brett explore what it means to thrive in an era where machines can handle knowledge work, and why the skills that matter most are becoming deeply human. From raising AI to being raised by it, they discuss how this technological shift is also an invitation to reclaim connection, purpose, and wisdom.
They discuss:
- Why wisdom is the new competitive advantage
- The difference between knowledge and being good at being human
- How small teams with strong relationships are replacing large bureaucracies
- What happens when society loses its sense of purpose
- Signs that your AI use is helping or hurting you
- How to use AI for personal development without losing yourself
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
In this episode, Joe and Brett analyze a rapid coaching session with an 18-year-old who says he hasn't felt good in years. Despite doing mindfulness, reading Eckhart Tolle, and preparing meticulously for the session, he can't seem to access the peace he's looking for. As Joe works with him to slow down and actually feel what's happening in his body, Brett and Joe unpack the self-reliance pattern: how it forms, how it shows up in relationships, and why the mind moves so fast that it convinces us we're not feeling when we clearly are.
They discuss:
- The self-reliance pattern and its roots in early caregiving
- Why worry is actually a sign of devotion
- The difference between mindfulness and loving yourself
- Attention-seeking as an unmet need for care
- How breakthroughs change your life, even when they seem to fade
- Why there's no rush in the work of self-love
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Forgiveness is one of the most charged words in our culture. For many of us, it was coerced out of us as children or held up as something good people do. But what if forgiveness isn't about being good or letting someone off the hook? In this episode, Alexa Kistler and Tara Howley reframe forgiveness as an act of self-care, a way to reopen your heart without abandoning your boundaries.
They discuss:
- Why coerced forgiveness misses the point
- Forgiveness as a three-step process: emotions, curiosity, and boundaries
- How boundaries make forgiveness possible
- The difference between forgiving someone and wanting to be around them
- What it means to forgive yourself
- Holding forgiveness as sacred without making it an obligation
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
You think you don't belong because you're different. What if you feel different because you're not being yourself?
→ Learn to be yourself - Connection Course: https://yt.artofaccomplishment.com/imposter-belonging
Joe had an observation from running retreats: Everyone walks in thinking they're the outsider. Everyone. The executives, the artists, the parents - they all think "I don't belong here." By day 7 that feeling's gone. Not because they changed. Because they stopped performing. The question to ask isn't "do I belong?" It's "am I being myself?"
When you switch questions the world rearranges.
•••
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
What happens after awakening actually happens? In this follow-up episode, Brett and Joe dig into the messy, surprising, and often disorienting reality of what it's like when your sense of self starts to shift and what to do about it. Whether it arrives as a gentle fog lifting or a bolt from the blue, the integration process has its own terrain worth understanding.
They discuss:
- How awakening shows up differently for different people
- The fear that comes when identity starts to dissolve
- Why some people want it to stop, and others want it back
- Head, heart, and gut awakenings, and what each needs for integration
- What actually changes in your life, relationships, and work
- How to support someone going through it (including yourself)
Resource Mentioned:
- Doing Nothing by Stephen Harrison
This episode was produced by Mun Yee Kelly and edited by Charlie Garcia at FutureVoice Media.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The traditional search for purpose is backwards
→ Practical experiments to transform your life: https://artofaccomplishment.com/experiments
After 7 years chasing his "dream career," Joe discovered he'd been running toward exactly what he was trying to escape. This revelation changed how he approaches purpose entirely—leading to a method that's guided countless people from confusion to clarity.
The truth? You can't find your purpose by thinking about it. Just like you can't identify a champion swimmer by looking at 5-year-olds on dry land. You have to get in the water.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Awakening is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean? In this episode, Brett and Joe finally tackle the topic head-on after 150 episodes of addressing it indirectly. They explore why awakening isn't a goal in the Art of Accomplishment work, what actually happens when people wake up, and why it might be both far bigger and far smaller than you imagine.
They discuss:
- What awakening actually is (and isn't)
- Head, heart, and gut awakenings, and how they differ
- Why making awakening a goal can slow down the process
- The myth that awakening is a finish line
- How meditation can be a path to enlightenment or a tool for dissociation
- Why awakened people still have daddy issues
- What to do if awakening catches you off guard
Resource Mentioned:
- Doing Nothing by Stephen Harrison
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The beliefs you can't question keep you stuck
→ Experiments to find freedom: https://www.artofaccomplishment.com/experiments
Most people never realize their deepest beliefs are holding them hostage. Joe Hudson shares a radical truth from 30 years of coaching the world's highest performers: The moment you stop defending who you think you are, you become truly free.
Highlights:
• The meeting room test: How fear instantly creates either/or thinking
• Stanford's "smart kid" study that changed everything we know about praise
• Why millionaires who believe "I'm successful" often plateau
• The ocean vs. rock metaphor that transforms how you handle criticism
• What actually happens when you realize you're both an asshole AND deeply loving
• The terrifying moment when meaning dissolves—and why it's actually liberation
"A sword attacks the ocean, and the ocean doesn't care."
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Wanting is one of our most powerful levers for change. Not what you want, but your relationship to wanting itself. In this episode, Joe sits down with AOA facilitator Alexa Kistler to unpack why so many people are at war with their desires and how ending that war offers a path out of suffering.
They discuss:
- Wanting, craving, and aversion
- Childhood patterns that take us away from wanting
- Identity shifts when you allow yourself to want
- How not owning desire makes you more manipulable, not less
- Why chasing outcomes creates suffering, even when you succeed
Research mentioned:
- Gender differences in personality traits across cultures
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
You're about to discover why that promotion you won't ask for, that business you won't start, and that conversation you keep avoiding all come from the same illusion.
→ Turn your fear back into excitement (free mini-course): https://www.artofaccomplishment.com/resources/procrastination
Joe reveals the counterintuitive reason you feel 'stuck' and can't seem to move forward on your goals. It has nothing to do with a lack of options and everything to do with a fear of consequences. These insights come from Joe's three decades of working intimately with some of the world's most productive people, from billionaires to Fortune 500 CEOs, and uncovering the emotional patterns that drive procrastination.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Joe let Brett ask him anything at all about his life, and there were SO many questions, but ultimately his curiosity lead him to explore the story beneath the teaching: what was Joe’s path? How did he come to the work that he now shares with the world? Joe started out as a young man whose curious and open spirit blended with a serious rebellious streak that opened up a unique path. A bit of luck, love, and sometimes painful adventuring through the world, shaped him into the Joe we know and love today. Tune in to get a glimpse of the many facets that comprise Joe’s life.
Links:
- Related Episode
- Tara & Janine on embodiment
- Book: Black Elk Speaks
- Fitz Perls
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
|Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Doubt isn't protecting you from failure, it's protecting you from your feelings.
For every ambitious person, doubt is the silent killer of greatness. Joe breaks down what he's learned from working with Silicon Valley's top performers: doubt isn't an intellectual problem, it’s a misunderstood emotional signal. It’s a protective mechanism to stop you from feeling something uncomfortable, whether it’s a fear of failure or even a fear of success.
🎧 Subscribe to the Art of Accomplishment
Podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3ezSoop
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3ETrfHA
Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3Czx7Tu
Other platforms: https://artofaccomplishment.com/podcast
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
|Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Brett and Joe have nailed the PERFECT episode, which means they can finally get this podcast launched! Now they just need to get the perfect album art, title, set…and the perfect list of everything they need to do before they can launch the perfect podcast!
In this episode, our hosts tackle everyone’s favourite Achilles heel: perfectionism. It shows up in individuals, teams, organizations, and entire societies. They explore where it comes from, why it has increased dramatically over the past decades, and how it narrows perception, creates internal chaos, and—paradoxically—produces worse results.
They discuss:
- Perfectionism is fundamentally fear-based, not excellence-based
- How perfectionism predicts the same negative health outcomes as chronic stress
- The rise of perfectionism over the past 30 years and why things haven’t gotten better
- Binary thinking and the illusion of a perfect end state
- The childhood roots of perfectionism and chaotic environments
- Why perfectionism actually creates the chaos it’s trying to prevent
- How organizations unintentionally reward fear and stagnation
- Practical ways to work with fear, the inner critic, and the nervous system
Related Research:
How Perfectionist Leaders Stifle Creativity (Forbes)
Perfectionism Is Increasing (HBR)
Why Being A Perfectionist Is Bad For Your Health (Self)
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
|Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Chaos is evolution's favorite tool, learn how to use it for growth. When faced with chaos, we often react with fear, limiting our thinking.
In this short format episode, Joe encourages us to fully feel the fear and to see opportunity within it. By learning to fully feel our emotions we can find greater wisdom and a path forward, even in the midst of chaos.
For more, subscribe to the Art of Accomplishment Podcast:
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3ezSoop
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3ETrfHA
Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3Czx7Tu
Other platforms: https://artofaccomplishment.com/podcast
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
In this special crossover episode, we are republishing Joe’s appearance on Charisma on Command with Charlie Houpert alongside Dr. Alok “Dr. K” Kanojia. They explore what charisma really is and why genuine presence and emotional awareness matter far more than polished performance.
Charlie’s opening question, “What is charisma?” unfolds into a deep exploration of authenticity, self-love, and emotional intelligence. Joe and Dr. K contrast performative charisma (built on control, manipulation, or validation-seeking) with true charisma, which arises from inner alignment, vulnerability, and purpose. The three of them discuss how self-acceptance, emotional integration, and listening reshape the way we connect and influence others.
Check out more from Dr.K on the HealthyGamerGG Podcast on Spotify
Twitter @HealthyGamerGG
healthygamer.gg
https://www.tiktok.com/@healthygamer.gg
https://www.instagram.com/healthygamer_gg/
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
If you struggle with perfectionism, fear of success, or feeling like you have a "tyrant boss" inside your head, this breakdown reveals exactly how to shift that dynamic.
In this episode, Joe and Brett analyze a rapid coaching session with a man who is a high-performer for others but frozen when it comes to his own business. They uncover how "stories" about perfectionism keep us stuck, and why trying to be a "good provider" can actually stop you from doing the work. As the man works with Joe to peel back the layers of what’s causing his procrastination, Brett and Joe dive deeper into the topic of procrastination, dissecting the root causes that cause us to freeze when we wish to act and paths forward for reframing both how to approach and to view procrastination.
They discuss:
- The idea of procrastinator as an identity
- Self-judgement, perfectionism, and shame
- The emotional roots of procrastination
- How to dissolve stuckness
- Practical ways to approach procrastination
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
In this episode, Joe sits down with Johannes Landgraf, CEO of Ona, to dive deep on how bringing the tenets of AOA’s teachings to the company has transformed their leadership, culture, and performance in the fast-moving world of AI. From quadrupling revenue to spending their days with greater enjoyment, Johannes shares how the seeming paradox of scaling a company while deepening connection has impacted him personally and the company at large.
They discuss:
- How AI and rapid innovation challenge traditional leadership models
- Conflict as a source of clarity and alignment
- The role of vulnerability and transparency in building organizational trust
- Ona’s principles and how their iterative process
- Lessons from Ona’s transformation
- And much more
Learn more about Ona’s principles: ona.com/principles
Sign up for the AOA Leadership newsletter: https://www.artofaccomplishment.com/leadership
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Why do so many high achievers feel like frauds? In this episode, Brett and Joe explore a topic near and dear to the hearts of anyone who has ever thought they needed to be someone else to be loved: Imposter Syndrome.
Together, they explore:
- Our relationship to shame and self-worth
- Antidotes to imposter syndrome
- The childhood experiences that encourage imposter syndrome
- Implications in leadership and business
Dive Deeper:
- Imposter Syndrome - Psychology Today
- Imposter Syndrome & Self Compassion - AAPA
- Academic paper on imposter syndrome
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
In this episode, Brett and Joe talk about leadership—not just the title or position, but about what it truly means to lead and be a leader. They explore how leadership emerges in every moment of life, from boardrooms to families to personal choices, and how emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and conviction shape the kind of leader we become.
Research links:
Emotional intelligence, leadership, and work teams: A hybrid literature review
The First Follower
The influence of self-awareness on effective leadership outcomes in South Africa
Decentralization in Organizations: A Revolution or a Mirage?
Why Decentralized Companies Outperform Their Industrial Peers
Distributed Leadership and New Generation Employees’ Proactive Behavior: Roles of Idiosyncratic Deals and Meaningfulness of Work
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Brett and Joe deliver a long-awaited episode on procrastination, exploring its real contours—the shame, the avoidance, the misplaced priorities. They reveal how it stems from self-criticism and avoidance, and show how a shift in perspective can turn it into prioritization, creativity, and authentic productivity.
Together, they discuss:
- How procrastination depends on self-abuse and self-judgment
- Procrastination vs healthy prioritization
- Emotional avoidance
- The importance of iteration, play, and creativity
- Practical experiments and exercises for working with procrastination
Research:
“How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain” Andrew Newberg
Link to Procrastination experiments page
The 3 Ps: Perfectionism, Procrastination, and Paralysis - Psychology Today
Why procrastination is about managing emotions, not time
Procrastination: An emotional struggle
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
According to some studies, over 80% of Americans experience time scarcity. In this episode, Joe and Brett explore what’s going on when we feel time scarce. They unpack why so many of us feel starved for time in an era of unprecedented efficiency, and provide clear, actionable insights into how presence and emotional awareness can change our perception of time itself.
They cover:
- Why time scarcity is more about emotional overwhelm than actual hours
- The paradox of saving time but still feeling busier than ever
- How presence shifts our experience of time
- The role of grief, fear, and shame in the feeling of “not enough”
- The importance of rest, integration, and flow states
Connection Course: link
StudiesTime scarcity - 80% of people don’t have enough time: article
Flow states: article one, article two
Parkinson’s Law: article one, article two
Media usage: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/social-media-usage
Radio lab podcast episode: https://radiolab.org/podcast/91584-time
Alexander Lowen on rest: https://reichandlowentherapy.org/Content/Vegetative/stress.html
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
In this episode, Brett Kistler and Joe Hudson dive into the epidemic of loneliness and its impact on our lives. They explore the roots of loneliness, how it differs from solitude, and why shame and self-perception often amplify the experience. They explore how to transform loneliness into deeper self-connection and meaningful relationships with others.
Join them as they discuss:
- How loneliness, solitude, and isolation differ
- The connection between loneliness and shame
- Childhood roots of loneliness and insecure attachment styles
- The role of society, mobility, and social media in shaping loneliness today
- Practical ways to reconnect with yourself and with others
- How VIEW is an antidote to loneliness
- Experiments and practical guidance for addressing loneliness
Resources:
Shame podcast: https://www.artofaccomplishment.com/podcast/the-anatomy-of-shame-emotion-series-8-2
The Connection Course: https://www.artofaccomplishment.com/course/the-connection-course
Experiments: https://www.artofaccomplishment.com/experiments
Relevant research:
US CDC: Addressing Loneliness
Surgeon General: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation
How people think about being alone shapes their experience of loneliness
Mental health and loneliness: the relationship across life stages
Loneliness, community, and nature
Psychology Today: Why Am I So Lonely?
The Link Between Childhood Trauma and Feeling Lonely
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Tara Howley and Janine Parziale dive into stage fright and performance anxiety. Drawing from personal experience and professional expertise, they share how to work with fear rather than fight it—transforming it into a source of energy, presence, and even joy.
They discuss:
- Understanding the physiology and psychology of stage fright
- How to reframe fear as excitement and use it as fuel
- Body-based techniques for releasing freeze and nervous system overwhelm
- Practical preparation strategies—from nutrition to exercise to mindset
- The role of shame, self-consciousness, and compassion in performance anxiety
- Embracing mistakes and turning them into moments of connection and magic
- Why stage fright can be a gift and how to welcome it
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
In this episode, Brett and Joe break down the dynamics of feeling stuck and what to do about it. They reveal how subtle patterns from childhood continue to shape our adult experiences. They also share practical strategies to breaking free from emotional, intellectual, and nervous system blockages that hold the pattern of being stuck in place.
Tune in to hear about:
-
Understanding the emotional roots and different forms of stuckness
-
How childhood experiences shape our adult experiences of being stuck
-
The relationship between stuckness, anger, and fear
-
Practical methods for moving stuckness on an emotional and nervous system level
-
Intellectual frameworks to reframe and overcome patterns of feeling stuck
Newsweek article on Andrew Newberg study: https://www.newsweek.com/religion-and-brain-152895
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Three former VCs turned coaches walk into a room…Steve Schlafman of the podcast Downshift sits down with Joe Hudson and Jerry Colonna (author of Re-Boot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up) to explore the journey of living one's purpose, especially in times of uncertainty and change. They share personal experiences and wisdom on navigating fear, grief, trust, and discovering deeper authenticity and fulfillment from three different stages of life.
They explore:
-
Navigating uncertainty with clarity and compassion
-
Embracing grief as a pathway to deeper personal transformation
-
Building trust from an authentic and human-centered place
-
The difference between transactional and transformative coaching
-
How to authentically live and express one's purpose
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Joe and Brett break down a coaching session from one of Joe’s public coaching workshops. In this episode, Joe encounters a woman who feels like she’s trapped in her head and can’t move forward. As they dissect the shifts that occur during the session, the complexity of confidence and the subtle ways we evade self-doubt are laid out as an opportunity to reflect on how they show up in our own lives. Together, they discuss:
- Understanding the nuanced relationship between confidence and doubt
- How subtle avoidance strategies—even beneficial ones like somatic work—can unintentionally reinforce stuckness
- The power of anger as a tool for clarity, decisiveness, and empowerment
- Reframing doubt as something to embrace and learn from rather than to fear
- Practical advice for moving through blocks related to self-doubt and perfectionism
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Joe and Tara sat down with our friends at Modern Relationships for a conversation about their relationship—their meet-cute, what happened afterwards, the wisdom they have to share with us, and how they shifted their relationship from abusive to one that you can’t help but want for yourself. Together with Erik Torenberg, they discuss:
- How to navigate intense triggers and deep emotional challenges
- The crucial role of personal growth and transformation
- Practical strategies for effective communication and conflict resolution
- Moving beyond blame and shame to foster genuine mutual understanding
- Embracing change and life transitions as opportunities for deeper intimacy
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Thanks to Modern Relationships for hosting this episode. Find more at the links below:
- Spotify
- Apple
- YouTube
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
We’re back with a coaching breakdown! In this episode, Joe and Brett dissect a rapid coaching session focused on self-love. They examine the subtle ways our guest has learned to turn away from himself in the presence of others and point out the breadcrumb trail he follows back to self-connection. This offers an opportunity for those of us watching to see ourselves more clearly and turn toward ourselves with love. Watch them explore the barriers and powerful moments of realization that help us move from self-criticism and doubt into genuine self-welcoming and love.
Video of this session is available on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/n24xPZP1dmQ
What We Cover:* Recognizing and dismantling self-critical narratives * Practical steps for cultivating authentic self-love * How welcoming ourselves can dramatically shift our internal experience * The role of shame and vulnerability in self-acceptance * Why genuine self-love is a somatic, experiential practice
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community! Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson Brett on X: @airkistler AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Attunement invites us to listen deeply not only to others but also to ourselves. But what, really, does it mean to attune? How does it work? What happens when you’re attuned? In this episode of The Art of Accomplishment, Tara Howley sits down with Janine Parziale to deep dive into the practice of attunement and discuss:
- How attunement differs from basic active listening
- Recognizing when we are genuinely attuned versus disconnected from ourselves and others
- Practical ways attunement can improve communication and relationships in both personal and professional contexts
- How attunement can transform conflicts and challenging dynamics into deeper connections
- The risks and rewards of deep attunement
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Brett and Joe uncover the often hidden complexities behind setting and pursuing goals. They reveal how our relationships with goals reflect deeper truths about ourselves and why embracing genuine desires leads not just to accomplishments, but to a richer, more authentic life.
They talk about:
-
Why it's crucial for your goals to reflect what your heart truly wants
-
How goals reorient us toward creativity and fulfillment
-
The importance of setting aligned goals
-
How to use principles and metrics effectively
-
The importance of celebrating failures
Join us for a surprising conversation about goal-setting the AOA way.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Brett and Joe explore how we cope with life’s unpredictability—from global events to personal crises—highlighting why some of us thrive while others falter. In a world of rapid change and unpredictable outcomes, embracing the present moment and adopting clarity in intention can transform uncertainty into a powerful opportunity for growth. They delve into how uncertainty shapes us and how, surprisingly, facing it openly can deepen our relationships and resilience. Join them as they explore:
- Human tendencies toward control versus adventure
- Common pitfalls: optimism, pessimism, and "realism”
- Practical tools for thriving amid unpredictability
- The relationship between uncertainty and personal evolution
- Real-world stories of navigating uncertainty
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: https://x.com/artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
If your relationship with money has ever caused you grief, this glimpse into transformation could point the way to uncovering the root of your own challenges. Bobby Hobert comes to Joe with a question that sounds familiar to many of us: money struggles and how to step into the version of ourselves that feels so close, yet so elusive. What he finds instead is something deeper and messier: the recognition that trying to "get it right" is often the very thing in the way.
Together with Joe, Bobby explores:
- The subtle ways seeking approval can mask as leadership
- Why helping others isn’t always generous
- The discomfort (and magic) of not knowing who you are
- How stillness can reveal more than striving ever could
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
When Nathan Baschez saw a tweet from Joe Hudson about how he raised his girls—no punishments, no shame—he had to know more. So when Joe invited him onto the podcast to talk parenting, he jumped at the chance.
What unfolds is an honest look at parenting in real time. Joe shares how Hand-in-Hand Parenting shaped his family life, how emotional presence trumps perfection, and how parenting became one of his deepest self-development practices.
In this episode, they discuss:
- The link between emotional connection and behavior
- What it actually means to "stay with" a child’s emotions
- Why apology and repair are more powerful than being right
- And how we all inherit emotional patterns — until we choose otherwise
This is an episode for anyone who’s ever wondered if it’s possible to raise a child without control and whether, in doing so, we might raise ourselves too.
Nathan Baschez is a new dad who lives in LA, and the founder of Lex (https://lex.page), a new kind of word processor that uses AI to help you go deeper and have more fun while writing. Before this, he co-founded Every, and was the first employee at Substack.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
We grow up in a world where seeking approval is assumed, expected. Authority figures (like parents) assume the responsibility of approval or disapproval to teach their offspring how to move through the world. It’s also a kind of currency: it determines who we are, where we belong, what doors open for us. But at some point, some of us begin to wonder—what happens if I stop asking for permission? In this episode, Joe and Brett wrestle with the complexity of approval-seeking and how to break free from it. They explore:
- The push and pull between belonging and authenticity
- The weight of societal norms and expectation
- The way doubt and conditioning pull us from our innate wisdom
- The necessity of discomfort in the pursuit of true authenticity
- The somatic cues that indicate when we are honoring our truth—or avoiding it
- Practical exercises for cultivating self-approval
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
There is a moment when the body becomes foreign, when the timeline of your life no longer extends indefinitely but narrows into an unpredictable horizon. In this episode, Tara sits down with Michael Nagel, a beloved member of the AOA community, to speak candidly about what it means to love and be loved in the face of his cancer diagnosis. They discuss:
- The “psychedelic of mortality”—how the nearness of death transforms personal and social dynamics
- Embracing the support of a community while wrestling with the vulnerability of needing help
- The stark cost-benefit analysis of chemotherapy
- The dual forces of grief and gratitude, and learning to hold both at once
- Denial’s strange and necessary role in maintaining the will to live.
- The radical act of saying yes to struggle, and what it means to want life even in its hardest moments
Join us for a conversation that explores what it means to live when death is an ever-present companion.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Generosity is often relegated to a bit part in our lives, an incidental thing we appreciate when we notice it but not something we consider important to driving our happiness or success. What happens when we put generosity at the center?
In this episode of The Art of Accomplishment, Brett Kistler and Joe Hudson unpack the ways in which giving—whether of time, resources, or presence—is a direct line to our collective humanity and changes the trajectory of our well-being and sense of wholeness.
They touch on:
- The unspoken generosity of cultures that thrive on giving
- How generosity exposes our attachments—our need to be seen, to be in control, to matter
- The difference between obligation and true generosity
- Moments where generosity is a lifeline, a language between people when words fail
- The ways in which loss, grief, and generosity intersect
The article Brett wrote and referenced in the podcast can be found here: https://open.substack.com/pub/inneradventure/p/welcome-to-iran?r=30w17r&utm_medium=ios
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Our society glorifies self-reliance. We tell ourselves that it is the only way to survive in a world where no one is coming to save us and armor our hearts and mask our faces to avoid appearing weak or being disappointed when we show that we are in need.
In this episode, Joe and Brett deconstruct the mythology of self-reliance and ask: What does it mean to truly receive? How does our fear of vulnerability keep us from intimacy, from connection, from the radical act of trusting another? They explore the ways self-reliance is both survival and self-sabotage, the ways we must unlearn it in order to heal.
They discuss:
- How to heal the fear of needing and being needed.
- Why self-reliance is often a misleading ideal.
- The hidden fear and control embedded in hyper-independence.
- How trauma conditions us to reject support and connection.
- The surprising ways leadership and relationships thrive on interdependence.
- Practical ways to shift from unhealthy self-reliance to empowered collaboration.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
In this episode of The Art of Accomplishment, Brett and Joe provide a guide to productivity that challenges the notion of productivity itself. Drawing from personal anecdotes and experience, they explore:
- The distinction between working hard and working meaningfully.
- How dopamine and cultural norms fuel a false sense of accomplishment.
- Practical methods for aligning productivity with personal purpose and enjoyment.
- The role of reflection, rest, and pacing in sustainable achievement.
Join Brett and Joe as they illuminate the often-overlooked forest amidst the trees of modern productivity culture, providing tools to reclaim joy and efficiency in your work and life.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Why do some teams thrive in harmony while others crumble under pressure? How can leaders align aspirations with action, transforming their workplaces—and themselves—into engines of meaningful success?
Brett and Joe recorded a special episode of the podcast in front of a live audience to discuss the impact of workplace culture on decision-making, organizational growth, and personal fulfillment. The conversation dives deep into:
-
The challenges of fostering connection, accountability, and trust
-
What matters to people in organizations
-
The fundamental components of culture
-
The interplay between leadership and a team
And much more.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Purpose is not defined by what we do, but by how we show up to life’s callings—whether in moments of fear, effort, or surrender. In this episode of The Art of Accomplishment, Joe and Brett lead us on a journey to uncover what it means to live with purpose. Not as something to be found, but as something to be recognized. Together, they unpack the myths surrounding purpose, challenging the notion that it is an external destination and reframing it as an inherent part of how we live.
They examine:
- The search for purpose
- How purpose emerges in the moment
- Balancing the fear and challenge of stepping into purpose
- Discovering purpose as a deeply personal truth
- How facing discomfort and friction often reveals the path to deeper meaning
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
In this episode of The Art of Accomplishment, Brett and Joe take us on a poignant journey through the inevitability of death and the profound ways it shapes the experience of life. At the center of their conversation is Brett’s brother, facing a terminal diagnosis, and the extraordinary lessons his life—and the process of his dying—have imparted.
Through anecdotes of BASE jumping, near-death experiences, and profound loss, Brett and Joe explore the paradox of mortality: the closer you are to death, the more vividly you taste life.
Brett and Joe examine:
- The power of mortality: How facing the truth of our impermanence can compress life into moments of unparalleled sweetness.
- The freedom in letting go: Why the stories we tell ourselves about success, identity, and purpose often crumble in the face of death.
- A life well lived: Brett reflects on his brother’s choice to "dive into his family" and redefine what it means to truly live.
- Lessons from the edge: Stories of BASE jumping and near-death experiences that reveal the peace and clarity often found in moments of extreme vulnerability.
- The opportunity of goodbye: How acknowledging the fleeting nature of life can lead to deeper, more meaningful connections.
As the conversation unfolds, a clear and steady message emerges: death, far from being an endpoint, is a profound teacher. It forces us to confront what matters most, stripping away the trivial and leaving only the raw truth of our existence.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
“Show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future,” is a common expression that suggests who you surround yourself with will determine who you become and how you operate. Evidence suggests that there’s some truth to this.
In this episode of The Art of Accomplishment podcast, Brett and Joe explore the makings of effective support networks. Through the lens of BASE jumping, self-discovery work, business, and parenting, they discuss:
- The importance of shared purpose
- Accountability
- The benefit of diversity
- Practical steps to create your own support structures
- The necessity of vulnerability and visibility
Tune in for a stimulating conversation about how support systems are a vital part of the transformative power of community.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
There’s an elephant in the room! Everyone KNOWS there’s an elephant in the room, and they keep glancing at it—except for one person who is highly committed to ignoring the elephant. The elephant is making a mess. It’s taking up all the air and space in the room, and it’s already crushed poor Bob. Yet instead of talking about the elephant in the room, people are afraid to mention that there’s an elephant. Some people get so uncomfortable that they leave the room, but still say nothing. Everyone is hoping that the person who is ignoring the elephant will finally acknowledge it, so they can do something about it, but they aren’t sure how to go about it.
In this episode, Brett and Joe unpack the phenomenon of the elephant in the room. They explore:
- The dynamics that create this situation
- How looking directly at these issues can lead to healing and growth
- The importance of addressing difficult topics in both personal and professional settings
- How to create a culture where individuals feel safe to express their thoughts and feelings
- The need for leaders to model this behavior
- The significance of conflict in fostering trust and connection
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Most people never consider that fighting can be a useful and healthy practice for our relationships — and that “fighting well” is a skill that can be learned. We resist conflict until it builds up and we reach a breaking point, and then BAM! Our trauma runs the show and we risk re-traumatizing ourselves and others.
In this episode, Joe and Brett talk about how to fight well. They explore how:
• Healthy fighting can actually lead to healing, growth, and deeper connection
• The importance of speaking your truth
• What to NOT do during fights
• The empowerment of a good fight
• When to walk away (and how)
• When a fight is no longer worth fighting
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction to Relationships and Fighting
03:00 - The Journey of Fighting Well
05:51 - Understanding Healthy Conflict
09:02 - Navigating Trauma in Relationships
12:03 - The Role of Window of Tolerance
14:57 - The Dynamics of Emotional and Logical Partners
17:53 - The Importance of Speaking Your Truth
20:54 - Recognizing Apathy in Relationships
24:01 - The Gift of Conflict in Relationships
27:02 - The Nature of Truth in Perspectives
29:52 - Final Thoughts on Fighting and Love
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
What’s all this fuss about experiments? What’s so great about them, and how does one even go about it? Join Joe and Brett for a deep dive on experiments! Hear about Joe’s early experiences that led him to place experimentation at the core of his self-exploration work and what makes them so important to the work we do at AOA.
- The characteristics of effective experiments
- Why it’s more effective to approach them from a playful perspective
- How to iterate effectively
- Pitfalls to watch out for
Plus, learn about some experiments that Brett and Joe are running right before your eyes! Come along for a fun chat about how to, ultimately, have more fun in life.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to Experiments in Life
03:00 The Philosophy of Experimentation
06:00 The Role of Experiments in Self-Discovery
09:04 Characteristics of Effective Experiments
12:14 Mindset for Running Experiments
15:05 Identifying Areas for Experimentation
18:01 Iterating and Evolving Experiments
20:53 Trusting the Process of Experimentation
23:55 Real-Life Applications of Experiments
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Joe’s favorite definition of pleasure is the noticing of sensations moving in the body—not just the good ones, but all of them. This week, Joe and Brett talk about pleasure and the role it plays in our lives. They discuss:
- The misconception that pleasure is separate from other emotions
- How allowing all emotions to be felt can lead to greater pleasure
- How embracing intensity plays an important role in pleasure
- How societal norms and conditioning can affect our relationship with pleasure
- The pitfalls of seeking pleasure as a means of avoidance
Tune in for a conversation about the power of pleasure in transforming our lives, and how exploring pleasure can change your world.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Whether we put authority figures on a pedestal or want to stick it to them, authority issues abound in our society. Joe and guest host Alexa Kistler connect over their shared history with authority issues. Together, they breakdown what the impacts can be for both the authority and the person with authority issues:
- How it distorts your world
- How it affects business
- The pitfalls of being an authority
- Ways to approach handling authority issues
NOTE: This podcast was recorded prior to the announcement of Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
We heard you! So many of you loved Joe and Brett’s last coaching breakdown that we are back with another. This time, they review a rapid-fire coaching session that starts out exploring jealousy but evolves into a deep dive into setting boundaries and fear of rejection. Together, they explore:
-
Opening the heart to opposing viewpoints
-
Feeling through fear of rejection
-
Grieving lost love to find the love that is always present
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
The desire to be seen is a primal human need, and under the guise of many names it drives our behaviors and shapes society. Tara Howley, co-founder of AOA, joins Brett for a conversation about the importance of being seen, why many of us fear it, and how shame colors our experience of it. They also explore the role of curiosity in resolving conflicts and deepening connections, and how our societal mores prevent people from being seen in important ways that have far-reaching consequences.
They also cover:
• Signs and symptoms of an unowned or unseen desire to be seen
• Fear of being arrogant or prideful
• The impact of parents not seeing their children's accomplishments
• The disallowed parts of ourselves that we need to see
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
What does it mean to be “enough” to have a relationship? In this episode, Joe coaches a woman grappling with feelings of inadequacy in relationships. Through their conversation, they uncover her underlying desire for control and fear of self-abandonment. Together, they examine her beliefs about love, worthiness, and connection.
Topics discussed:
- the importance of self-love
- surrendering control
- embracing vulnerability in relationships
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Our idea of failure and how we respond to it dramatically shapes our identity and, consequently, how we live our lives. When we fear failure as an end-all-be-all rather than viewing it as an opportunity to learn and iterate, it can significantly hinder our personal growth, creativity, and ability to reach our full potential. In this episode, Brett and Joe explore the transformative power of embracing failure as part of life's journey. They discuss:
• How shifting focus from outcomes to effort can lead to unexpected and remarkable results
• Strategies for reframing failure as a stepping stone to success
• Real-life examples of how embracing what we think of as “failure” leads to better results and breakthroughs
Joe refers to the work of Dr. Kyra Bobinet, a Harvard neuroscientist who studies the link between the habenula, our ability to stay motivated when fear of failure strikes, and how to overcome this part of our brain to stay on track with our goals.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
We’ve all experienced passive aggression and can often spot it when it happens to us. Whether we’re on the receiving end or dishing it out, our unowned anger seeps out of us and gets displayed in sometimes unexpected ways. In this episode, Joe and Brett get into the nitty gritty of passive aggression—what it is, how it comes up, some of the myriad ways it can present itself, and the impact it has on our relationships and morale. They also examine what it looks like to be passive aggressive to oneself, the cultural normalizing of passive aggression, and how to respond to it when it arises.
Check out the other episodes mentioned in this podcast:
Golden Algorithm: https://www.artofaccomplishment.com/podcast/the-golden-algorithm-decisions-series-3
Fear Triangle: https://www.artofaccomplishment.com/podcast/the-power-dynamics-of-fear-emotion-series-7-3
Upright Apology: https://www.artofaccomplishment.com/podcast/the-upright-apology-a-tool-for-transformation
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
What do you do when you feel stuck? How do you get unstuck? Are you really stuck, or do you feel stuck? What’s the difference? This week, Joe and Brett unpack a rapid-fire coaching session with a woman who felt stuck in her life. They explore the feeling of stuckness and its underlying patterns, discussing what they notice in her real-time expression and the freedom she discovers through her self-inquiry.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
Brett on X: @airkistler
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Joe sits down with his eldest daughter, Esme, to discuss what it was like to raise a teenager—and what it was like to be raised by Joe as a teenager. They talk about the difference between being a parent and truly knowing your child, teenage rebellion, the things you can see in teen behavior that sheds clues on what's happening at home, and share stories and memories along the way. Tune in for a touching and illuminating conversation!
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Brett on X: @airkistler
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
You’ve got questions, we’ve got reflections on your questions! Join Brett and Joe as they address topics that have been asked of the podcast since the last Q&A. In this episode, they respond to questions about ambition, relating to narcissistic parents, addiction to stress and dysfunction, supporting children through their emotional experiences, and emotional fluidity.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Brett on X: @airkistler
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
When Stephanie Harrison’s perfect-on-paper life resulted in physical and emotional breakdown, she got curious and went in search of answers to what was causing it and what needed to change. It led her straight to the heart of happiness and flipped the achievement script on its head—much like happened with Joe. In this episode, Joe sits down with Stephanie to talk about her new book, The New Happy, the life experiences that brought them to the work of self-inquiry, and what it means to be happy.
Stephanie Harrison is an expert in the science of happiness and the creator of the New Happy philosophy. She has a master’s degree in positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was later an instructor, and was previously the Director of Learning at Thrive Global, leading the development of science-based programs that improve well-being.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Brett on X: @airkistler
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
What is the power of gratitude? How does it impact productivity and growth? In this episode, Joe and Brett talk all about gratitude—how it is often overlooked as a path to solve problems, speeds up transformation, and changes self-perception. They explore gratitude as a practice, the challenges of gratitude, using gratitude as a strategy, and allowing versus forcing it.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Brett on X: @airkistler
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
What brings someone to Master Class? What’s the impact that the course has? Joe sits down with 3 people—one from each year that course has run—to learn about their experiences and what Master Class meant to each of them before, during, and after their journeys. Tune in for a surprising conversation on what happened when they dove head-first into AOA’s Master Class.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Brett on X: @airkistler
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
What’s hidden in plain sight? Our assumptions belie our worldview. In this episode, Brett and Joe explore what it means to question the assumptions you have, what happens when you do it, and how it can change, well, everything.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Brett on X: @airkistler
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
When it comes to being understood, whose responsibility is it? What do you do when you feel misunderstood? In this episode, Joe coaches Savannah, who is grappling with feeling wilfully misunderstood by people in all areas of her life. Together with Joe, Savannah explores how state of mind, emotional content, and the desire to control an outcome—even just trying to control whether you’re being understood—impact how we are listened to and understood. She experiments with and discovers the difference between listening to and being in connection with oneself in order to express herself fully and to be understood.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Brett on X: @airkistler
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
What do public speaking and self-discovery have in common? Tristan de Montebello, founder of Ultraspeaking, and Joe sit down for a conversation. They discover they share similar philosophies and approaches that fuel their respective teachings and compare notes on the power of allowing the present to unfold before you, the importance of listening and silence, and the wisdom that becomes available when you learn to trust that everything you need to know already exists within you.
Check out Ultraspeaking and connect with Tristan: https://ultraspeaking.com/aoa
On X: https://x.com/Montebello and https://x.com/ultraspeaking
On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ultraspeaking
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Brett on X: @airkistler
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Listening! What is it? How do you do it? What’s so important about it, and how does it feel? In this episode, Brett and Joe talk about listening, which is a fundamental component of the VIEW mindset and core to living a fully aligned life. They explore what it means to really listen, how it can change your reality, relationships, and business, and share thoughts on what it is as well as what it isn’t.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community!
Joe on X: @FU_JoeHudson
AOA on X: @artofaccomp
Brett on X: @airkistler
Visit Us: www.artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at www.view.life/explore
Why the f$%& don’t we just feel joy all the time!? So much of what we do in life is in pursuit of joy. In this episode, Brett and Joe talk about what joy is, what allows us to feel joy, and what gets in the way of our full experience of it. They also explore how joy is related to feeling safe, some practical tips on experiencing joy, and how joy impacts business and leadership.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community.
@FU_JoeHudson
@artofaccomp
@airkistler
artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
In this episode, Ali Abdaal explores with Joe Hudson what comes next after publishing his best-selling book, Feel Good Productivity. They discover what lies behind Ali’s drive to always be doing, the magic of connection, and how being in connection creates more meaning, creativity, and satisfaction in life.
Ali is a doctor turned entrepreneur and the world’s most-followed productivity expert. He is the host of the podcast, “Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal,” the YouTube Channels, “Ali Abdaal” and “Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal” His book, Feel Good Productivity, is out now.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community.
@FU_JoeHudson
@artofaccomp
@airkistler
artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
Joe and Brett talk about a pattern of obligation and responsibility and how it relates to the emotional experience of love. They discuss why this pattern comes to be, as well as how it manifests itself in different areas of our lives.
Watch the full rapid-fire coaching session: https://youtu.be/NJLJJeFvrfQ
Related Episodes:
How Love Gets Confused
What is Selfishness?
Who is the Voice in Your Head?
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community.
@FU_JoeHudson
@artofaccomp
@airkistler
artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
Joe speaks with Jonny Miller about the nervous system, the role it plays in our lives, and how we can work with it to access deeper joy and vitality.
Jonny hosts the Curious Humans podcast and teaches Nervous System Mastery, an online course.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community.
@FU_JoeHudson
@artofaccomp
@airkistler
artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
Joe interviews Brett about his experience crafting and facilitating a high-flying retreat in the Utah desert and his lifelong journey of learning to embrace fear.
For more about the retreat, visit welcomingfear.com
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community.
@FU_JoeHudson
@artofaccomp
@airkistler
artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
Joe and Brett share a tool from our courses called Emotional Inquiry. This is a practice that can reduce self-judgment, change bad habits, and improve our ability to communicate with others.
To download the guided exercise, visit view.life/ei.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community.
@FU_JoeHudson
@artofaccomp
@airkistler
artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
Brett interviews Joe about his approach to training coaches and facilitators in the Art of Accomplishment. They talk about the foundations of great coaching, the dangers of coaching with unseen motives, and how a commitment to self-discovery supports the capacity to facilitate others in transformation.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community.
@FU_JoeHudson
@artofaccomp
@airkistler
artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
Joe and Brett explore a common pattern that underlies conflict dynamics in business, romance, and even geopolitics.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community.
@FU_JoeHudson
@artofaccomp
@airkistler
artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
In this coaching session with Joe, Khe Hy explores his relationship with money and the pursuit of wealth. He examines the internal scorecard that's been guiding his ambition and what he'd have to feel without it. In these feelings, he uncovers an internal compass that's been with him all along.
Khe is the Founder and CEO of RadReads and hosts The Examined Life Podcast. Find him on Twitter/X at https://twitter.com/khemaridh
Watch this session in HD on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh1sLPC8n_Q
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community.
@FU_JoeHudson
@artofaccomp
@airkistler
artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
Joe and Brett discuss what happens when a blessing that legitimately supports us in our path — money, free time, security, or even love — becomes something we’re afraid to lose and a condition we place on our freedom.
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community.
@FU_JoeHudson
@artofaccomp
@airkistler
artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
Finding love isn't just about meeting the right person, but about being ready for them. Joe and Brett explore the patterns people exhibit while seeking love, from choosing partners who are emotionally unavailable to being overly self-reliant. They talk about how a fear of losing one's identity can cause us to push away love, and how people tend to show up in our lives the moment we're ready.
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
How long do you hold on to emotions?
How much do they stagnate in your system?
How fully you can process your emotions and let them flow through you?
Joe and Brett discuss how the capacity to feel all of our emotions and allow them to move through us leads to better decisions, deeper relationships, and a richer experience of life.
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
Pondering their own entry into parenthood, Brett and Alexa chat with Joe about the profound changes in identity, roles, and expectations that come with the decision to have a child.
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
Joe and Brett reflect on how to find or build a healthy community in an era where loneliness has reached pandemic proportions.
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
Joe and Brett invite questions from listeners on the subject of humility.
How can we tell the difference between true humility and false modesty?
What does it look like to be humble while fully expressing ourselves?
What happens when 'humility' gets used to make ourselves or others small?
Send us your questions on Twitter, through our website, or in our Circle community.
@FU_JoeHudson
@artofaccomp
@airkistler
artofaccomplishment.com
We invite you to experience our work. Reserve your spot at view.life/explore
Do you ever feel like you’re stuck in a relentless cycle of burnout? You’re not alone.
In this episode, Joe and Brett dive into the nuances of cyclical burnout — the dependence on adrenaline, the self-perpetuating sense of urgency, the inevitable fiery crash.
Learn to feel the difference between stressed idleness and deep rest, exploring the interplay between fear, joy, and excitement.
Explore alternative ways of working that may be more energizing than relying on adrenaline, and see how gratitude can open up a powerful escape hatch from the burnout cycle.
To engage in spiritual practice is to bring awareness to our evolution. In this episode, Joe and Brett unpack the relationship between exploring our inner depths and getting things done in the world, and how both can be achieved together when we see business itself as a fertile ground for self-discovery.
How much tension in your life comes from using or avoiding conflict in order to get what you want?
What would change if you allowed conflict to deepen your connection with others and find great solutions?
In this episode, Brett and Joe unpack the nature of conflict avoidance. They take a deep look at its root causes and symptoms and how it can lead to stagnant relationships, substandard solutions, and a lack of internal alignment.
Learn to navigate the turbulent waters of discord with loving boundaries and an open heart, finding the connection and collaboration possible through welcoming conflict as it arises.
All of us came into this world completely helpless. In many ways, we remain so throughout our entire lives. How does the emotion of helplessness serve us, and what happens when we embrace it?
In this episode, Joe and Brett explore helplessness and its role as a crucial component of fear.
- Examine this commonly-avoided feeling in the contexts of raising children, running a team, or teaching a loved one to BASE jump.
- Learn to discern between the raw feeling of helplessness and feeling stuck.
- Experiment with a tool for emotional inquiry
Experience how the visceral feeling of helplessness can shatter illusions of control and unearth a profound sense of agency, opening up a path to clear understanding and connection to the present moment.
Brett probes Joe about his history with money, from avoiding it entirely at first to recognizing the role it played as a surrogate for his father's love. They discuss how our projections of money can be traced back to their emotional roots.
Joe and Brett focus on depression and how it shows up in our thoughts, emotions, and nervous systems.
Learn how to examine your direct experience to uncover the root causes of depression and get unstuck by relating to yourself in a different way. The conversation includes pointers for showing up for friends or loved ones who are feeling depressed.
Brett, Alexa, and Tara talk about marriage, commitment, and the fears of loving and losing a life partner.
Brett chats with Tara Howley, coach and Art of Accomplishment co-founder, about how a flash of insight integrates into embodied wisdom.
Tara is facilitating the weekly small group sessions for the Master Class + Deep Dive cohort. Applications for 2023 are open until midnight PDT on May 29th. Learn more and apply at https://artofaccomplishment.com/course/masterclass/
Joe and Brett talk about what they watch for when looking for a leader or teacher or when exploring a new path or practice. They elaborate on how patterns of saviorhood, superiority, and delegation of authority can show up anywhere in society — in the workplace, in the political sphere, or at the dinner table.
Learn more about our free workshops and online courses at artofaccomplishment.com
What is love? We all have a felt sense of love and opinions around what it is. How do our feelings and ideas about love form? What happens when our experience of love gets confused with our complex past? And how can we unwind our conditioning and open up to the deepest, richest love available to us?
How much of your life do you spend straining and efforting only to spin your wheels and ultimately burn out? In this episode, Joe and Brett peel apart the layers between 'trying' and effortless action. They acknowledge the value of each way of being across various life contexts and discuss the role emotional fluidity plays in freely navigating the spectrum — from trying to its polar opposite.
We return to Joe's journey, where his years-long chase after a momentary experience of oneness slowly expires.
Joe takes us on a walk through his childhood and early life, from the suburbs of Connecticut to fleeing the revolution in Iran. A green mohawk and an 8-second hit of oneness.
Joe and Brett answer more questions from listeners.
- Is it helpful to connect to difficult people to discover one's triggers?
- Am I delusional for feeling okay when the money's running out?
- How do Joe and Brett benefit from being purveyors of knowledge? What kinds of experiences are outside of their reach?
- How can I call up emotions that aren't presently triggered?
- How can I make peace when I don't feel affection from my partner?
- How to feel through contraction or 'gunk' in my body?
- How necessary is the visual eye contact part of VIEW? Could it be done blind?
Thanks to everyone who sent their questions. Tweet us yours at @artofaccomp.
Joe and Brett talk about how principles drive decision-making and shape our lives -- whether we're aware of them or not. They distinguish between principles and values and examine what gives a set of principles their clarifying power. Joe shares the principles he's used in life and business, and the process by which he's grappled with them over time.
In the third episode of our series for the Decisions Course, Joe and Brett dive into a common emotional pattern that shows up anywhere decisions are made.
Joe and Brett talk about how to dismantle patterns that cloud our judgment and make decisions that include the wisdom of our emotions.
Our guest Christofer returns with his wife Sadie for a powerful couples coaching session with Joe. They uncover how a pattern of self-reliance and appearing strong for each other has created stress in their relationship. What happens when they try a different approach?
Joe and Brett celebrate a banner year of podcast growth by answering questions directly from listeners.
In this episode, we explore:
(3:20) Anger – feeling, expressing, and receiving ‘anger at’ a person
(11:07) Presence – staying with ourselves in complex and fast-paced group situations
(15:23) Depression – what is it, and how can we play with it?
(21:26) Alone, but not lonely – how our sense of connection evolves through deep work
(25:16) Desire – staying in touch with our wants as craving subsides
(30:38) Mental health – relating to family or friends with mental health challenges
(35:38) Patience – insights and practices to be patient with ourselves and our growth.
Joining us for today's episode is Joe’s daughter, Esme. Esme was given a school assignment to make a podcast about where she came from by interviewing a person from her family about a meaningful experience in their life. She decided to deviate from the task and follow her interest. She wanted to know what it was like for her Dad to raise her.
When her assignment was complete, she offered to share it with our listeners. Enjoy this touching interview between Esme and her Dad Joe.
Today’s episode is a coaching session with a guest who wants to stop postponing his enjoyment into an abstract future that never arrives. The session opens up into a deep exploration of what can happen when we bring enjoyment into any moment -- even while experiencing chronic pain.
Joe and Brett discuss how to find deeper clarity in decision-making, whether at the office or standing on the edge of a cliff. From the premise that decisions are emotionally-driven, they explore how we arrive at decisions based on how we think we’ll feel when an outcome arrives. When you’re happy to feel any emotion, good or bad, your decision-making becomes very clear.
Tune in to find how becoming more aware of our emotions and finding guiding principles can help us quickly find the next obvious step in any decision-making process.
In our previous episode, Joe and Brett talked about how seeing through limiting beliefs can be scary because we're not sure we'll be safe. This is an especially relevant concern in the realm of high-risk activities like skydiving and BASE Jumping. In today's episode, Joe interviews Brett about how his relationship to the idea of safety has changed over the course of his decades-long career in adventure sports.
They discuss:
1:54 - What is safety?
5:32 - Safety as an idea can bring us comfort or distress
9:20 - The concept of safety as detachment or contact with reality
11:17 - Business and safety
13:23 - Grounded and ungrounded excitement
14:26 - Applying lessons from safety in airsports to business life
16:48 - Internal stability and flow
19:55 - Learning to be secure is learning to fall - a story
24:26 - Finding our inherent innate stability
Tweet us your comments @artofaccomp
Revisiting the topic of limiting beliefs, Joe and Brett explore what prevents us from seeing them, what keeps them stuck, and how to see through and integrate these beliefs in a way that enables a more free and easeful existence.
In this episode, we discuss:
- The logical fallacies, ignorance, and avoided consequences that make us not see many of our hidden beliefs
- How we can see a belief and still be limited by it
- Exploring the “latticework” of beliefs that hold structures of identity in place.
- Three core beliefs that commonly underlie others, and how to find evidence that loosens them.
- What we can do once we see our beliefs and how we can use awareness and inquiry to easily integrate them.
In this episode, coach Mina Lee joins Joe to explore the nature and emotional dynamics of overwhelm. They inspect how it shows up in our lives and the emotional blocks, beliefs, and nervous system responses that keep it in place.
Tune in for a fresh perspective on how to embrace the intensity of overwhelm and tap into an internal sense of safety that facilitates the real-time processing of big emotions and life challenges. Learn how overwhelm flows through a company and inhabits its culture, and how focusing less on reducing overwhelm and more on driving flow can lead to a more relaxed, productive, and fulfilled team.
Resources:
Mina Lee
In this follow-up on the recent episode “How Relationships Reveal Us”, Alexa joins Joe and Brett to dive deeper into the premise that we’re all attracted to the partners who trigger us the best. What does this mean, and how do we follow these triggers toward our mutual growth and freedom?
We discuss how trigger and attraction are related and how avoiding the feelings underneath our triggers can produce relationship dynamics that last for years if left unexamined. Learn to recognize and welcome your own triggers as well as those of a partner, finding the empowerment to draw boundaries and share desires from a place of kindness.
Also, hear Brett sing.
Resources:
Coaching with Alexa: flourishment.life
Coaching with Brett: brett.kistler.life
Courses: artofaccomplishment.com
Our sense of identity is composed of the ideas and emotional states — even the gut reactions — that we identify as who we are. Identity is how we recognize ourselves. It guides the structure of our thoughts, emotions, and visceral responses.
Most people don’t spend their lives learning how to make their identities more transparent. We often think it’s hard to change aspects of ourselves. The reality is that transforming our identity isn't inherently difficult — it's just that a large part of it is allowing the unfelt emotional experience that our beliefs about ourselves hold in place. It’s hard to change identity from our head, and it's hard to change aspects of identity that we aren't even aware of.
If you're running a business or team, it's absolutely being influenced by your identity. Identity limits the emotions we're willing to feel, the information we're willing to receive, and the actions we'll consider taking. These patterns propagate from leadership into a company.
In this episode, Joe and Brett share perspectives and tools to see and feel through the limits of identity on the intellectual, emotional, and physical levels. They explore how bringing awareness and transparency to our unconscious structures of identity can reduce rigidity and cultivate a healthy, adaptive sense of self.
"Having a fight with your identity is only more identity — it makes it stick harder. The object isn’t to get away from identity, kick it, or beat it into submission: it’s to love it and see what it is."
- Which aspects of your identity have recently been brought to your awareness?
- What emotional or visceral experience came along with these insights?
Tweet your comments or questions to us at @artofaccomp, or use the feedback form on our website.
What can we learn about ourselves from the way we engage in relationships?
Brett and Joe address curiosities from listeners about how to approach relationships in a healthy way, riffing on the observation that we find ourselves attracted to the people who most perfectly hook into our triggers, traumas, and projections. Seeing this pattern as a feature rather than a bug, relationships become a vessel for deep healing and personal growth.
Examine how an agreement that “we’re together to make each other happy” leads to resentment and kills a relationship. Consider a relationship built on each partner finding their own freedom while being kind and supportive to one another.
Learn how relationships involve a continuous grieving process for our identity and bring us into contact with the helplessness of loving another without trying to change them.
- How can we welcome one another’s needs without neglecting parts of ourselves to make them happy?
- What does it look like to be authentic and open-hearted in the face of an attack?
- When a relationship ends, how do we not close down and repeat the same pattern next time?
We’ll be following this episode up with others in a new series on relationships. Tweet your favorite quotes and burning questions to @artofaccomp and let us know what you’d like to explore more deeply.
Anthropologist and coach Alexa Anderson joins the podcast again for a deep dive with Joe into the emotional and practical value of grieving fully.
They examine several forms in which grief can arise, the relationship between grief and identity, various mysteries of the way grief moves, and how unfelt grief underlies interpersonal and societal conflict.
Alexa and Joe discuss the tools they’ve used to help them move their grief in the wake of painful losses and to pre-grieve losses that haven’t yet occurred. They share examples of deep transformation that followed the processing of grief all the way through.
Tune in to deepen your relationship with grief as an intimate experience of love and care, and a doorway to the freedom available on the other side.
“Without the grief, we recreate the cycle.
Without the grief, we relive the trauma.
Without the grief, we don’t find the freedom on the other side of the limited identity.”
References:
- Stages of Grief
- Alexa's coaching practice: flourishment.life
“Never rob a man of his pain or his gold because both will serve him equally well.”
Super Bowl champion Aaron Taylor reflects on a journey to emotional freedom that continues far beyond his accomplished career in the NFL. For every feeling he'd been pushing away, Aaron came to find that “on the other side is infinite possibility.”
Join Aaron, Brett, and Joe as they talk about performance anxiety, feelings in the locker room, and how faith affects decision-making. They touch on the nature of accomplishment, how to raise children who hear their own voices of approval, and the value of having our identity shattered to pieces. Aaron shares a tearful moment with his absent father that produced an unexpected gem of gratitude. The episode closes with the story of a critical choice Aaron made at age 15 that changed his life.
“At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what we do, it’s about who and what we become in that process.”
Links and references from the episode:
- Mentalhealthbestpractices.com
- Check back in 16 years for a follow-up interview with feedback from Aaron on the referenced conversation with his son.
About Aaron:
CBS Sports Analyst and College Football Hall of Fame inductee, Aaron Taylor, has a "larger than life" personality, but its roots may surprise you: the former Super Bowl Champion credits his success to the principles of Gratitude, Service, and Teamwork.
Instilled from an early age, these principles became the inspiring foundation for the creation of college football’s only non-individual award, the Joe Moore Award, annually recognizing the Most Outstanding Offensive Line Unit in College Football. Through the Joe Moore Award, Aaron set out to not only preserve the legacy of his coach but also to shift the focus from a “Hey, look at me!” mentality to a culture of teamwork, of putting the greater good above ourselves in society at large.
Aaron was a decorated offensive lineman at the University of Notre Dame from 1990-1993, earning unanimous All-American honors both his junior and senior years. In his final season in South Bend, he won the prestigious Lombardi Award, annually given to the best interior lineman in the country.
In an incredible culmination of his childhood dream, Aaron was drafted by the Green Bay Packers in the first round of the 1994 NFL Draft and was a member of the Packers’ Super Bowl XXXI championship team. After a two-year stint with the San Diego Chargers, Aaron was forced to retire due to injuries after the 1999 season.
Off the field, Aaron is a moving and inspirational speaker. His candid approach and sense of humor make him an effective storyteller who is able to weave a powerful message of resilience, perseverance, and the importance of having a championship mindset.
Behind the winning smile and accolades, Aaron finds meaning and feels “most alive” when being of service or bringing value to others. Shortly after retiring from the NFL, Aaron established the Aaron Taylor Impact Fund and recently co-founded The Foundation for Teamwork, dedicated to fostering the most essential aspect of all societal endeavors: Teamwork.
Aaron currently resides in Southern California and New York with his wife and three children.
Shame is nature’s way of training us to fit into our culture and society. Like an electric fence, it outlines the contours of the identity we’ve grown into and discourages us from straying outside the lines.
This boundary around our comfort zone is often a poor match for ourselves and the world we live in. When we feel shame, our emotional experience stagnates, dampening our evolution and our enjoyment. People often find themselves stuck in the same shame cycles for years.
In this episode, Joe and Brett examine the structure of shame and how to melt it on an intellectual, emotional, and somatic level.
Transformed through awareness and love, our shame becomes a natural set of guide rails that help us live our life in alignment with our deepest values.
"All we're doing here is freeing the blocking of emotions by feeling into our body and creating love where there was abandonment."
The following is the “wall of shame” referenced at the end of the episode, compiled from Brett’s journal and submissions from our listeners:
- Shame of being amateur/inexperienced
- ...of missing opportunities
- ...of being incompetent
- ...of backing down or giving up
- ...of not creating value
- ...of being wrong, and then being hard-headed about it
- ...of being an outsider who doesn't speak the lingo
- ...of asking for help
- ...of being 'transactional'
- ...of not being present enough
- ...of hovering anxiously
- ...of having shame and hiding it
- ...of being a 'hypocrite'
- ...of being a know-it-all
- ...of being helpless or clueless
- ...of not 'deserving it'
- ...of failing as a result of either over- or under-control
- ...of upsetting people or scaring them with the truth
- ...of showing hurt or disappointment
- ...of not following my intuition
- ...of not being clever, determined, or forthright
- ...of not being ambitious, or of being too ambitious
- ...of disagreeing
- ...of telling people they are wrong
- ...of being withdrawn
- ...of needing people to change their behavior
- ...of needing time
- ...of thinking slowly
- ...of not knowing how
- ...of not feeling good when others are socializing
- …of not being enough (strong, present, resourceful, smart)
- …of freezing when action is required
- …of hurting the people I love
Send yours with the feedback form on our website to add to this list. Submissions will, of course, be anonymized.
Joe coaches a course participant through an exploration of self-trust. Beginning with an intellectual question about conflicted inner parts, our guest embraces the underlying emotional experience and touches the essence of who she is.
"What's the ultimate thing that you're running from?"
"Some sort of spiral effect -- I've seen people I love spiral into depression or spiral into madness."
"There's an abyss in you that you're avoiding, and your fear is that if you go into that, you won't come out. So let's go."
Full transcript coming soon! Check back HERE for the link.
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
Apologies are commonly associated with shame, power games, or beliefs about who’s right and who’s wrong. In this episode, we talk about the freedom to be had in making apologies without shame and in full ownership of our experience.
“When you make an apology that's upright, that's empowered, it feels fantastic. You feel strength in it. You feel responsible. You feel empowered."
What We Discuss in Episode 54:
3:52 Why apologies are sometimes used to appease our own guilt.
11:05 How to apologize in a shameless, empowered way.
17:20 The notion of power struggles in apologies — how to recognize when it’s happening and what to do about it.
20:07 Why forgiveness is more for you than the person you’re forgiving.
26:54 Tools and practices for becoming more aware of the relationship you have with apologizing.
Full transcript coming soon! Check back HERE for the link.
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
At the age of eighteen — just before the birth of his child — Emile began serving a life sentence for murder. In this episode, Emile tells us how he came to face the fear that drove him to kill a man, and which followed him into prison. He shares how he learned to love himself and see through an identity that might have otherwise imprisoned him in yet another manner. After finding inner freedom, Emile eventually wrote his way out from behind bars as well: his sentence was commuted in 2017 after serving twenty-one years, a testament to his journey and transformation.
"I am under no illusions, right? I cannot make amends to the man I killed. I cannot make amends to his family. I still need to be a north star, right? In my world, in my life. So I can spend my time hating myself, [or] I could spend my time helping to create a world where little kids don't kill other little kids."
About Emile:
Emile is a queer, African-American activist whose life sentence in prison was commuted by California’s Governor Brown after 21 years for his accomplishments while in prison. While in prison, he was a culture writer for Easy Street Magazine; he co-founded Prison Renaissance, and despite the criminalization of organizing in California prisons, he covertly organized in prison to pass legislation that changed the way California treats juveniles in its criminal legal system. Emile is a widely published journalist, essayist, and literary writer. His credits include pieces in San Francisco Chronicle, TruthOut, Colorlines, and the Brennan Center. Emile is available for talks, panels, and workshops on the following topics:
• Power in the Criminal Legal System
• Media in the Criminal Legal System
• Three Principles of Creating Miracles
What We Discuss in Episode 53:
03:51 Emile’s relationship to fear — rooted in a culture of hyper-masculinity and violence — throughout his childhood and early adolescence.
14:53 How Emile came to the decision to write his way out of prison.
19:13 Finding self-forgiveness after murder and redirecting energy to make a positive impact.
25:51 The psychological experience of solitary confinement and how what happens in prison is mirrored in society at large.
31:00 The freedom and power of choice in the face of fear.
41:58 Why welcoming all emotions and aspects of yourself creates the path to an overarching sense of peace and joy.
Full transcript coming soon! Check back HERE for the link.
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
Beneath the stories we tell are emotions waiting to be felt. In this episode, we talk about how our stories and emotions interact and how feeling our emotions can help us find deeper stories.
"If you allow the emotions to move you, your stories change, period. Every time."
What We Discuss in Episode 52:
01:34 What stories are and how they impact our emotional experience.
09:14 Expanding the connection of stories to belief systems and identity.
11:42 The intellectual and emotional components of stories — how they interact and how they differ.
18:04 How moving our emotions also changes the story.
26:39 The paradox of stories both pointing to emotions and having the potential to slow down the movement of them.
30:24 The different stages of stories and the purposes they serve.
Full transcript coming soon! Check back HERE for the link.
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
Will Chesney found identity and purpose as a Navy SEAL, one of the military’s most elite teams, where he was required to perform calmly and effectively under the most extreme circumstances. However, years of neurological and psychological trauma left Will in a very dark place. Unable to do what he loved most or connect effectively with others, he turned to drinking and isolation. After hitting rock bottom, a friend reached out and invited Will to join him on a journey of self-discovery that allowed him to tap into his resilience and get himself back on his feet. Tune in as we learn what Will did to find healing and meaning in life after war.
Will served in the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group as an operator and a dog handler in the Osama Bin Laden raid. He was awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart for his bravery.
"I woke up and it was me again at one point during the weekend. I know I was a SEAL and everybody always says, “Oh, we can't relate to what you've gone through.” But everybody has trauma. Every life is good but life’s hard sometimes. Everybody deals with trauma no matter what."
What We Discuss in Episode 51:
02:41 The challenges of reintegrating into civilian life as a combat veteran.
05:51 The mindset and techniques that Navy SEALs use to remain calm and effective in any situation.
13:25 Navigating the depression and hardships that come with losing a core identity.
20:26 How humility is essential for executing any successful mission.
24:44 The reflection that put Will firmly on the path to recovery.
Full transcript coming soon! Check back HERE for the link.
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
In this bonus episode: Joe and Brett respond to requests to know more about the Master class. They go through the story of how it was created, what it includes, and how it addresses root causes. Brett also asks Joe who the course would be good for and who should not take it.
We talk a lot about connection in this podcast — connection with ourselves, our emotions, our relationships and with the world around us. It’s essentially what we’re pointing to in every topic we discuss. In today’s episode, we talk about why that is, and how orienting toward connection in all aspects of our lives facilitates sustained expansion, increases our capacity, and puts us in touch with something bigger than ourselves.
“And the truth is that you're being in connection with yourself and others is not dependent on anybody else because being in connection with what is doesn't require anybody else.”
What We Discuss in Episode 50:
2:13 Defining connection as a "meta state" or a state that encompasses all states.
17:31 How being connected affects productivity and effectiveness in a team.
23:39 The physical sensations in your body that let you know you're in connection.
28:45 How to be with tension and still feel deeply connected to yourself.
32:48 Why connection is all internal and completely within your own locus of control.
38:16 How to drop back into connection when things get tough.
Full transcript coming soon! Check back HERE for the link.
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
In Episode 49, Brett interviews Joe Sanok, a business consultant and productivity researcher who, until recently, lived full-time in a camper with his wife and children. When he and his wife decided to uncouple, it changed both Joe’s and his children’s lives in a big way. Learn how Joe used his meditation practice and other self-exploration tools to allow his world to unfold beautifully through surrender to reality as it was rather than clinging to what he thought it should be.
Joe’s latest book is "Thursday is the New Friday,” a book about the four-day work week. He’s also the host of the Practice of the Practice podcast.
"As soon as the sun came up at 5:30, I was wide awake. And so to say, I'm awake, what can I do to ground myself to be the dad I want to be? To be the person I want to be? To be the business owner I want to be? My strongest meditation practice started then and it came from a place of need rather than a place of, 'I should be doing this.'"
What We Discuss in Episode 49:
2:48 The pivotal moment that changed the direction of Joe’s life.
9:40 Finding an internal locus of control and how it allows things to naturally unfold.
12:22 Parenting as a single dad in the midst of a major life transition.
18:46 Teaching nuance, healthy rewards and handling difficult emotions to children.
24:59 Boosting creativity and productivity by adopting a 32 hour-or-less work week.
29:09 Why slowing down is the first step to productivity.
32:06 Showing children how to find their own purpose without pattern matching to their parents.
Full transcript coming soon! Check back HERE for the link.
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
In this episode, we talk about limiting beliefs and how they run our lives, affecting our capacity to be with ourselves and live the life we want. We discuss how to find them, see through them, and discover what happens when these beliefs are no longer running the show.
“It's about being able to integrate new knowledge. And if you can't integrate new knowledge because you think you have the whole story, you're limited. Period.”
What We Discuss in Episode 48:
2:51 Defining what limiting beliefs are and how they can impact your life.
12:27 How welcoming or resisting a situation shifts both your interpretation and experience of it.
17:15 The notion that integrating multiple perspectives creates better solutions.
22:14 The three general categories of limiting beliefs.
24:06 How to see through the limiting perspective by discovering it in reverse.
34:30 One of the most common limiting beliefs and questions to ask yourself to determine what relationship you have to it.
Full transcript coming soon! Check back HERE for the link.
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
What’s the difference between a boundary and an ultimatum? What happens when we use “boundaries” to control another person?
In today’s episode, design researcher and strategy consultant Alexa Anderson joins Joe Hudson for a discussion on boundaries. Tune in to learn how drawing better boundaries can deepen relationships in work and life by immediately increasing our capacity to love.
"It’s scary if your boundary is accepted and the person loves you in your boundary, because that means the way that you have modeled the world in the past has to now change. And that means you have to change."
What we discuss in Episode 47:
3:51 How optimal boundaries increase your capacity to love somebody.
8:25 Why walking on eggshells, caretaking and other people-pleasing behaviors are not the same thing as compassion.
9:35 The trap of trying to change the ones you love in hopes that it will make them happier.
13:46 How to hold boundaries in a work context.
20:33 The difference between a boundary and an ultimatum.
30:12 Resentment as an indicator that a boundary is not being drawn.
54:07 Why boundaries can be scary to set and difficult to hear.
Full transcript coming soon! Check back HERE for the link.
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
After listening to our two-part series on building functional teams, it's easy to see all of the shortcomings in our teams and realize that we might have a ways to go before we can truly call our teams functional. This realization can result in shame and feelings of not being good enough. Once we realize that our brains are wired to focus more on what’s going wrong than on what’s going right, we can shift to a more balanced assessment using a powerful tool. Gratitude allows us to see how the things we might call “setbacks" or “failures” might actually be leading us to the success that we desire. Tune in to this bonus episode to learn about the power of gratitude in a team.
“I would say the real, core reason as to why people resist gratitude besides that it’s strange and awkward in the beginning is the fact that they’re scared that they won’t be prepared for the inevitable doom that is always around the corner if they are happy.”
What we discuss in Episode 46:
1:27 Negative self-talk and how it contributes to the group dysfunction.
3:36 Having gratitude for the lack in your life and why that’s important.
7:40 Discerning between dissociative and embodied forms of gratitude.
8:04 A simple gratitude practice that can be easily used with teams and in families.
Full transcript coming soon! Check back HERE for the link.
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
Last week, we discussed the characteristics that set functional teams apart and how to build your own. In part two of this series, we explore the opposite: what makes a team dysfunctional and how to recognize the signs of one in your own organization. Some of the things that we discuss include why trading short-term discomfort for long-term discomfort is often counterproductive, the top characteristics of leaders who produce dysfunctional teams and the root of the dysfunctional behavior itself. Join us to learn how to identify these behaviors in your team and correct them so that you can cultivate a team culture where creativity, innovation and group cohesion thrive.
“The best way to measure if a team is dysfunctional is at the end of a meeting, do you feel invigorated or do you feel depleted?”
What we discuss in Episode 45:
1:26 What makes a team dysfunctional and why dysfunctional teams exist despite their shortcomings.
9:50 Why innovation requires a functional team culture to thrive.
11:09 Characteristics of dysfunctional leaders and how they impact the team as a whole.
18:18 Signs to watch out for in teams that point to a lack of cohesion and effectiveness.
23:20 Practical steps that anyone can take to bring their team back into alignment.
25:42 The root of dysfunctional team behavior and how it relates to unprocessed emotions.
Full transcript coming soon! Check back HERE for the link.
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
Every functional team is context-dependent on some level. Functionality looks different for a team of Navy Seals than it does for a team at a food processing center. However, there are qualities that all functional teams share. How are you meeting your goals and achieving results relative to other teams in your field? How much do people enjoy being a member of your team? How much do you trust that you will be seen, heard and respected when showing up as your authentic self? Tune in and learn more about what a functional team embodies and how to build your own.
“I’ll go into teams and one of the things I’ll do immediately is ask everyone what they want from a team and they almost always agree on everything. Everybody really wants the same thing. If you start owning your wants and you start creating the vision of what you want the team to be, whether you are the head of the team or not, it doesn’t matter. Everybody wants it.”
What we discuss in Episode 44:
1:15 The different types of functional teams and qualities that they all share.
7:05 Ways to determine whether your team is operating functionally.
11:50 Why trust is the foundation of a successful team and how to cultivate it.
18:42 The importance of putting the power of decision-making into the hands of the people who are contributing to the solution.
24:10 Ways to measure the success of a functional team and how it is context dependent.
31:57 Cultivating a team culture where people are encouraged to speak up and why it matters.
Full transcript coming soon! Check back HERE for the link. Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
In today’s episode, Brett interviews Heather Falenski, documentary filmmaker, adventure athlete and humanitarian worker. Her early career included several years of working on the African continent with refugees and others displaced by war. She is the founder of One World Media, a film production company based in Boulder, Colorado.
Heather led a fast-paced life working in some of the world’s most remote and challenging environments. Although her work was fulfilling, it was also physically and mentally taxing. It culminated into a severe chronic illness that left her bedridden for over a year. Heather discusses an epiphany that she had after hitting rock bottom that allowed her to move beyond impossible circumstances to regain health and stability.
“The greatest power that we have is to say: I AM that. And whatever “that” is, it’s what we’re defining ourselves to be. It’s what our concept of self is. We can define ourselves in any way that we want. We can say, I’m a filmmaker. I am healthy. I am respected. And once we hold that state as our dominant state of consciousness over a period of time, the outer world will start to conform and reflect that back to us.”
What we discuss in Episode 43:
07:30 The urge to control outer conditions and why it often leads to failure.
10:30 Stabilizing your inner landscape as a way of getting consistent results in the outer world.
14:09 Unconditioned consciousness as your natural state beneath all of the things that you identify with.
19:00 How to consciously shift into a desired self-concept, rather than allowing it to be dictated by outer circumstances.
29:11 Gratitude as a state of allowing a process to unfold, even if it takes some unexpected turns.
32:04 How hitting rock bottom can lead you to the necessary conditions to completely recreate yourself.
Full transcript coming soon! Check back HERE for the link.
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
In today’s episode, we explore how fear underlies the power dynamics that develop in our relationships with others and within ourselves. When fear is present, we naturally desire to control outcomes by taking on a bully, victim or savior role that externalizes our fear and separates us from our truth. Tune in to join us as we discuss the difference between power and empowerment. We will explore how welcoming the emotions and resistance around undesired outcomes can allow us to exit the power dynamics and show up authentically, leading to deeper connection and more harmonious relationships.
“We all get scared sometimes and so we all also get into power dynamics sometimes. It’s just the way it is. It doesn’t matter how old you are and it doesn’t matter how much you’ve meditated. If there wasn’t some of this tension, we wouldn’t be alive.”
What we discuss in Episode 42:
03:31 How fear creates power dynamics.
06:15 Fight, flight or freeze — the three ways that fear presents itself and the three roles of the Fear Triangle dynamic.
13:03 The different voices in our head and how they influence our behavior towards ourselves and others.
17:15 The difference between power and empower and the ways that it affects how we show up in relationships.
22:22 Choosing your authenticity as a way of dissolving the fear dynamic.
25:10 Brett’s relationship to fear/power and authenticity as it relates to his history in air sports.
28:00 The shame behind the roles in the fear triangle and how it can hold the cycle in place.
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2022/02/04/episode-42-the-power-dynamics-of-fear-episode-series-7/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
In Episode 41, Brett interviews Jaime Waydo, Chief Technology Officer for Cavnue. Previously, Jaime led systems engineering at Waymo, Google’s Self Driving Car program, and collaborated with NASA on the Mars Rover Curiosity.
Jaime came from a mindset passed down generationally that, especially as a woman, it was important to place everyone’s needs — children, spouse, employees — before her own. She quickly realized that this way of being led her to chronically running on empty, which neither benefited her nor her community. She pivoted to putting herself first: speaking her needs vulnerably, organizing systems to support her and designing a schedule that worked for her, transforming her work culture and her home life, while giving her the energy she needed to live life on her terms.
Tune in to this episode to find out how she made it all happen.
“Let’s just look at this like a patient on the table. What are the symptoms? And then, what’s the next step in treatment? And so, solving problems like that and not worrying about whose fault is something, I think is a really good way to keep the shame from cropping up in people and then they can stay much more in the problem-solving mode.”
What we discuss in Episode 40:
1:41 Why it’s okay and important to be selfish.
6:06 How being a chronic people pleaser can result in "chameleon leadership” and create anxiety within a team.
9:23 Generational expectations placed on women to constantly give without having support systems to replenish their own energy.
11:13 The turning point where Jaime realized that prioritizing herself would also allow her to better serve others.
16:00 How Jaime showing up vulnerably allowed her to improve team culture and cohesion during the pandemic.
20:00 Jaime’s techniques for speaking her truth within the context of challenging interpersonal dynamics.
26:26 How Jaime brought more peace and joy into her household by relating authentically with her children.
33:28 Shame as a root emotion behind micromanaging and people-pleasing behavior.
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2022/01/28/episode-41-jaime-waydo-taking-care-of-yourself-first-fearlessly-owning-your-desires-speaking-your-truth-and-designing-systems-to-support-you/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
Anxiety is a visceral experience of physical and emotional constriction that is hard to ignore. And yet, many of us engage in a maze of avoidant behaviors in an attempt to do just that. What happens when we see our anxiety as a signal pointing to unmet needs and the unfelt emotions around them? How can sitting with and feeling the sensations of anxiety result in profound internal and interpersonal shifts? Let anxiety be your guide as you tune into this episode.
“To love it, to invite it. I can’t wait to be anxious again. When you’re at that place, that’s the real freedom, where you’re not trying to manage yourself. That’s where the real freedom is.”
What we discuss in Episode 40:
3:15 Defining anxiety from the perspective of the “three brains” — the head, the heart and the gut.
9:15 Why we sometimes constrict ourselves from feeling the unfelt emotions that result in anxiety.
14:27 Anxiety as means of defending our sense of self and a signal pointing to an unmet need.
18:24. The internal and interpersonal shifts that happen when we sit with and feel the physical sensations of anxiety.
23:00 The consequence we are actually avoiding when we operate from anxiety.
25:16 The idea that emotions that we label as “positive” are often the ones we find most intimidating.
31:22 How emotional responses that society deems “unacceptable” can generate shame and anxiety, and can impel us to take action.
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2022/01/21/episode-40-anxiety-a-signal-to-unmet-needs-emotion-series-6/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
In this episode, Brett and Joe interview Sam Altman on how self-awareness gained through meditation can be combined with intelligence in business. Sam is an entrepreneur, investor and programmer. He is the CEO of OpenAI and the former president of Y Combinator.
Sam discusses his experiences with meditation and how it has transformed his decision making and resulted in a much calmer, more joyous default state of being. He explains some of the most profound realizations that he has had about himself and humanity in general through his work with AI. Join us to hear more about how Sam arrived at a place of calm detachment that allowed him to respond to challenging and stressful situations with ease.
“Intelligence and awareness, to me, seem like that have to go together.”
What we discuss in Episode 39:
1:30 A realization that completely changed the way that Sam operates in business, the way he thinks about AI, and his life.
5:04 The moment Sam realized his old way of operating, from a place of stress and anxiety, needed to change.
8:00 How to really care about something while remaining detached from the outcome at the same time.
11:03 The most transformative aspect of meditation according to Sam.
14:40 The experience of non-duality — how it shifts perspective and provides clarity on self, passions and priorities.
22:22 Whether human emotions are possible for artificial intelligence to experience.
29:38 How intelligence needs self-awareness to reach its full capacity.
32:50 How meditation shifted Sam’s relationship to anger and joy.
35:55 How the work that Sam has done on himself has evolved his work culture.
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2022/01/15/episode-39-sam-altman-leading-with-crippling-anxiety-discovering-meditation-and-building-intelligence-with-self-awareness/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
In VIEW work, we often talk about being in our body. There are practices and exercises in the courses where we’re invited to feel into our sensory experience and speak from our our heart or our gut, accessing deeper wisdom beyond our intellect. This can be very confusing for people when they approach this work for the first time. Today we’re going to explore what it means to cultivate awareness of what’s going on in our body and how it can help us access different kinds of knowing and wonder in our lives.
“There’s a way that our brain processes that requires not thinking and being in your body is one of the things that helps that to happen.”
What we discuss in Episode 38:
01:03 What it means to be in our body and why it’s so important for this work.
06:02 What it means to embrace the intensity and how it increases presence and creativity.
09:15 The difference between speaking and listening from the head, the heart and the gut.
13:33 How cultures that rely heavily on one of these types of intelligences can unintentionally cut themselves off from the other kinds of knowing.
20:28 The idea that placing awareness in our body can enrich our sensory experience and intuition.
27:28 Listening to the gut as a way to relieve analysis paralysis.
30:35 How the practice of body awareness can be incorporated within a business or organizational context.
35:46 Emotions and physical sensations as a doorway to the subconscious.
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2022/01/07/episode-38-feeling-into-the-body/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
Today’s episode involves a coaching session between Joe and a man in our community who has expressed the desire to have the courage to be himself despite fears of offending the people around him. By exploring triggers and feeling into the shame that underlies conflict avoidance, our guest finds that he can stay in connection with himself, even when others are angry with him.
"To heal my shame, I need to feel it and like feel through it and learn about it."
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2021/12/17/episode-37-healing-shame-by-being-ourselves-coaching-session/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
Most of the things that we do not understand, we fear. But what if the very path we fear also leads us to our most authentic selves? Approaching our fear allows us to go places and understand things that we wouldn't be able to otherwise. Join us in a conversation where we unpack what it means to use fear as a tool and an ally.
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2021/12/10/episode-36-fear-a-path-to-authenticity-emotion-series-5/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
In Episode 35, Brett interviews Carla Piñeyro Sublett, Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President of IBM on a heart-opening experience that radically altered the dynamic of her business and personal relationships. Carla came from a mindset that doing self work was self-indulgent. Stemming from that belief, she took on the role of being a manager of herself, her emotions and others around her. Through a sequence of transformative self-discoveries, she uncovered a greater capacity for love that was immediately felt and reflected back to her by her family and colleagues. In this episode, we follow Carla on an exploration of how making space to allow her own feelings to be felt invited others to do the same, thereby shifting the dynamics of her relationships both to herself and others into profound alignment.
"As I was going up on stage, one of my peers grabbed me and he said hey Carla, I am going to tell you something. I said what. He said I love you. That just doesn’t happen. It is wild but since doing this work, not only have I felt differently, somehow it has given people the permission to be their authentic selves and be open with me."
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2021/12/03/episode-35-carla-pineyro-sublett-on-finding-compassion-in-self-indulgence/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
Much of the work that we do in this podcast centers around defining our needs and desires — living into our own self interest, while loving it and trusting it as good. This can conflict with some of the programming that we have gotten from parents and society, which tells us that we should strive for selflessness and avoid selfishness. But what if self interest has the power to lead us to a more refined understanding of what makes us happy? In this episode, we will dive into the distinction between healthy self interest and what society calls selfishness.
"All self-interest it seems leads, if you allow it to, a more refined understanding of what makes us happy."
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2021/11/19/episode-34-selfishness/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
Brett and Joe interview Stacy Brown-Philpot, former CEO of Task Rabbit and founding member of the Softbank Opportunity Fund, on her journey through childhood abandonment to self discovery. Stacy identified that by choosing the path of self-exploration, she was able to feel through difficult emotions of fear and anger to find deeper love and joy. We will learn how her willingness to confront her past traumas has helped her become a more honest and empathetic business woman.
"You want to really work on yourself that deeply to process emotions like fear and anger, and on the other side of it is love and joy. How does that happen? The answer is it is a journey, and my journey is very different than what someone else’s journey might be. But the important thing is to be willing to take a step, one step."
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2021/11/12/episode-33-stacy-brown-philpot-on-reclaiming-abandonment/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
In last week’s episode on anger, we discussed some of the theoretical ways that this emotion impacts our relationships, families and society. In this second episode, we will follow up on what we learned last week by taking a deeper look into how repressed anger might show up and flow through us as individuals.
"If you are following the mind, it’s very hard to allow anger to move cleanly. Whether your story is they are absolutely wrong and they deserve this, or your story is no, they deserve compassion. Any kind of thick story around it is going to really make the anger have a hard time coming out in a clean way."
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2021/10/29/episode-32-the-wisdom-of-anger-part-ii-emotion-series-4/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
"I think it’s most dangerous if someone is like I should be good with other people’s anger. No, you shouldn’t. You either are or you are not. If you aren’t, take care of yourself. If you are, great, lean in. Just worry about loving your own anger, and all the rest of it will take care of itself."
It may be that the most misunderstood and hated emotion in our society is anger. At some point in probably everyone’s life, words spoken in anger have cut us deep to the bone. Actions taken from a place of rage have broken relationships and door hinges and turned families and societies against themselves, but where would we be without our anger? How can anger point to what we and others love and care deeply about? What does anger look like when we allow ourselves to feel it fully and cleanly?
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2021/10/22/episode-31-the-wisdom-of-anger-part-i-emotion-series-3/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
Brett interviews Ant Taylor, founder and CEO of Lyte, on a profound self-reflection that changed his life and business. Ant discovered that shifting from living largely in his head to operating from a more intuitive and embodied space allows him to tap into the wisdom of his emotions. We will learn more about how he now embraces the ebb and flow of emotional intensity, resulting in the uncovering of deeper truths.
"This moment, when he called out the anxiety, I didn’t know it at the time. It just triggered a different kind of, I guess, leadership style that was a little bit more like I am going to jump into that pit over there, guys. I’m pretty sure it is filled with snakes. I’m pretty sure I’m going to get my ass handed to me. It’s going to be at least funny, possibly dangerous, but if I live, come with me."
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2021/10/15/episode-30-ant-taylor-on-embracing-emotions/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
There are emotions inside all of us that can sometimes be difficult to fully feel — anger, sadness, fear and even joy often have an intensity that causes us to brace ourselves against them. What if instead of running away from a feeling, we leaned into it? How would it change our experience to turn towards the thing giving us discomfort, asking us to expand in some way? In today’s episode, we will explore how to embrace intensity in order to allow transformative change to flow into our lives.
"The person’s willingness to embrace intensity will mark the amount of change they will feel in their life in the short term. It’s a great leading indicator."
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2021/10/08/episode-29-embracing-intensity-emotion-series-2/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
Today's episode is the first of a new series on emotions. To kick things off, we’re going to explore the process of emotional development that we all go through as we start to work through each of the emotions that we’re going to discuss the next upcoming episodes.
"Managing our emotions is maybe a short-term solution sometimes, but it is really not a good long term one. That feeling of our emotions really actually brings us the freedom and the joy we want."
**Full transcript can be found here: https://artofaccomplishment.com/2021/09/24/episode-28-stages-of-emotional-development/
Follow us on Instagram at @artofaccomplishment to learn more about our guests and share your own experiences.
Joe and Brett jump into Brett’s background in extreme sports, business, and relationships to explore a key shift in mindset: from setting out to conquer our fear to welcoming it as a focusing and energizing force.
"The relationships and connections I have now feel much more real and much more robust than they often used to be when I was holding and carrying this belief that I had to hide my fear from the relationship, or it would damage it somehow."
Joe: Hi, everybody. This is Joe Hudson.
Brett: This is Brett Kistler.
Joe: Welcome to our podcast. Today we are going to do things a little bit differently. This is the beginning of a series we have put together, and the series is all about how self-discovery affects the rest of your life. It is particularly around interviewing CEOs who have had a moment of self-discovery that has changed their life and their business. Brett, what’s the self-discovery that you want to talk about? What’s the breakthrough that you feel has changed your life and the way you have done business?
Brett: Like many breakthroughs, this is one I have just had repeatedly over time, over years, but it has been related to my relationship with fear and that fear is something to be welcomed rather than overcome.
Joe: I remember at one point we were talking, and you said I used to think that I wasn’t scared, and now I realize I am scared all the time. What did you mean by that?
Brett: Growing up, I developed this self-concept of being brave and courageous, so I judged the fear in myself, judged the anxiety and judged anxieties in others and just felt I was not an anxious person. Of course, that wasn’t true. Of course, there was anxiety all the time. It was controlling me in a lot of different ways, but where a lot of that went in my life is that I started to do a lot of things to prove that I didn’t feel fear and that I was conquering it. Early on I got really into rock climbing, and then I got into skydiving, base jumping and other air sports, which helped me feel like I was in control of my fear, initially. That was my initial approach to it.
Joe: Awesome. How did it affect your business at the time?
Brett: At the time, I mean even before business, in school, I presented with ADHD, and I had a really hard time concentrating a lot of the time. I now recognize that when that’s occurring to me to this day, it is generally because there is something unfelt, often some form of anxiety that I am just not letting myself feel. The avoidance of that decreases my working memory and makes me go distracted, switching apps left and right or going to the fridge three times in 20 minutes. Those are all really good signs that there is something going on on the surface, and it is usually something fear related.
Joe: That’s an awesome recognition to be able to see what your body does and what your habits do when you are in fear. One of the things I have noticed in fear is that my mind becomes binary. I start thinking of answers as this or that instead of the thousands of answers that are usually available with any issue. What a great tell that is.
So that’s how it was in school. How did the ADHD affect your business? How did the fear and anxiety affect your business before, while you were still trying to overcome it or while you were still conquering it?
Brett: My business started out as I was doing programming, freelance. In order to focus and concentrate on programming, I needed to feel somewhat clear on what I was doing. If I started to fall behind or if there started to be something that just wasn’t going right with a project or something with a timeline or something with scope creep or expectations, I would start to get anxious. I wouldn’t let myself feel that anxiety, and so I wouldn’t recognize that it was affecting me. Suddenly, I just wouldn’t be able to focus on what I was doing. That would snowball the entire process.
I would keep this whole keeping it together attitude of powering through and staying positive and staying task and goal oriented, but that would be a farce because I would actually be doing anything but my work in those states.
Joe: How did it affect your business when you started interacting with people besides yourself, when you started having employees and you started to take on bigger clients? How did the fear that you were trying to overcome find its way in there?
Brett: That’s interesting. The fear, itself, would start to magnify because my problems would become bigger, and failure modes would be harsher, and more money involved, and more people involved. Even more so starting to become a CEO from being freelance started to be like my job is to keep it all together. My job is to make sure that nobody else is afraid. Everybody just believes that everything is going according to plan, and that also didn’t work very well. It definitely blew up in my face a number of times.
Joe: How did it blow up?
Brett: Ways it would blow is people would start to bring fears and concerns to the surface, and those concerns would be uncomfortable and inconvenient. I might even see them as potentially damaging morale or distracting people from the goal of the project. Oftentimes those concerns were very, very valid, and if they weren’t valid, the feeling that somebody had around them was also very valid. If it wasn’t addressed, it led them to feeling disconnected from the project or from the team. In either case, the fears were very important signals that by ignoring them or by trying to change them into some kind of positivity or sometimes even just boldness or courageousness. We are afraid, but we are just going to do this anywhere, stepping on the signal and not listening to it
This occurred over the course of like 15 years in my business at different levels. This is one of those things that I continued to learn on a new level every time the business grows and I jump into a larger version of the same picture, I then have a new layer to feel through this, like welcoming people’s fear and welcoming my own fear and also holding space for it in a way that allows it to be processed and not just resisted and turned into low level anxiety in the team.
Joe: I am going to dig a little bit further here. What specific? Can you give us something really specific? I know a lot of people out there would be very much in understanding of what you are saying. They can resonate with it. My question is if you can give us something really specific so potentially somebody who is still in that place where they don’t think they have the fear might be able to recognize it.
Brett: One good example was on this project where I had been leading this project before, and then one of our heads had been leading the project later. Then the company grew, and we started to get bigger clients. Myself and him started working on bigger projects with the bigger client, and we needed somebody to take over this smaller project. We put together the people that were available and gave them the task of taking over this project, diving into it, understanding it and then meeting the next year’s goals.
Along that process, there were fears that were brought up by a number of people on the team, like I am not sure if I quite have enough handle on this or I am not sure if the time zone is working well between this other team member and myself. I am not sure what exactly milestones we are trying to achieve here, and what it is going to look like. A lot of that stuff I just brushed off a little bit. It’s okay. The team is going to figure out. I know this is a rough beginning, but it will all get sorted out.
As a result of not listening to those things, the project started getting off track, and ultimately the fears were realized. We started to have issues that were starting to be pretty big issues for the client. We corrected course, and the process of correcting course was me just having this breakthrough of everybody has actually been saying very important things all along that I wasn’t listening to and that I wasn’t bringing into the conversation, and I wasn’t permissioning.
Joe: What I am hearing is what they said would bring up a fear in you that you didn’t want to feel and, therefore, I think you said as step on the signal. Before we move on to the next section, which is how you made the discovery and what that process was like, I would love to just understand how your relationship to fear in the past affected your relationships. What did it do with your relationships with lovers or family or friends?
Brett: There are a couple of things I could get into there. One is in relationships with partners. There might be a fear of being engulfed and then just not naming that fear of being engulfed would lead to just putting up walls, and then those walls would lead to lack of connection, lack of charge. Early on, really, in my relationships, I just had a hard time actually having any relationships because I was constantly so afraid of doing something wrong or scaring somebody away or just being weird.
That’s the relationships, but something that’s also really interesting is it is interpersonal but also out of the business context was in air sports and in base jumping. There would be a group of us on top of a cliff at an exit point preparing to jump together, and we are young, early 20s, mostly male. There would be a lot of ego and just signaling and wanting to fit in.
A phenomenon occurred a lot where somebody or even everybody on the exit point would be feeling a particular kind of fear about something, like the conditions really aren’t that great right now. They were great while we were hiking, but now they have deteriorated. I feel uncomfortable about this, but nobody else seems to feel uncomfortable so it must just be me. I don’t want to be the one to suggest that we all go hike four hours back down this mountain. That led to some really uncomfortable situations at best, and at worst led to fatalities.
There is where some of these breakthroughs really come in. I love these people, and here we are together. Because we were trying to be something for one another that was some vision of courageous, because of that, now somebody is injured, and they are in the hospital. It could have been us. It could have been any of us. That was really where this particular kind of breakthrough really started happening for me.
Joe: The first question that comes to mind for me, particularly if I am thinking about the audience, is what the difference is in your mind, your experience and your body between overcoming fear and feeling fear.
Brett: There is a difference between fear and excitement. Both of them show up similarly in the body as cortisol and adrenaline making your body be ready to act swiftly and sharply, but there are different components of it. If you are about to do something dangerous where you have to perform well to survive, there is going to be some component of that that is fear of actual danger. Your body is going to be inhibiting itself from doing something dangerous, and then there is another part that's the excitement of feeling competent, prepared and your body readying itself to perform at its best.
Both of them are always present, but the difference that I feel between them is when it is excitement, I am feeling expansive, more aware and sharper. But if it is fear of something that I should not be doing, if I am in over my head or I am not paying attention to a variable consciously that subconsciously I am aware that is going on. There is something wrong with my equipment or conditions have changed, and I am just not letting myself see it. Then the fear will actually feel more constricting and closing in.
The difference between overcoming it and welcoming it is the difference between standing on an edge and feeling the fear closing you down and just pushing through it anyway or feeling the fear and then welcoming it and seeing how it transforms and how much it transforms into excitement. The same thing can be going into a meeting in business. The same thing can be going into a difficult conversation with a partner where it is like I don’t know what’s going to happen in this conversation right now. I may lose my partner and we may have a deeper connection after this. My body is scared, but also I am ready to step into my truth.
Joe: When you feel into your fear in air sports, the signal seems to be whether you should do it, or you should not do it at that moment. What generally do you find the signal to be in the rest of your life?
Brett: The signal isn’t just a do it or don’t do it, a go or no go. It is what to be looking at. The signal is telling me if I listen to and feel into the signal, the signal is telling me what I care about. The signal is telling me what threatens it, or at least what I perceive threatens it. If I don’t listen to that signal and I just want to overcome it, then I may assume that I understand what the signal is and ignore it.
That can be to my detriment, but feeling the signal and then being like I am afraid of this happening. I am afraid of losing this project. I am afraid of losing this client. I am afraid of not being able to support my team. I am afraid of not being able to pay the bills. I am afraid of my business collapsing. I am afraid of being a failure. Then if I let myself actually feel those fears, then I can see what’s on the other side of them. Just letting my body process those unwanted outcomes makes it that if I find myself in the direction of those outcomes, I have already mapped the landscape. My intuition will be more calibrated to lead me in a workable direction.
Joe: It also feels like something that you are saying is that one of the signals in the fear is there is a self-care signal. It means one of my needs might not be getting met, and I need to address that.
Brett: Yeah, absolutely. Then the attempt to overcome the fear is the opposite of self-care. It is like this need of mine doesn’t matter, and I am not listening. Instead, I am going to prioritize this other thing. Sometimes that works, but in the long-time frame, if you do that every time, statistically it just doesn’t work out as well when you are actually paying attention to what all of your needs are even if not all of them can be met at the same time every time.
Joe: That’s something I see all the time with the people is that this generalized anxiety that they have is perpetuated because they are not getting their needs met and they are not seeing the signal of their anxiety of I have needs here that aren’t being met that I can ask for.
Brett: I have come to understand the difference between fear and anxiety in myself is that something that I am afraid of, there is usually something specific. I can point a finger to it. If I am feeling just anxiety, then it is general. I might be confused about what it is, or I might feel like it makes no sense but if I listen to that anxiety, the first step for me is often just to feel my dissociation, to feel my numbness because I have that patterned really deeply. My system just shuts down anxiety so that I don’t feel it so I can continue doing whatever I am doing, rock climbing or whatever. That was patterned in very young.
I feel into that pattern, feel into whatever numbness or dissociation there might be in my body. Slowly, the anxiety will start to rise to the surface. I feel that anxiety. I am like wow, something feels tingly here and butterflies. This feels uncomfortable. Then the more I feel it, the more that anxiety turns into some specific fear or constellation of fears that come with the signal of what it is that I actually need that I am not getting.
Joe: That makes a lot of sense. That story that I started out at the beginning where you told me that I used to think I wasn’t afraid and now I feel like I am afraid all the time, tell me what that transition was like. How did you become aware that there was this constant fear? What was that journey like? How could somebody who is right now thinking to themselves I might be that guy, I might be that woman who feels like I am not scared at all?
Brett: I started to notice it part way through the 18-month course that I did with you. I found that there was a period of a couple of months where I was paying very little attention to my work and to my business and doing a lot of going to authentic relating workshops or circling, just going to the tea house and hanging out with people and talking about all kinds of things that were related to my business, but I wasn’t actually taking action on it. It just started to dawn on me that I was clearly avoiding heavily. What am I actually avoiding?
Through the tools I learned in the program, I started to recognize that there was fear there. I was like huh, that’s strange. I had never thought of myself as being fearful. I had the exact opposite self-concept, building a life around being somebody who is in a deeply healthful relationship with my fear or at least aspiring to be. This idea that I was living with low level or maybe even high level but not felt anxiety in just my day-to-day life in San Francisco where I had all of my basic needs met just broke my brain to realize.
When I started to feel it, I realized of course, I have always been feeling this kind of fear. This is why I used to be really awkward around women when I was really young, and why over time I have been working through discomfort and fear in business scenarios and with boundaries. This fear, this anxiety would be the thing that I wouldn’t recognize that I was feeling that would make me walk away from an opportunity because I was afraid of failing at it.
Joe: What were some of the tools? What were the tools that helped you in this process? You speak about this 18-month course, but if I am listening to this thing, I am going what tool, what can I do.
Brett: A lot of what we did in the course was exercises that brought us into feeling different emotions and witnessing each other feeling those emotions. This alongside recognizing that the world is a project, and that the judgments that we have of others is something that we are judging in ourselves. With those two things superimposed, when I would see somebody in fear, I noticed that I judged it. Huh, interesting.
Joe: Yeah, that’s such a great hack in general is when you really notice that all of your judgments are just a way for you to stop feeling something or to resist feeling something. It is a cool hack because it lets you know everything you are avoiding. That’s awesome. It’s great to hear that from your perspective. I have one perspective going through the course. It’s cool to hear the other perspective.
You are going through this journey of understanding your fear. You have this recognition that actually the fear is always here, and then you have a recognition that there is a signal to the fear that’s really important. At some point, there must be some transition from taking that information and acting on it instead of taking that information and trying to overcome it. Can you tell me about that process? Can you tell me about the process of learning to act on the signal of fear?
Brett: There are a lot of little moments this occurred. An example in air sports is I would be preparing to do a jump of some kind. I would have this fear that was sort of abnormal, not just a normal level of elevation but like something else going on but logically everything seems to be fine. I would ignore it. Then we are about to jump and then somebody points out something that I had completely missed that was dangerous, and I am like oh, yeah, that was the fear. That was what the fear was pointing to, so having that little recognition.
This is something I need to be listening to more and it is a fine line between those different signals of fear and excitement. You never find the exact edge between them, and I don’t know if there is a binary edge. Having these close call experiences, and also in business, too, also in personal relationships, but just recognizing how much the cost is of not listening to it, not listening to the fear, not feeling it, how much the cost of trying to overcome it is.
Also, another thing in flow sports with your body is that if you are second guessing your body while your body is doing something, then it takes it out of flow. To be feeling fear and then suppressing that fear is just a way of fighting yourself. It decreases your connection to what you are doing.
Joe: What I notice is that oftentimes when people start to recognize I have this fear, and it is telling me I am not taking care of myself. It tells me that I have a need that’s not met. There’s another thing they have to jump over, and that thing seems to be asking for their needs. You might be sitting on the top of the mountain, and you might say I have that fear and probably nobody is saying anything. Maybe other people have it. It is really important to say it. Then there is the actual act of saying it.
In something like air sports, it makes sense to say it pretty quickly because it could be your death. It is a high consequence. But in a business environment, oftentimes people really hesitate to ask for their needs to be met when they realize the fear is indicating there is something not being met. How do you do that? How did you learn that? Have you learnt that?
Brett: You would be surprised how long it can go in air sports without learning this or continually learning it. Also, in business, I have a client who is also a very good friend. We worked on a project with them for 8 years. Over time, it started to grow old and stale. The tech was growing stale. There wasn’t really money to be putting into it, and so it started to just reach this point where it was we really need to be rebuilding this from scratch. It is also going to cost a lot of money. I don’t know if you guys have that kind of money. I am really scared to tell you that I don’t know that we can continue to work on this project without resources I don’t know that you actually have. I really want to do well by you. I don’t want to leave you abandoned, and I am scared. What are we going to do?
I don’t want to be working the way we have with the resources we have had. I apologize for continually trying to make more and more happen under the same budget constraints when my assumption is that can’t increase. That’s one example of a conversation that’s happened a number of times in business. I’ve done a lot of business with friends. With or without friends, there is often a caretaking aspect. Now that I am working on this project with you, it is my responsibility to make sure it is going well. If you have business needs otherwise, then you should tend to those. I will just make do with what we can. That very often did not serve the clients in the end.
Joe: What I heard you say is one of the ways in which you have learned to ask for your needs to be met is by being really vulnerable and speaking out, saying I am scared here and just owning the fear and then seeing how that lands. What other ways have you found to be able to speak your need or speak the fear that’s happening in a way that can be handled by people or in a way that feels really true and authentic to you?
Brett: Just drawing a boundary. I have a need that I am afraid it’s not going to be met, and it is going to be difficult for me to be moving forward with this uncertainty of not knowing if this need is going to be met, so what I really need is this. I need not to have this be happening.
Joe: What, if anything, was your way of becoming comfortable with drawing these boundaries that have potentially these huge consequences, losing lovers, losing business, losing friends?
Brett: Feeling the thing I am afraid of happening and then grieving that occurrence. Pre-grieving the loss, recognizing that maybe I am in a codependent relationship with a partner or a client, and that the moment I draw a boundary to make sure that my needs are met, they will attack me. That can actually really happen. They might even leave and then badmouth to everybody. That could actually happen. That’s the situation I have gotten myself into through avoiding fear.
Now is the time to feel it, and be ready for the consequences, which in the short term may hurt a lot and in the long term the result is living more authentically and having better relationships as a result even if it is not the same relationships.
Joe: That’s a great transition for focusing on the third part of this interview, which is how life is now. If you were to ask the people in your life, whether it be business or your air sports friends or your relationships or your family, how would they describe the difference? They might not describe the difference as he seems like he is really in touch with his fear. They might not even notice that. What do you think they do notice?
Brett: I’ve heard people describe me as being more confident. I am not sure that is quite the right word for it, but my internal experience is being more willing to feel afraid of whatever it is I am stepping into. Externally, people see it as having courage.
Joe: How about the dissociation? You talked a bit earlier about your dissociation being one of the first things that happens in fear. What are people’s reflections about your dissociation compared to before?
Brett: I haven’t gotten a lot of feedback from people on my dissociation or lack thereof. Sometimes I do. People are like where are you right now. There is a way that I am not defensive about that. I don’t have as much shame around being distracted or preoccupied by a fear, and so if somebody points something out to me. They are like where are you right now, what are you thinking about. It used to be the case that I would come up with a bullshit excuse, not an excuse but something that wasn’t really what I was afraid of, and I hide the fear.
Now I am much more likely to share vulnerably what it is that I am feeling. It often just evaporates the moment I do that.
Joe: What is all of that doing to your sense of connection with your friends, relations and their sense of connection to you?
Brett: I feel much more loved for who I actually am, and I feel like my fear is much more permissioned and welcome. Others feel that their fear is welcome with me. That deeply increases connection and also leads to a lot more difficult conversations that are had earlier rather than later, finding what’s actually real. The relationships and the connections I have now feel much more real and much more robust than they often used to be when I was holding and carrying this belief that I had to hide my fear from the relationship, or it would damage it somehow.
Joe: How does that look in a business meeting? What did a business meeting look like before you were feeling your fear and after you were feeling your fear?
Brett: An extreme example, before feeling my fear, I would overpromise, underdeliver, speak to the positives that are going on in the project and be afraid of sharing anything negative. That went predictably poorly every time. Now there is just a much deeper sense of trust. Clients and I feel much more comfortable that neither of us are going to move forward into something that really doesn’t work for us or that doesn’t set us up for success. There is also trust that if anything changes course as something always does, that we will be able to have the conversations to correct course and flow with reality as it is coming at us, which leads to a much deeper sense of safety.
Joe: My experience of that is it is not just safety; it is trust, which I think you just mentioned. As you feel the fear, instead of overcome it, what is your sense of trust in life? How has that changed at all, if at all?
Brett: My trust in life has deepened immensely. For example, if I go through this fear process of what happens if I lose a client, what happens if I lose the business, what happens if I lose everything, what happens if I break my legs, I have a much deeper trust that whatever happens, I have strong relationships. Even if I lose my relationships, I have an ability to develop connection anywhere, with anybody. Whatever it is I have in my life is less dependent on the thing I am attached to that currently makes me feel safe. I feel that I could approach a much wider range of possible scenarios and situations and unexpected curveballs and be able to navigate it with self-compassion and in connection with whoever is around me and just be much more resourceful than I used to.
Joe: To wrap this up, I would love to hear about a specific example of something that happened in the last year where you had a big oh crap moment, a big fear moment and you felt into it, and what happened afterwards.
Brett: Several months ago, we had a really big client that reduced the team size for our projects. They had to go back to the drawing board and do a bunch of internal rewrites. Our contract with them, which was an ongoing, very large contract for us, was significantly reduced, which brought us from being cash flow positive to cash flow negative. Immediately, I was like this is Covid times, things are crazy. What are we going to do? I just let myself feel that fear, like oh no, this is the end. Everything is going to collapse. I let myself feel that. I laid down in my bed and just let my body shake, just let my body shake it out a little bit.
Then I came out of that, and I was like this is a really great opportunity for me to get out of the golden handcuffs of having one client bringing in most of the money and to start really leveraging some of the business development we have been doing and go out and find more clients and expand into new areas and upscale. That was a couple months ago. Right now we are in a much better position than we had been. I am really, really grateful for both that challenge and that experience and also for having this relationship with fear that allowed me to just feel it because that could have easily been another multi-month avoidance fest that would have led to collapse in a previous iteration of myself.
Joe: I am just so curious. How did you approach your team with this? This big thing happened. You feel your fear. How did you come to your team? What did you say?
Brett: That’s also interesting. I think a previous way I might have brought that to the team would have been like this happened, but don’t worry. We got this. Then people would have been do we really got this. I don’t know. The way that I approached the team with it and also I just have a really great team, so they were approaching me in the same way when we discovered this information. It was like this has happened. This is good for a lot of reasons. It is also scary, and we are going to flow with this and do what we need to do. There are many reasons we are in a good position right now, and there is also uncertainty. Let’s step into it and see what we can do.
Joe: How did that go as far as people getting nervous and saying I’ve got to leave? The fear that you have that I have to tell everybody I have got it all together and it is all going good, how did people actually respond to that level of openness? There are good things. There are bad things. It is scary. It is uncertain. How did people react to it?
Brett: There was a lot of excitement actually. There were some fears and there was some discomfort, but also there was a lot of excitement. This is awesome. Let’s grow. Let’s expand. Let’s get into new markets. Let’s find new clients. Let’s get out of the comfortable zone we had been in. Of course, there were some who didn’t take that approach. We did have a couple of people end up leaving, and I am not sure entirely what their internal reasons were. I think some of them were just getting a better offer elsewhere or maybe they just felt uncertain, so they left.
But those that are with us are fully onboard. It has led to a lot of really great team cohesion. There has been a number of difficult conversations and there has been a number of celebrations of achievements and small wins leading to bigger wins. Now there is just a bigger potential for what the company can be now. I think that a lot of us are feeling it.
Joe: Just congratulations on a two-month turnaround from losing a huge client or losing a huge portion of your revenue. To turn that around in two months is pretty amazing.
Brett: Thank you. Also, there was pretty good timing with it, too. Q1 is a pretty good time. A lot of hiring happens then. People have been starting to come out of the Coronavirus. Timing worked out well for us. I had just recently hired a VP of Sales to start bringing in leads, so we had a pipeline that was ready and just hadn’t fully been capitalized on yet. But a lot of that came down to listening to early fears of what would happen if we lost a bunch of business. Let’s be ready for that. It was a bunch of stacked fears having been listened to that led us to be in a position that we could turn it around that quickly.
Joe: That’s awesome. Thank you very much for spending time with us. I hope it was as enjoyable for you as it was for me. It was good to share these other aspects of you with the audience and to learn so much of it myself. It is interesting how I’ve known you for years now and there is still so much of your life that is a constant surprise to me. It was a pleasure to get to see these aspects of you. Thanks, Brett.
Alright, everybody. Thanks for listening to the Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we encourage you to rate and review the show and share it with your friends. We want to hear from you, so send us your feedback, questions or suggestions for the topic of our next episode. To join our newsletter and learn more about the AoA community and online courses, or to find the show notes from today’s episode, visit artofaccomplishment.com/podcast.
The essence of a cult dictates that you hand over your power to someone else, which is the antithesis of the VIEW mindset. Is there a way to retain autonomy and have individual needs met while also deeply contributing to the needs of a group? In this episode, Brett and Joe unpack the differences between cult dynamics and group cohesion.
"I want to bring people to their own wisdom, and I don’t want to bring people to my wisdom, somebody else’s wisdom or a group wisdom."
Brett: We were talking about the vow and cults and some of the people coming back into AoA from having done ESF and other kinds of work, and there is a tongue in cheek that sometimes people joke about. I am back in the cult. This is a cult. This is not a cult. A question for you that somebody asked that was tongue in cheek was what if you just stopped resisting that you are a cult leader.
Joe: It is funny. As soon as you say this and I know it is being recorded, I become self-conscious, and I don’t even want to put that thought in anybody’s mind. I don’t know if it is a semantic thing. It is like when other people use the word cult, and in my mind cult means another thing. I don’t know if it is even generational. But to me, the essence of a cult is where you are handing over your power to somebody else, which is the antithesis of the work that I want to do in the world.
By the way, I don’t think that all cults are bad. I actually think there are things that are cults that we don’t call cults. I mean I have definitely been in companies that have a very cult-like thing where it is very hard to leave. There is only one way of thinking, and dissent is not appreciated. I’ve definitely seen it in places like political systems, some deep cult-like behaviors, but it is such an antithesis of what I want to be doing in the world that I just want an association with it, which is there is something in it for me in that.
Brett: For sure. It brings me back to something you said once. When we did our one-on-one session that was recorded, there was a thing that you said when I was feeling a lot of tension. You said if you took all of the tension out of a cell, it would die. Tension is part of the system. I am seeing this here. In any group, there is like a desire within the people of the group to start to surrender to the group. Please just solve my problems, meet all my needs, make my decisions, make life easy for me, and heal me, change me, especially in personal development type groups. There is that particular force that is kind of driving towards group cohesion and group healing. As it does that, there is some level of critique and critical thinking, or personal wants and needs can start to slowly fall to the wayside.
Then there is this other opposing force, which is I think the one that you are living in a lot whenever somebody brings up this is a cult. You are like ooh, I don’t want to use that word, which is no, no, no, we want everybody to have their own autonomy and we want everyone to have their needs met and not sacrifice a large portion of their needs so that the group can as a whole can get a small sliver of needs met and then completely be unhealthy in other ways. There is this tension.
Joe: I also see that when groups subjugate themselves for the group, there is no healing that happens. As people in a group subjugate their needs, it just creates trauma. It doesn’t actually create healing. I think there is a tendency for it. I think it is very similar to the same tendency that two people get into a relationship and both of them start making sacrifices to their authenticity to make sure the other person is happy or stays happy, walking on eggshells or saying the exact right thing or doing whatever they need so the other person doesn’t get upset with them or angry at them or get sad or whatever it is.
I think it is the same thing that happens, and I think it is really unhealthy in a relationship. I think it is really unhealthy in a group. At the same time, there is no judgment towards it in my system, but there is a deep dislike for that kind, dislike as in I don’t like the taste of that. Just like I don’t like cooked fish, and I want to eat fish. I will eat raw fish. There is that to it.
I think the other thing that bothers me about the cult thing, and I would love to explore this because, like I said, I know there is something in this for me. What I notice is when people get involved in these programs, they have a way of interacting with each other which is deeply fulfilling. People come and say I really miss doing the work. I really miss the groups. People who do this work together stay friends for five, six years, and they get to know each other. The community builds. There is nobody telling them what to do, no leadership in it. They just enjoy it. It feels to me that to say this is cult behavior, it diminishes it. It is saying we can’t be this way naturally. We can’t just be happy naturally. We can’t just be deep and intimate naturally. It is only okay because we are in this cult.
There is something about that tongue and cheekness that I think dismisses the idea that this can be your life. This is my life. This is many people I know. It is their life and they have never done this work. There is something that is like hey, don’t dismiss. Don’t. That only can happen in Vegas. No, it can happen any God damn place you want it to happen. This is your life. There is something in that that I get a little defensive towards. I am like hey, no.
Brett: There is this idea that can happen when you find a group and a set of tools that bring you a deeper place of self-acceptance and self-love, and your life starts changing. There is a stage where you believe that these tools and these people are either required for it, or just that you are far more likely to get it if you are with those people. It starts to create the sense that there is a boundary between us and then everybody else who is not on this page. That is a thing that just happens anywhere in any group, a sports team, fans of the Browns, anything. It is like these are our people. Those are the other people. Our religion is the ones that eat chicken. The other religion is the ones that eat pork. It starts to create this boundary.
There is something in the way that you relate to this, which is even if we are playing with the idea that this is a cult or not a cult, letting ourselves play with the idea of letting the concept of cult show up in our jokes so that we are at least self-referential and self-aware of the tendency that we might have to become insular, but there is also still this.
Joe: Hold on. I’ve never thought about it that way. Never thought about it that way. What you are basically saying is on some level potentially the jokes are a way to keep it in consciousness. It creates an awareness of it so it doesn’t get out of hand potentially.
Brett: Yeah.
Joe: That actually makes me really appreciate it in a different way. I hadn’t thought about it that way.
Brett: I think it also puts a little bit of framing around the kind of behavior that might occur. For a group of us that moved to Hawaii recently, we have a particular way of relating to each other. We have these tools, and some people would come and hang out with us. They would see us doing things differently, like go deep into emotions with these particular techniques. We actually had a couple of people be like are you guys a cult. If we were just defensive, like no, we are not a cult, then that would be maybe a red flag.
Joe: What’s the answer? What do you say?
Brett: The answer is I don’t know. If things got out of hand, we could let ourselves accidentally devolve into a cult if we weren’t actually careful. It is easy to recognize this group has something that I need and that I want that seems to be filling my needs more than I have found other places. Then I start getting attached to the group. Then my fear and my control mechanisms start coming in, and then somebody might start trying to control the group. Then people might sacrifice themselves for the group cohesion because the group is so important and it feels like you aren’t going to get it elsewhere, which goes back to the thing you were saying, which is buying into the story that all of life can’t be the work. There is a tendency that that could just happen if you are not watching for it.
I think there is a way that being self-aware of we have a different culture developing in this group of people than is the broad culture out there. That might mean others project cult onto us, and that might also mean that we accidentally start exhibiting those behaviors.
Joe: What’s interesting to me here is that I watched the Vow thing. Some of the tools and values were similar to some of the tools that we use, and so I remember the immediate response. I watched it with Tara, my wife. Our immediate response was, mine more than hers, I just don’t want to do this at all. I’ll give up the business. Maybe I won’t even coach. I don’t want anything to do with this. I was having a hard time, and I remember watching it and I am like where does the cult begin and where does the cult end. Then I started doing the research on the cult stuff and how to control groups, and then I started seeing it everywhere.
I remember this one scene in the Vow where the Dalai Lama is talking to Keith Raniere, and the Dalai Lama has a problem with the thing, and then everyone is like this is a problem. He gets talked out of the fact that it is a problem, and then everybody goes oh. I am like wow, it is like one cult talking to another cult. Now, obviously there are huge differences between the two. I really like what [unclear] and I like some of what [unclear] has done in the world, but I saw it in companies. I saw it in political groups. I just saw that this behavior is almost everywhere. I remember after watching it, there was kind of this thing that happened to me is almost like there is just no way to do this. It was kind of like a giving up or something. There was something in me that was just like no matter what you do, humans will make it a cult. No matter what, and by humans, I mean me. I am not excluding me from them.
It was just like no matter what you do. This is what it devolves into or evolves into because people like to have a clear understanding of what’s going on. They like to have roles. They like to have hierarchy. That was the arc of my adventure watching that, and somehow or another in there, when I started to really research, I remember 25 things that let you know you are in a high control group or a cult. I was like we don’t do that, we don’t do that, we don’t do that, and we don’t do that. All of a sudden, there is a distinction, and this is the difference. That’s the only thing that actually I think got me interested in doing the work again. It was so much not wanting. I want to bring people to their own wisdom, and I don’t want to bring people to my wisdom, somebody else’s wisdom or a group wisdom.
I sometimes don’t see my own wisdom. I see the group wisdom or someone else’s wisdom. It is something that it is impossible to completely let go of. It is an interesting journey for me. I wonder how much of the word is charged. I think about the word narcissist. The words narcissist and victim, they were bad words in my head. If you are a victim or you are a narcissist, and then seeing we are all narcissists and we are all victims. There is no bad word here. I haven’t found the place where cult isn’t a bad word. In my world, I don’t see the place where giving up your will to a group is not a bad thing.
The funny thing, the thing that hits me first is that giving up your will generally is a beautiful thing. As a matter of fact, I think that level of surrender is like one of the most enormous gifts I have ever had in my life, but it wasn’t to a guru. It wasn’t to a group of people. I think about something Gareth, who runs this thing called Conscious Cult, and he says what happens if you are surrendering consciously with the full understanding that there is imperfection on all sides of it. Even there, I would say it is far better to surrender to the ineffable than it is to a person.
Brett: The ineffable, that’s one of the things I can imagine someone hearing and being like what the fuck does he even mean with it. You said before surrender, but the way you have this feeling about this word surrender that is like I don’t like the way people use it normally because it is like what are you surrendering to. I’ve seen you make a distinction between surrendering to something outside of yourself that is not tapped into your wisdom and surrendering to whatever it is coming from within you and through you. That brings me into something that actually really relates this sort of unavoidable phenomenon of group cohesion into cult behavior that just exists in all humans even if you become part of the cult of personal development gurus who doesn’t want to be a cultist, which could be its own cult.
Joe: No way out.
Brett: No way out. On some level, there is this fundamental pattern in life to self-organize into structure. Structure becomes control, becomes rigidity. That can occur on a group level, but it can also on an interpersonal level inside us. That’s actually what a lot of this work is, to recognize where in some sense we are a cult of one with our own beliefs and our own sub selves and parts that are colluding in some cult-like way to be us against the world. The work itself is to be swimming upstream of that and finding what’s underneath it and relaxing those constraints and letting a broader intelligence come through.
Joe: I have so much joy in me right now hearing that. I love that, how you have shown that the cult is a projection of the internal cult and how our internal structure is very cult-like. We have a guru that’s a voice in the head that says things and we believe it without questioning whatsoever. I just thought the whole thing. If I want to take the principle and say if my internal world is that of abuse, then I look outside and see the external world as abuse. If my internal world is one of love and I look outside, I see the external world is one of love. I see how love acts. The question I have for myself is if I am rejecting the cult externally, if I am rejecting the cult externally because I am not sure if I am entirely rejecting it. But let’s just assume I am.
I am definitely rejecting one of those things. Then I am rejecting that in myself. What does it mean to reject the cult in myself? Because the fact is if there wasn’t that cohesion, if there wasn’t this is the worldview that I hold, then there would be like a deeper level of collapse. It would almost feel like you lose your center. Wait, hold on a second, which every major transformation has been a losing of the center or the fear of losing the center.
Brett: There is some level that each of us is afraid of losing the center for a reason because we could just fully dissolve, and yet dissolving is exactly the direction that is most healing for most of us to go, not all of us.
Joe: The way I think about it is I am a cult of one, and that’s okay. There is a tremendous amount of joy with that statement, and there is also a nervousness. I am a cult of one, and that’s okay. That’s like somehow I define myself incorrectly. Somehow I define myself incorrectly as someone who can almost entirely see through my own belief patterns. It is almost like an acknowledgement and an okayness and a love of the fact that I can’t see through my own. There are ways that I can’t. Maybe every way I can’t see through my own belief patterns. I am sitting with that. I want to see what that does.
I am going to say it again. I am a cult of one, and that’s okay. What turns in me is like it is almost like there is no group of people who don’t have a set of beliefs. It is like seeing humanity of cult, and it reminds me of this thing when I saw it the first time or the only time. I remember thinking to myself a couple things, like wow, they get so much goodness out of this. There is so much goodness out of this. Then the next thought was why do you have to mess this up. What would anybody do? Then, the other thing that I saw was like everybody is in a cult. The cult of materialism, the cult of technology, there is just major thought processes. If you went out into society and said I am just going to give them all technology, the society would be like what the fuck, and they would call you a cult.
They wouldn’t see they are the cult as well, and so I think there’s a freedom that comes with this of saying cults of one, and that’s okay. No matter how I try, I will never, ever be able to see the water that I swim in.
Brett: A characteristic of the experience of being in a cult must be that there are parts of you that are aware that you are being controlled or that you are allowing yourself to be controlled, and those parts are being resistant, disassociated. I am curious in you, in this I am a cult of one, you have this belief that I will never be aware, or I don’t see through, but what about the part of you that does see through whatever sliver of the structure you think you have.
Joe: That’s how I identify. It’s the destruction of that identity that is, I think, the cult, meaning I identify as somebody who can see through it. It is the death of that identity, and I agree. I mean I agree that all of us see through it, and I also agree that all of us are [unclear]. There is definitely just some stuff. We don’t know what life would look like if we didn’t have eyes or we had different sensory organs. We are limited in our ability to understand by the nature of our organism if nothing else, by the colors that we see. But that’s an extreme version. It is an interesting thing. Literally it is like the death of the identity.
Yeah, I can see through stuff and I can’t see through stuff. There are ways in which I am open minded and ways in which I am not open minded. I can’t even see the ways I am close minded in some cases. I can see the ways I am close minded sometimes and then trying to ignore them.
Brett: Which is a necessary thing to do in order to weave our experience together into any cohesive story that can have any consistent plot line at all. There has to be information that’s lost and that is essentially some micro level of cult behavior inside ourselves.
Joe: Let me test it. Give me a cult joke or something like that about this work being a cult. I want to feel what happens in my system.
Brett: We are getting a bunch of shirts made with your face on it, and we are going to save the world.
Joe: You got the double duty on me, even the saving the world part of it. There is more humor in it, for sure. I can laugh at it. I couldn’t laugh so easily at it recently, so that’s a good sign. I had this idea that if we ever did have a center, if there was ever a place where everyone was coming together to do this work consistently, that we would have a picture of a guru on the wall in five or six places, but every month it would change. We would pick one of the people and put them in the guru picture.
Brett: At least two of them would be cartoon or something mythical, an animal. That’s great.
Joe: Thank you for that.
Brett: I enjoyed it.
Thanks for listening to the Life in View podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW or to take a course, visit view.life.
References:
The Vow, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10222764/
Many of our beliefs about the way the world works and our role in it are formed in our early years of life. As adults, the family dynamics that we had as children can show up at work, in our relationships and other areas. Family dynamics gives us a chance to identify and heal patterns that are no longer useful to us so that we can empower ourselves to consciously choose how we show up in our lives.
"My brain isn’t in a place where I can trust my thoughts, so I am going to go get my brain in a place and my body in a place where I can trust my thoughts, where I am out of my trauma so that I can think clearly because if I am acting out of the trauma, I will recreate it over, over, over and over again."
Brett: So wow, that was quite an opening Q&A.
Joe: Yeah, Art of Accomplishment is on. Holy crap.
Brett: People went there.
Joe: Oh my gosh, unlike any start of anything I have ever been in. It was amazing how vulnerable it got and how quickly. It was really cool.
Brett: I remember the first Q&A after the first week of work went really, really deep, and we were all blown away. But this was just like the orientation. You are going through a bunch of PowerPoint slides, and it was like oh man, I can bet half the people here are probably bored to tears. Then, before you know it, a couple questions come through and it is straight to the core.
Joe: Straight to it. Sara was saying to me. She said I was scared. Last year, we got lightning in a bottle, and it might not happen again. She says that fear is completely gone. First thing she said when I called, she said I miss AoA calls. This was great. It was awesome.
Brett: Something I wanted to talk about today is something I saw today in this call. So many of the things we do in this work, so many of the times I see you work with people, it often boils down to some form of family dynamic. We have talked about this before. We have these projections we carry from our childhood, people who are caretakers, parents or family members, but also projections of society, projections of money. But in particular, there is something to this concept of family dynamics that just continually comes up. I have noticed it comes up in my life a lot, in my relationships. I have projected my mother onto basically anybody I have ever dated to varying levels of effect. I have projected my mother and my father onto the management in the company, in my company and in friendship groups.
A lot of times when we do this work, there will be a group. It is often in a group setting, and I know that you size those groups such that family dynamics can come up and then be worked with. So let’s talk about that a little bit. Tell me a little bit about what family dynamics means to you, and what makes this important.
Joe: Something that is most interesting about it is that family dynamics are cool in the fact that they allow you to see why things are coming up, and they are also cool in the fact that it gives you one way to heal patterns that are no longer useful to you in your life. That’s what makes them cool. If you look at Freud’s work or a lot of the early psychotherapy work, it was all very focused on that early family stuff. There are a lot of ways to have significant transformation without ever really going into it. I say that at the front end just to say that there is lots of avenues of transformation. There are lots of ways of healing. There is no one way, and so this is a cool thing to talk about but if anybody is listening and thinking this is the only way, please let that go in your head.
The way I think about it, the best explanation I have ever heard is that our brains, there are many brains that hang out. There is delta, alpha, beta, and theta, and theta is kind of the brain wave that we get into right before we go into sleep or right as we are waking up. It is the brain wave that happens when you are under hypnosis, and it is the brain wave basically you are in basically from zero to seven, eight years old, for the majority of it. It is really a way that you are being programmed just like you would under hypnosis. As kids are young, they are in this theta brain wave. It is why fairies are real for them, and it is why they are in a magical reality. It is that dream state, between that dream and awake space. In the American Indian culture, it was represented by dragonflies, which I just think is a beautiful imagery of what that is.
We are being programmed in that young age, and we are in that brain state that tells us what reality is. This is love. Love is what we experience mom and dad doing and how we experience their interactions with us. This is what money looks like. This is what power looks like. This is what nature looks like. We get taught this whole way of looking at the world in those young times. If you are three years old and you are scared and you run to mom, and she is like it is time for you to be strong, that’s what you are going to learn. If the mom pulls you up and holds you, that’s what you are going to learn. If the mom slaps you and says why do you always bug me, that’s what you are going to learn. That’s how you are going to react to fear. That’s the way I think about it.
That zero to 8 years old particularly is very much your programming. I think it continues. I think we learn things. Traumatic events can teach us and unteach us things, so there are other experiences we can have. Therefore, that’s reality. If we stay on that path, whatever we learned in that time frame, even though it might be painful, it is very easy to stay there. It is when you move out of that path that it becomes challenging. The other thing about this, which is ancillary, but I think cool to think about is that most of the transformation techniques I have seen be very useful tap into the theta brainwaves. Oftentimes, when people finish Groundbreakers, that week-long course that we do very rarely, people are like I can’t remember anything that happened. I don’t know what happened. When you and I did ESF together, people were like what the hell happened. I spent 3 days, and I don’t know what the hell happened.
Brett: I still can’t remember 95% of what happened there.
Joe: It is because you are in that theta space, and that’s where you are doing the reprogramming.
Brett: To bring some examples into this, in the Q&A today, somebody made a comment in a session with you. They were like I am enduring the storm. I am weathering the storm. You were like wait a minute, in that, there is still an enduring going on. You can see the whole fractal family dynamic show up of like I was taught that life is a storm to be weathered, and you could see how that might create a pattern. If I am carrying that belief, then I will be attracted to people who are also experiencing life as something to be endured, and then we find this thing where we are enduring it together. That could be one way. If my mother was that way to me or was that with life and taught that to me, then I might find myself in a relationship. If I am resisting that and I am like I don’t want to live a life that feels like enduring, then I will find myself living a life where I am resisting the perspective that it is being endured and finding others in my life to feel that resistance with.
Joe: Yes. Sometimes you are finding people who are seeing the world that way you see it, but you are also finding people to prove the way you see it is right. If you are somebody who believes that the world should be endured, then you are probably also finding somebody who makes you endure life. You will find people who both become the thing to be endured and the people who you can say isn’t true we have to endure together. That seems to be the pattern that you recreate over and over again.
Brett: Right. Let’s talk about a couple of other example patterns just to make sure we are not in one particular zone here. Another thing that might happen is that somebody might grow up with a father who is somewhat emotionally absent. They are always working, but they are providing for the family. Their role is creating space in the home, but they are not as present maybe because they can’t be. Then that person grows up, and then they find themselves doing the same thing or also just expecting the same of others.
Joe: Or marrying that exactly. They might become the role of the father, or they might marry the role of the father and expect that is just normal.
Brett: Maybe another example, to paint a third example into this picture, is a mother who has a hard time accepting the way that her child is different from her or following a different path and struggles with that, so then the child grows up with a belief and then dating people who have a hard time accepting parts of them and feeling judged.
Joe: There is an immediate step there, which is mom doesn’t fully approve of me. Therefore, the voice in the head doesn’t fully approve of me. Therefore, I date other people who don’t fully approve of me. That’s all part of that scheme. We can find one of those for all of us. We can all find one of those, but there are also ones that almost pertain to almost everybody, not everybody but almost everybody.
I will just give a really simple example of that. As a kid, one of the things that you learn is that there is a mother and a father. They are authority figures and they have control over your life. Most people walk around the world with a boss, who is an authority figure and who has control over their life. Not everybody, but most people walk around the world with that. Now, I will often tell clients you don’t have a boss. You have a client. You have a customer. Unfortunately, you are not diversified. You don’t have lots of customers. You only have one, but you have a customer. They are not your boss. They are not your authority figure. They are somebody who is a customer, and you can lose them or you can get another customer or another client, however you want to look at it. Just even the perspective that you have a boss who has some sort of control over your life is a projection of a family dynamic typically.
Brett: Yeah, and that points to something which this family dynamic thing is, which is when you were growing up, it was real. Your parents had authority over you. You didn’t have certain kinds of power that you do as an adult, but the perception continues.
Joe: Yes.
Brett: That’s the way that the lives that we lived in our family become the lives that we recreate in subtler and subtler ways as we mature and develop.
Joe: That’s right. That’s exactly how it works.
Brett: What are some examples of how this shows up in the workplace? You just had the boss projection. What about in a team? What are some ways that perhaps some people’s family dynamics issues interact with one another? What are some examples you have seen?
Joe: One of the coolest things, you just said in the team. One of the tricks I will teach to executives is that if they aren’t the authority figure in the room that everybody is reporting to, then a lot of these dynamics diminish. One really cool way to stop those kinds of projections that we are about to speak to is to make the team report to itself, meaning every time you have a team meeting, somebody else is responsible for holding accountability, meaning that the team when somebody fails, it is not the boss who says hey, what happened. It is the team that says hey, what happened. To really make the accountability to the team, which is really where the accountability lies. It is not to a boss.
That’s just a cool way that you can create a structure inside of an organization and that changes a lot of this kind of dynamics, which is just a drag on an organization. The drag can be so many ways. It can be I project onto my boss that I need to please them. I project onto my boss that they are never happy with me. I project onto my boss that their opinion matters more than my opinion or that they have more authority than me. One of my favorites is I project onto my boss that they are a bad authority figure and I need to rebel against them. One of the more destructive ones I see a lot of is if I grow up with a father or mother who I always disappointed, I will recreate ways to disappoint my boss. You see that happening all the time where people are creating ways to disappoint their boss, but they can’t see that they are recreating it.
All of that happens, and then the boss also has projections back, like I am responsible for these people. No, the boss is not responsible for them. Everybody is responsible for themselves. Or these people, I cannot depend on them. I have to do it all myself, or I can’t let them down or nobody can do it except me or I am necessary. That’s one of my favorite ones that bosses have. You see this especially at like not exactly the top tier of an organization, but that level below that. When I work with executives that are not quite at the C level, oftentimes those people, the big thing they have to do to get to the next level is learn that their job is to become unnecessary. They aren’t necessary anymore. They can create a structure that basically makes them irrelevant. When they do that, they just take it to the whole next level. It’s when they think they need to be needed or that they offer something special that the team can’t offer without them that they hold themselves back. All of those are projections of family dynamics as well.
Brett: Absolutely. That kind of points to something you said earlier about how family dynamics is an interesting way to think about things and it can be useful, but don’t get too hung up on it. I can imagine some of these dynamics that come up, issues with authority, might not have actually come from your family. It might have come from your school. It might have come from a mixture of those things.
Joe: There is a tremendous number of men in Silicon Valley who are in the top tier of their game who got bullied pretty heavily. These are a lot of the billionaires, a lot of the biggest players in Silicon Valley are men that don’t have an inherit large social intelligence that got fully bullied. They learned there is such a thing as power, and it is real. It is a dog eat dog world, and they need to be in the place where they have the power. They are incredibly smart and they can do it. That also in itself is a project. Obviously, it is not the only people who are near the top tier of Silicon Valley, but there is quite a few of them.
Brett: Seems like a common cluster characteristic. This then also brings us back to what we can do about this. If we are using this kind of framework to start recognizing that a lot of the patterns that are occurring in our lives are being recreated from our family of origin and then kind of spreading out from that to our community or whether we were bullied or how teachers treated us, how church treated us, various things, and we are still recreating these patterns, let’s talk about an example of a team or a personal relationship or a group of friends. When people’s stuff comes up, they start to slide into these roles where one person will have a set of projections onto the group. Then that will just happen to click into place when someone else has their set of projects, and so on around the group.
Joe: I would say it doesn’t click into place unless they meet the right opposite or right corollary projection. It is like they find themselves, and they are like click. This happens in almost every marriage I ever seen where their traumas overlap in this perfect way where they can play the opposite roles with each other where they can therefore learn to grow and transform because of the relationship.
Brett: It is like people find each other based on the complementary surface area of their traumas, and that’s the thing that makes a team.
Joe: And the best part is when they get into blame, one of the main moments when I am working with a couple where something gets undone is when they realize it’s perfectly matched. There is no one to blame here. I am holding my side. You are holding your side. That’s a great moment when people see that. It loosens the whole thing.
Brett: Then the dynamic can change and loosen. The relationship can grow or develop, or they can move in separate directions, whatever is right.
Joe: If they move in separate directions without healing it, they will most likely create another relationship that’s very similar.
Brett: Yeah, that sounds right. It is interesting. There is almost this way that you could frame our family dynamics or our family projections as something that holds us back in the world, but it is also the exact kind of thing that is heat seeking, seeking us into exactly the kind of situation we need to solve those dynamics and grow through them in connection with people.
Joe: The reason I said don’t make too much of the family dynamics is because knowing this doesn’t help you heal it very much, a little bit it does. But let’s take this exact same metaphor, but we will talk about it on an emotional level. Instead of saying family dynamics, we will say what’s happening emotionally. In your family, you were taught certain emotions you couldn’t have. Your body needs to get homeostasis. Just like if you were taught you couldn’t pee, you would be walking around trying to find a place to pee. Your body is trying to get the emotions to move through so that you can get back to homeostasis. What the subconscious is doing is it is recreating patterns where that emotion can come up so that it can be felt. As soon as you fully allow that emotion, you fully surrender into that emotion and let it move all the way through you, then you will stop recreating the pattern on an emotional level.
The intellect, understanding it is useful. It loosens it up. Emotionally, feeling the thing that the pattern has taught you not to feel will very much loosen it up. That will change it pretty dramatically, and the other thing that helps on a nervous system level is that when you are in that pattern, there is a felt sense that is different. If you think about the time that you got most angry for no good reason, or felt most out of control for no good reason, even though you might identify the reason, you realize this doesn’t make logical sense that I would be this upset. That’s the sensation that you have, not the upsetness, but the sensation that’s carrying that upsetness. That’s how you know you are in your trauma. There’s a felt sense of going I am in my trauma. I am in the pattern here. I know this, and then that’s where the rational brain can be really helpful and say when I am in my pattern, I just can’t believe my thoughts right now. I can’t believe this.
I remember in my journey there was this really wonderful moment where somebody came to me. It was in a business thing. They were like hey, what should we do. I said I can’t trust anything I think right now. My brain isn’t in a place where I can trust my thoughts, so I am going to go get my brain in a place and my body in a place where I can trust my thoughts, where I am out of my trauma so that I can think clearly because if I am acting out of the trauma, I will recreate it over, over, over and over again.
Brett: Yeah, it seems like a great way for the rational, intellectual mind to be able to support the emotion and its process, and then on the opposite side of that, I can see that the thing you just said. My emotion that just came up is way more than it should be. I could also see that being a rationalization for I should down regulate that emotion and not have it because it is clearly too much for the situation. Somebody just looked at me a certain way and I am all upset. But another way to frame that is this is exactly the amount of emotion my system needs, and this thing brought up a bunch of bottled up, pent up stuff that maybe I don’t want to bring up right now in this environment and attack people with, but it is a pointer to the fact that it is there.
Joe: Yes, and it wants to be felt, it wants to be processed, and it wants to be loved. That’s exactly right. That is beautifully said, better than I could have said it.
Brett: Keeping on the topic of family dynamics, there is another thing that I can see that occurs. People will go through a story of life. This is maybe one of the ways this can be a trap. They will say I just keep dating my father. I keep dating my mother. Then that becomes a belief about themselves, and it becomes a learned helplessness within that. It seems like the emotional stuff we were just talking about is a way through that. It seems like there is something useful about recognizing that. I can see what is happening here because that might be one breadcrumb back to the thing for me to work with, the emotion to be felt. It also might only be a breadcrumb back to the thing next to it, and it might not have been a family thing.
Joe: Intellectually, you can learn this thing. This is a family pattern, and then it can not change. Then you can start the belief system of I can’t change this, and then you can start the belief system of I am always going to be in this. Or you can notice the pattern and you can have the belief system of this is going to be really tough to change. Then you can say look, I have changed it a little bit but I am not making progress quick enough. All of those things are more of the projections from your early childhood.
Brett: The belief that I am not quick enough.
Joe: Emotions are hard. Transformation is difficult. I am not quick enough. I can’t do it. I am helpless. Mom was helpless. Blah, blah, blah.
Brett: I will always be controlled by my emotions.
Joe: Or I can’t trust emotions. Emotions can’t be trusted. All of these things are learned from somewhere in the childhood. What often happens is somebody sees the first thing that they have been working on, and they stick right there on that thing. But they don’t see it is held in place by a whole bunch of other ones. As one or two start falling apart, it is easy that the rest to start collapsing.
Brett: If somebody is listening to this episode and they are starting to look for family dynamics in their life from the perspective of this might be interesting, might be helpful or it might be a trap, not to take it too heavily, and they start to see something. What’s the next step for somebody who starts to recognize I have had this pattern all of my life, I can see how it comes from some form of these dynamics. How can I start to see people as an individual, unique human that they are and not as the people that I was raised by?
Joe: The next step to take outside of learning to recognize it, and the best way to do that is when you are triggered, to know that you are in it then and to feel through it, which is another great step. The other thing that is like a couple really cool tricks to play with are if you find yourself in an emotionally triggered space, stop everything you are doing, feel the emotion and without any intellect, just feel that emotion. Trace it back to the first time you ever felt it. That will really teach you where this thing came from. That’s a really useful trick.
Sometimes just feeling where it came from, and this happens oftentimes with things you don’t expect. You might be triggered over a boss and you find out it has something to do with a babysitter, or you might be triggered over money and you find out it has something to do with dad. That’s a cool trick.
Another really trick as far as next steps of dilapidating the program is to remember that all of these programs came for good reason. If you were striving your whole life to find your dad’s love and so you are programmed to strive for love, that’s your job as a kid is to make sure you are loved by your dad or you might not survive. It is instinct, and it is beautiful. Can you love these patterns? Can you respect them for what they tried to give you? Can you just help them find new ways of doing it more effectively rather than move into you shouldn’t be doing this? I keep doing that. What’s the problem here? Because that’s just more of the pattern.
Learning what the pattern has done for, how it has served you, its intent even if it is mean and vicious, its intent is to take care of you. To see that and honor that also is really effective in allowing the patterns to become more useful and more effective and more functional.
Brett: It is almost like honoring your path to have been perfect as it is, and your behavior to have developed according to very logical, environmental shaping. It makes it easier to step forward and say that my future behavior is also going to make perfect sense in some regard, and I don’t need to be self critical. I can just feel what’s true for me.
Joe: I was just dealing with a person recently, an old friend who I love dearly, and just going through the heat. At some point, he looked up and said to me I realized that it doesn’t matter who would have been put into my position, this is what would have happened to them. He saw that it wasn’t personal to him. The life, the patterns, all of it wasn’t personal to him. Anybody put into that situation would have ended up that way. It was so much relief in that.
Brett: Do you have any integration questions for us about family dynamics?
Joe: Yeah, the first one would be what’s the pattern in your life that you most feel holds you back, and then the second question would be what’s the way you try to avoid it that is actually keeping it in place. What’s the way you are trying to avoid that pattern that actually holds the pattern in place? That would be the other way to say that. Then the third question is what is it about this pattern that has been serving you, has tried you and has served you in the past.
Brett: Great questions. Thank you, Joe.
Thanks for listening to the Life in VIEW podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW or to take a course, visit view.life.
In today’s episode, we will be taking a deeper look at projections. What exactly does that mean? The parts of ourselves that we cannot own — either good or bad — are what we project onto other people. The concept of projection is rooted in the idea that we create beliefs based on our past experiences. We carry these beliefs with us into the present, where they subconsciously shape our current reality.
"People think somebody who really sees through projections is really smart because they come up with really cool, unique, innovative ideas, or they act in a way that is seemingly not normal but yet it works. It is not so much really that they are smart or not smart. It is that they don’t see the same level of limitation on everything that somebody who fully buys into the projections sees."
Brett: Today we are going to talk about projections, so Joe, you have talked about projections a lot in our courses, this idea that from our past experience we create these beliefs that we carry into the present. This shapes our reality in the moment, and I would like to get into that a little bit further today. Joe, what are projections?
Joe: It is such a complicated subject because the word “projection” is used for many things. There is the psychological projection, which somewhat stems from Young’s work and some other psychologists. That is this idea that the parts of ourselves that we cannot own, the parts of ourselves that are either good or bad, but that we cannot have full ownership over. We project onto other people. This is something that happens when you are deeply triggered.
An easy way to look at this just briefly is you look at most politicians, and if you see them really just accusing somebody else of something, you can see a way in which that is true about what they are doing as well. If you are dealing with somebody and they are like they are so arrogant, that comment in itself is arrogance. It is as if you can presume to know what their reality is. That's projecting the unknown parts of ourselves, and it can be positive things too, like oh my gosh, they are so smart. They understand everything, and I don't. That can also be unowned parts of ourselves, positive unowned parts of ourselves that we then project on to other people. There is that. That is what we will call psychological projection
Then, there is this projection onto the world, and that's more about how we lived our first eight or nine years of life when we are theta brain waves and where we are basically learning what life is. We might learn that love is associated with shame or money is associated with lack. Authority is associated with anger. Then we go and recreate those projections in our life because we are like that's what we learned it is, and so you go into the world. You are in your 20s, 30s, your 40s, and you find out that everybody who you choose to have a romantic relationship with has a tendency to shame you, or you see money as something there is not enough of and then you are not able to have the money that you want or need. There is that kind of projection onto the world.
Then there is the projection of self, and the projection of self, which is closely related to the next projection, but I want to make a distinction between the two, the projection of self is that we don't really see the world. We see ourselves, or we don't really see reality. We see ourselves in reality. That would be like if somebody is a thief, they see the world as a world of thieves. If somebody has a deep relationship of self-love, then they see the world as love. Even when they see the atrocities of the world, they see it as people trying to love themselves, and they are not capable. The way that we see ourselves and relate to ourselves then is how we interpret the world. That's another level of projection, the projection of self.
The final projection that I see is the projection of I, which I am making a distinction here though there is not a real one, but I think it is useful to make the distinction. That's just the idea that there is a you that is separate. We have this identity. The way humans work is we have a sense of identity, and we don't know if other animals have that sense of identity. But we have a sense of identity. At the very core of that sense of identity is the idea that there is an I that exists as separate, and a tremendous amount of spiritual modalities. Ramana Maharashi is the most known example where a lot of the work is really to see the self not as something to be protected, not as the body, not as an emotional state, not as something that has existed for 45 years or whatever it is, but as illusionary in nature or to see the self as the awareness of all of those things. That's the last way that I think about projection. It is those four ways I think about projection.
Brett: You have got psychological projection where you are projecting onto essentially someone else’s psychology making assumptions about their intent or their experience.
Joe: In that case, it is disowned parts of yourself, parts of yourself that you don’t want to fully accept about yourself.
Brett: These can be parts that you judge about yourself, but also parts that you judge about yourself not having.
Joe: Correct.
Brett: Like in the case of admiration towards somebody.
Joe: Specifically, they can be things that you don’t actually see in yourself. It is so disowned that you cannot even see it in yourself. If you see somebody as super brilliant, there is no person I have met that doesn’t have their own level of brilliance in some capacity. If you see that, admire that, put that up on a pedestal, it is a strong indicator that you cannot see it in yourself. Similarly, if you are like that person is a thief, and you cannot see that you also have in that in you and in your actions, then that’s the psychological projection.
Brett: That’s the psychological projection, and then you have got the projection onto the world, which is sort of your baked in assumptions about how the world works from your early childhood experience.
Joe: Yes, right.
Brett: You have got this projection of self. This isn’t a projection onto yourself, but it is a projection of yourself onto the world, seeing the world the way you are internally organized.
Joe: Correct. That’s right. I use the example of the saying in love, but if you think that it is really important to be dressed and put together, then you are likely to think it is important for other people to be dressed and put together. That’s the simple version of it. What’s good or bad for you is good or bad for the world. The way that you see yourself and relate to yourself is the way that you relate to the world.
Brett: If it is weak for you to cry, then it is weak for others to cry.
Joe: Correct, great example.
Brett: Then the last one is the projection of I, which is you are distinguishing from the projection of self as this one is more of a meta projection that you are a separate self from the world.
Joe: That you have an identity.
Brett: There is some boundary that is you.
Joe: If you think about that, if I cut you in half. If you think you are your body and I cut you in half, which half is you?
Brett: Or a [unclear] experiment where they cut the corpus callosum and people had basically two very separate identities, each controlling half of the body and at odds with each other.
Joe: Exactly, or people think I am emotional. You were emotional, but what happens if that emotion just stops? Are you still emotional? Is it essentially you? What is essentially you is the question? Ramana Maharashi uses language like who am I. The deconstruction work of almost all spiritual traditions are getting to the basic underlying question of what you are essentially. What is that you are that you have always been? From the moment of birth to the moment of death, what is the unchangeable, immutable part of yourself?
Brett: Which I suppose is just a process of seeing through projections of the self, which changes our experience of the world as we do that. So as you mention emotions, how do emotions play into projections? How do they interact?
Joe: When we have big emotions, we learn differently. Part of how people brainwash folks is that they create big emotional experiences for them, and then that’s what allows them to change habits. When we have big emotional experiences, it allows us to learn. If you want to redefine somebody’s idea of themselves or idea of the world, basic training is an example of this. You create these big emotional experiences, and then they have a different sense of themselves at the end of it. Emotions are useful in that way. They are evolved to do that. If I get bit by a snake, and I have this big emotional experience and a big physical experience, I am less likely to be bitten by that snake in the future.
What this does is it makes traumatic experiences really key definers of who we are. If we have had long-term abuse or we had a car accident or if we have been in a war, it starts to define us because it upends our learnings from those early days or maybe it even happens in those early days of life. They are really important that way. I think the nuance that people often don’t quite get is that oftentimes people recognize when they have big emotions that they are out of control themselves. You could say they are acting in trauma, or you can say they recognize that when that big emotion takes control, they do stuff they don’t want to do.
The natural movement when they see that correlation is they assume causation, and in that assumption of causation, they say I need to manage my emotions so that I don’t have big emotions, or I need to be in control of my emotions. What that path ultimately leads to is a level of disassociation. The emotions are still there. They are still moving us, but we disassociate from them. They become harder and harder to recognize.
The other way to think of it is to assume correlation. These things are together, and my job isn’t to control them or suppress them or push them down. It is to learn how to surf them and to love them and to accept them deeply and to find the joy in them or to not resist them. If we take that step, then what happens is the emotional currents of our life become vitalizing. We fall in love with them. There still isn't control, meaning that we don’t find ourselves succumbed to these big emotional experiences because we start to see that that is just another level of resistance. But we don’t disassociate from them, and we don’t stop to see or recognize the massive impact that these emotional currents are having even if we have pushed them so far down that we don’t feel them anymore. If we don’t dissociate, we start to recognize that these big emotional currents in our lives are more like road signs rather than causation.
Brett: It almost sounds like you are describing sort of chicken or egg thing with projections or emotions where the emotions we have in our early youth. Children are very emotional, and that correlates highly with their learning rate and how quickly they soak up information like a sponge. They create these projections, and then we carry these projections into our lives and tend to see the world as it was when we were kids, which will then tend to bring us back into those emotions we had when we were kids. If we let ourselves feel those emotions and process them, then being in this emotional state can allow us to shift our projections.
Joe: That’s exactly it. I would say it is not that we only see the world. We create the world. When we are living through a projection, it is not just that we see the evidence that it is true. But you also attract the same experiences. You also manipulate events to create the same experience. On an emotional level, what’s happening is that emotion that wasn’t allowed to be felt all the way through, that wasn’t allowed to move all the way through you is looking to recreate circumstances so it can move all the way through you, and then the circumstances stop getting recreated. That's how it works on an emotional level.
Brett: Then feeling the emotion completely allows the projection to shift into maybe some generalized form because it seems like a projection is a limiting perception on the world.
Joe: Yeah, and that doesn’t mean they are bad or good. They are just useful or more useful or less useful, meaning I project onto snakes that they are deadly. Now obviously all snakes aren’t deadly, and I might find a snake and think it is deadly and jump away, but it is not deadly. The question is what the projections are that are useful, that create peace and joy, productivity, love in our lives, purpose, whatever it is that one thinks they are after. What are the projections that create the things that we are not after?
When you are doing the deep work, the stuff that was programmed in the early days, like if you were lucky enough to have parents that just deeply loved you and were attuned to your emotional experience and wanted you to feel safe and protected and weren’t emotionally trying to cajole you into certain emotions and not other emotions. Then, it is really easy for you to reproduce that kind of love in your life. But if you didn’t get that, it is more challenging. It is those early projections because we have a rational conscious mind, we can say that is the world I want to live in. Do I want to live in a world where love is conditional, or love is shame or love is control? Do I want to live in a world where love can be different?
We have the choice, and then the work is not just feeling the emotions but falling in love with them on an emotional level. Intellectually, to be able to just see them, to just identify them can be incredibly freeing, and then to work with them and say wow, I am in a projection. What if I take a contrary action? Intellectually, that is that way to work on them.
Brett: It also sounds like falling in love with the projections is part of this path, too. I’ve definitely seen and experienced in the process of discovering that projections exist and that everybody is doing them, there can be a process of I’ve identified a projection. That’s bad. Projections are bad, which is just another way of disowning yourself. The only way you can navigate a chaotic world is to create some kind of sense-making system of projections.
Joe: I have never thought about it as falling in love with projections, but it is beautifully said. Fighting against your projections is only a way that increases their stability.
Brett: I imagine going birdwatching, but you don’t like birds. How many of them are you going to find? If you love finding a projection, it is like wow, I am projecting right now. That might be useful. Also, it might be useful to do it a little bit differently or experiment with it a little bit.
Joe: That’s great. When you say how many birds you will find, it is like proof. For instance, if you talk to somebody and you say tell me about a trauma that you had, and let’s say their trauma was that when I was a kid, I had a dad who would always yell at me. The lesson that I learned was that I had to be quiet to not get yelled at. Let’s just say. Let’s keep it simple. That’s the data they picked up. The data that they didn’t pick up was the ways that they still asserted themselves even by not speaking up. They didn’t learn that wow, I can survive a tyrant in my home, not that I have to, but I can. The information that they didn’t pick up was that mom was actually loving me the whole time, or I didn’t pick up the information that dad did love me from time to time. There was this love that was available.
What’s interesting is our brain is adapted to pay more attention to the negative things, and so oftentimes one of the ways we recreate these things is to only see the evidence that supports the pattern, the projection.
Brett: What is the practice then of becoming more aware of these projections and reengineering them?
Joe: I mean it is different for the different levels of projection. In the psychological projection, everywhere you are triggered, you are triggering an unknown part of yourself. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be triggered. It doesn’t mean that you are not right. It just means that you are also projecting it on to somebody else. Every time that you are triggered is a great example of how you are projecting a disowned part of yourself or anyway in which you idolize somebody, you are projecting a disowned part of yourself. That’s a good way to work on the psychological projection.
The projection on the world is just a really easy thing to do is just list out 10 things that are important to you, like money, love, authority, decision making, whatever they are. Then, ask yourself what the essential learning was you had from your childhood about money and love and authority, and notice how you are recreating those things and notice how you are manipulating the world into it. I’ll give you an example in a second here. How you are attracting it and notice how you are proving it.
An example of this is just like almost everybody at some point in their lives, you keep on dating the same person with different names. I used to attract or create this world in which I was going to be emotionally abandoned. One of the things that I did was I attracted people who were more likely to emotionally abandon me. I was attracted to them. The other thing I did was I manipulated the world to do that, so when I felt unheard, instead of saying ouch, I feel unheard and I would really like to be heard, I would get angry. You are not hearing me. Because I was in my trauma, and then that of course would push them away even further.
Then I would look around the world and I would say that person emotionally abandoned me, and that person emotionally abandoned me, but I wasn’t noticing all the people who weren't or who really wanted not to, and I wasn’t allowing it. I was abandoning them. That’s the way to look at it as far as that level of projection. Then on the projection of I, I mean the easiest thing to do is say what I am, and really sit in the question rather than to look for an answer. But there are other things you can do as well, which is just notice the part of yourself that has always been there or put your attention on to a tension. There are lots of things that help you see through the false sense of identity, the kernel of that identity being that you exist as a separate thing or as a non-separate thing even. The kernel of the identity is that I exist.
Brett: Another area that I have heard this concept, kind of a metaphor, is something called object fixation or target fixation. If you are flying a parachute and you want to land in a field, but there is a tree in the field, if you look at the tree, you are probably going to hit the tree. Driving a motorcycle around a corner, if you look into the ditch, you are going to go into the ditch.
Joe: That’s a beautiful metaphor. I really like that metaphor.
Brett: There have been lots of times in my life when I have seen some kind of disaster coming in business or in a relationship. I am like not wanting it, but I am scared of it, which makes me think of it more, which makes me see and look for the evidence of it more and not see the other paths available to me, and then the thing happens. I am then surprised for some reason.
Joe: Right now, I got in touch with an old friend, and he is in a state of believing that he is bad and incapable. You can watch this reality that he is living in create itself. He needs to do something at his job, and he doesn’t want to feel the anger of his boss, so he doesn’t need to do the thing that he needs to do to make sure that job is done right because he is trying to avoid the anger. Then, by not doing the thing he needs to do, he has got more evidence that he is bad and incapable because he is trying to avoid the feeling of being bad and incapable by being yelled at by his boss. That’s how the whole thing moves. It is like as we see ourselves as a certain way, subconsciously or consciously, we are recreating that over and over and over again.
Brett: So that’s how that ties into this projection of I being the base level projection of all of these really. Because the more you see yourself as any certain thing defined by any particular characteristics or identity, then that’s going to set the context for the projections you are going to have in your relationships, in the world and upon yourself.
Joe: That’s right. Unfortunately, even if you see through the I, it doesn't really resolve the emotional stuff. You can have a lot of cognitive freedom. You can have a lot of intellectual freedom when you see through the personal I, when you have that kind of awakening, but it doesn’t change the emotional experience of stuff. In fact, it can make the emotional experience harder to access because it starts operating at a more disassociated way or in a lower-level way harder to recognize way. The freedom of the intellect is great, but it is far more productive to meet it with the emotional freedom as well, with the loving of all of the emotional experiences that are happening.
Brett: That’s really interesting to me. I am very intellectual, heavily weighted on the intellectual, personally, and so the more I start to recognize some of my own projections, they can easily just become a way to be not good enough. I am still living in this. I don’t know how to get out of this particular projection, but I see it. I am frustrated by it now. There is this layer of frustration as an emotion to feel on top of whatever emotion is driving that projection to begin with.
Joe: That’s one way it happens. Another way it happens is the emotional scenery becomes more and more in the background, but it is still driving you. I know we have talked about this. We cannot make decisions intellectually. All of our decision making is emotional. If you remove the emotional center of a brain, then a person ceases to make decisions even though their intellect, their IQ is still operating at the same level. The emotions are still moving us, but they have become so far in the background. There is this kind of way of saying nothing is real, nothing is true, there is no I, and yet all of these emotional decisions are still happening. Still there is this level of drama and chaos in life even if you go and move to a monastery. It is still there.
Brett: What then is the way to take the information from this episode and understanding this existence of projection become more aware of them and use that as breadcrumbs into the emotional experience underlying them?
Joe: On the intellectual level, I think the underlying problem that people experience when they start to recognize projections is they will be confronted with a reality that everything is a projection. There is nothing that we see or do that isn’t a projection. If you want a direct experience of this, just look at a tree. It is better if you look at like a living thing and see it as a tree. This is a tree. I see it as a tree. Then, see it not as a tree. See it as this is just this thing that’s in front of me, no label, no projection, no need to identify, classify, and just be in the presence of the tree.
When people talk about deep presence, this is what they are talking about is to have a moment or two without the projection operating at full speed. Not that it is not always operating, not that it is not accessible to us at any time, but to really just be in what is in this moment without any of the labels and stuff. You can get that really direct sense of being more in projection and less in projection. The issue that arises, like I was at least trying to say, was that at some point you see the whole world as a projection, the whole thing. There is no thought you can fully trust. There is no emotional experience you can fully trust. There is no body sensation you can fully trust. It doesn’t mean you can’t trust, but it is literally like the world becomes a kaleidoscope.
That’s some scary shit. Because if you interpret it as I am in control, oh my God, it is a kaleidoscope, I don’t know what to do, I am out of control, it can be very, very scary. It can be something you really, really want to avoid. The idea of projection itself is something that often people will accept and embrace very slowly because they have to confront this thing. If they do it really quickly, it is just really important. If you really can all of a sudden just see this whole world is a projection, it is really important to see that essentially that’s not going to stop you from operating at any level at all. It just is what is, and there is this huge freedom to it. Oh wow, I don’t have to take anything seriously, and yet I can still enjoy myself and yet I can still have purpose and yet I can still be productive. But I can take everything with this light-hearted joy that comes about. So that’s the intellectual issue is that at some point you come across this idea that everything is a projection, and you are like crap. There is this fear.
As far as the emotional part goes, it is kind of different for people who haven’t had the kind of identity of self switched to awareness or to the infinite and those who have had that switch happen. If the switch hasn’t happened, then leaning into your emotional states, loving your emotional states, inviting your emotional states, seeing the emotional states when they are out of control is just another form of resistance. Allowing them to move through your body, looking forward to them, that’s the work. That’s the really powerful work. If it is afterwards, that’s the same work, but you have another step on top of it, a step for the before, which is to dig them out. It is to really deeply go in and look for the most nuanced little emotional shift and plumb the depths of that and almost magnify it.
One of the people who taught me about this stuff, he used to work with monks. I think he worked with Trappist monks and Tibetan monks, all sorts of monks. He said when I do the work with them, it is like dragging them back into hell because they have to go back into the emotional experience they had pushed so far into the background. When that is happening, the thing is that you see people who have that peace but without the joy, when they have calmness, but they don’t have the exuberance of life, like if they don’t laugh easily, that’s a pretty good indicator that the identity has shifted but the emotional experience has been suppressed.
Brett: A lot of this conversation is reminding me of this psychological test that can be conducted. You think of an object, and then you have 10 minutes to write down how many uses for that object you can think of. Let’s say for a brick. Your projection would be this is a brick. It is used for masonry, and you could build a wall with it. But the more you start to see the brick just as an object, as just something that it is not a brick, then you could start to see other purposes for it, like counterweight for an elevator or you could break into sand and make play doh out of it, or a million other uses.
I think the same thing can be true for an emotion that a projection might come from. I am angry. That means somebody else has wronged me, and it is their fault. That’s one projection of this emotion, but if I just go into the essence of the emotion and feel that, then what else might that mean for me. What other richness might there be in that experience?
Joe: That’s cool. First of all, never heard it explained that, and I am really digging that. Second of all, I thought you were talking about something different, which it also applies to. Let’s start with the emotional experience. That anger could be an indication that I haven’t drawn the boundary I need to draw. That anger could be an indication that I am not taking care of myself. That anger could be an indication that somebody has wronged me. You are right. All of that is levels of projection.
The thing I thought you were talking about, which also seems like a really cool idea to me, which is the brick could be this, the brick could that, it is the same with projections. Oftentimes something that happens when people start seeing through their projections, they have a lot more opportunity in front of them. They see a lot more options. The array of possibilities opens up to them, and so a lot of times people think somebody who really sees through projections is really smart because they come up with really cool, unique, innovative ideas, or they act in a way that is seemingly not normal but yet it works. It is not so much really that they are smart or not smart. It is that they don’t see the same level of limitation on everything that somebody who fully buys into the projections sees.
Brett: Right, that is something that I meant by that as well. I went the emotion route, but really I think this applies everywhere. This is really kind of the core of how VIEW can change our lives because particularly impartiality and wonder but also vulnerability for other people to have this experience with you with getting more information and empathy, being curious about other people’s experience and being with them in it. These characteristics or these traits lead us to have a more granular awareness of reality beyond the initial assumptions we might have had even though those initial assumptions still exist, and they still can guide our behavior and allow us to act quickly and effectively. The more we can become aware of them and the more we can see them for what they are, as projections, then the more granular our awareness of the world around us can be and the more we can start to see other possible interpretations of the world than the ones that we have started with.
Joe: Again, that is the third time on this podcast. I have seen it that way, and it is such a beautiful articulation of it. It is such a great story to build around it because that’s absolutely how it works when you look at it that way.
Brett: Of course, that’s also just a projection.
Joe: Of course, that’s also just a projection. That’s the thing. That’s another thing that’s really cool about this work is I know you have seen this in my work, but I will go and pontificate on something because that is what I am asked to do. Then, they will say you are totally wrong about that. I will be like yeap, that’s true. I can absolutely see the world in which everything I am saying is incorrect because I can see that there is some correctness in every point of view and some fallacy in every point of view. The fear for me when I was entering into that way of looking at the world was oh shit, I will never be able to act. How will I act if I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong? How will I be able to act if I know that everything is and isn’t true and act the same way that you would if you were an animal or a dragonfly?
Actions still exist, and you are still processing information. You are still having emotions, but what happens is you start choosing the projection that serves you best, the projection that allows for more freedom, that allows for more love, that allows for more joy. You start choosing it, but you can’t stop seeing through it. You just realize at some point if all of it is true and not true, then I actually just get to be who I am, who I want to be.
Brett: I think the more that you accept all of your projects rather than labeling some of them as good or some of them as bad, then the more all of them can kind of be present in each moment and your entire past experience can sort of average out to one statistically most likely scenario, one specific next step from each scenario that is likely to have the better outcome, but nothing is guaranteed.
Joe: Yeah, and you don’t really give a shit if it is guaranteed or not because whatever shows up in your field, it is not resisted and it is not labeled. If I was to choose, do I want to go to prison and love myself or do I want to stay out in the free world and hate myself? Consequences become less important than the actual freedom to see yourself in the world in a way that is enlivening, that is joyful.
Brett: That seems like a great stopping point for this episode. Do you have any integration questions for us, Joe?
Joe: One question that arises is if you write down four of the things that trigger you most in the world, in what ways are you judging or disowning that part of yourself. In what ways are you judging or disowning that part of yourself? Second question is, if you are looking deeply at who you admire or who you put on a pedestal, what are the parts of them that you admire and how do you not own that aspect of yourself? The last question is, what’s looking out behind your eyes?
Brett: That’s a good one.
Joe: I encourage you not to answer that question, just be in it.
Brett: Wonderful. Thank you, Joe.
Joe: Thank you, Brett.
Brett: Thanks for listening to the Life in VIEW podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW or to take a course, visit view.life.
References:
Ramana Maharshi, www.sriramanamaharshi.org
Most of us have a voice in our heads constantly narrating our experiences. Have you ever noticed what yours is like? How it talks to you? How would you feel is someone else spoke to you the way that this voice speaks to you? Would you speak to someone else this way? Today we are going to explore how the voice in our head influences what we say, do and feel. We will learn how we can develop a new relationship with it.
"You have this deep, critical voice in your head. It is like you are living with a horrible, micromanaging boss all the time. We know what that's like if we are actually sitting next to one of those people and they are constantly barraging us, and yet we just think it is normal when it is coming from ourselves."
Most of us have a voice in our heads constantly narrating ourselves
[Whispers: Why did you say that? She hates me. Get it together. Get it together.]
Have you ever noticed what yours is like? How it talks to you? How would you feel if someone else spoke to you the way this voice speaks to you? Would you speak to someone else in this way? Today we are going to explore how the voice in our head influences what we say, do and feel and explore how to develop a new relationship with it. Joe, what is the voice in the head?
Joe: The voice in the head. Let's make a distinction. There's a voice in your head, which is the thing you can hear talking to yourself. It´s kind of the editor that's constantly happening, that's judging your situation, wondering what people are thinking about you, telling you what to do, telling you how to do it. I would make a distinction here that there's the voice in your head that is repetitive, and the voice in your head that is unique or inspirational.
Neurologically speaking, they say that we have about 50,000 thoughts a day that happen. That's the voice in your head. Most of those for most people, the voice is saying the same thing over and over again. You should lose weight. You should lose weight. Or why are you drinking so much coffee? Stop drinking so much coffee. It's a repetitive voice in the head.
When I am speaking about the voice in the head in the context of working with people, I am talking about the repetitive, bossy, critical voice in the head.
Brett: Let's take a moment to help tap into their voice in the head right now. If it is 50,000 thoughts a day, it must be accessible at any time.
Joe: Yeah, that's great. So a wonderful way to do this is to just be silent for the next, say, 20 to 30 seconds and stop thinking. [silence] In that time period, a thought arose, and maybe the thought was how long will this silence last or this is stupid. What makes us do this? Or I hope I didn't forget the eggs in the oven, whatever. That's the voice in the head. That's what it is. It's the constant thinking that goes on, and for most people it is very auditory. It is very word focused. For some people, it is more somatic. It is more body focused. But the grand majority of people, literally it is like they can hear the voice.
Brett: I felt both. As the silence went on, I started to feel a little bit of tension in my body, and then the thought that popped up was I wonder how much dead space we should have in a podcast before we lose people's attention.
Joe: Perfect. Both are always happening. There's somatic. That's not exactly true. There's always the somatic experiencing that's occurring. You cannot stop that, and then oftentimes there are thoughts that go with it. The tricky part is that the more you become aware of the voice in your head, the more you become aware of what it is saying. Oftentimes, when people first get confronted with the idea, they might not think they have many thoughts in their head and the voice in the head isn't very active, and then the more they pay attention to it, the more they realize it is constantly humming along back there.
Obviously, there are people who do a tremendous amount of meditation or different practices where the voice in the head is far more silent, particularly the reoccurring voice in the head is far more silent and quiet. That in itself is an interesting thing because the somatic experiencing hasn't stopped, and so to some degree it is harder to find the pain that's occurring. The voice makes it much easier to feel that pain or to see the dysfunction of the way the voice happens. It is harder to understand it or see it or work with it if it is just a somatic experience.
What I notice is the more you become aware of it, the more sensitive you are to it. The more sensitive you are to it, the more you realize what it is saying and how it is saying it. A great example of that, I did a ton of meditation in my earlier years. A point came along where the voice in the head cut by like 75%. I felt like it was gone for a while as far as the recurring negative, looping thoughts. Over time, I have noticed oh no, there are still things there that took me a while to notice. Just the thing that's always saying have you done this, have you done this, have you done this.
It's just a matter, like anything, it is subtle until you see it. The more sensitive you become to it, the more you become aware of how much it is affecting your day to day, minute to minute life.
Brett: What makes it important or interesting to become aware of it? I imagine if I had a roommate in my head just constantly talking to me, ignorance would be bliss. What makes it worthwhile to start paying attention and noting what it is saying if what it is saying can be so self-critical and distracting?
Joe: There are a couple of reasons. One is because it is the first step to a different relationship to it. In my first experience of really becoming aware of it, I was reading a psychology book on Gestalt. It was Fritz Perls, I believe, and he was talking about how there was an upper dog and an underdog in your internal dialogue. The upper dog was like the bully telling you what to do, criticizing you, and then the underdog was the one rebelling against that, which is a much more subtle, quiet voice that it often takes years for people to get in touch with and experience.
Just being aware of it, just being aware. For me, in particular, it was the should thing. I think he called it out. When you tell yourself you should do something, that's the upper dog. Just by recognizing it and seeing it every time it came, it just started to become quieter and quieter. Just the recognition of the voice in the head can change the way the voice in the head dialogues with you until you resist it, until you are like oh man, I have got to change that voice in my head. Then the voice in the head is now telling you to change the voice in your head, and that resistance makes the voice in your head persist.
But just the simple awareness of it, just like the gentle, there it is doing that thing again, can reduce it. So then the question of course is why would I want to reduce this voice in my head. There are a ton of reasons for that. A very active, negative voice in the head is in the DSM called dysthymia. The definition of low-level depression is this constant, negative self-talk. That' s one reason. Another reason is because life is just far more enjoyable and sweet when your consciousness isn't a horrible boss.
On one level, you said if my roommate was like that, I would rather just not hear them. The truth is when you have this deep, critical voice in your head, it is like you are living with a horrible micromanaging boss all the time. We know what that’s like if we are actually sitting next to one of those people and they are constantly barraging us, and yet we just think it is normal when it is coming from ourselves. Just the joy and bliss of life as that voice changes or as your relationship to it changes, it totally can transform how much joy and happiness and easy and clarity you can have.
Brett: Somebody I was talking to recently about the voice in the head, they said their voice isn't a self-critical voice, but what they do is they rehearse conversations they could have had. It seems like that is a way of being self-critical. The fact that you would rehearse a conversation you have already had about how you could do it better comes from self criticism, and then self-criticism is shaping the thoughts of what you thought you should have said. What are some of the other ways that the voice can show up in people if somebody is listening to this and they are not connecting with this idea of their being a voice in their head that's critical of themselves or the upper dog, as you put it?
Joe: Constantly telling you things to do, shoulding you, wondering about what other people think of you incessantly or even just more than once, rehearsing and trying to make sure you get perfect at something before you actually go and live it. All of those are great examples of how the voice in the head can work. There's a multitude of ways it can work, and it is quite cool in the way that it finds its new home when you have spotted one. Like I said before, you can be saying the should thing, I understand that. I don't want that, so I am just going to be aware of it. Then pretty soon the voice in the head becomes the aggressor to the voice in the head itself. It's amazing how it can just find it's new natural home.
In Zen, they talk about trying to use the voice in the head to get rid of the voice in the head. I am paraphrasing here, but to use the voice in the head to get out of the voice in the head is like asking a thief to be the security of your house. It doesn't work.
Brett: Yeah, the voice isn't you, and the voice speaking to the voice is also not you. All of it is just in the way of your impulse. What that kind of brings me to is one of the characteristics of the voice is that it seems to be slowing us down, either by pulling us out of the present into the past or the future, trying to solve some unsolvable puzzle, or the self-criticism in it can just inhibit us from taking steps that may be imperfect but are steps or speaking what's true for us in the moment without imposing a lot of restraints around what people might think or what might be wrong about it.
Joe: Yeah, I mean just a great way to think about this is so the voice in your head has worried about how some future things are going to go, maybe a job interview or maybe a first date. If you think about all the worrying that you did and all the scenarios that it went through and all the things you thought you were going to say and all of the ways you were going to behave, how much of that was actually pertinent, how much of that was actually useful energy, how much of that actually helped you prepare, and how much of it just did nothing and was just a waste of time. How much of it actually hurt?
I see oftentimes when people are rehearsing things over and over and over again, it builds up such an anxiety around the actuality of the thing happening that they are not there in present with what's occurring in front of them when the time to rehearse is over.
Brett: My experience of that is it also sets up for major disappointment and a shame spiral after the conversation doesn't go anything according to your rehearsal.
Joe: That's a characteristic of the voice in the head, actually, to create the reality it is trying to avoid. Give an example of a perfectionist, and having the voice in the head trying to convince you that you need to be perfect about something. That incessant nature makes it very hard to even do something really well. That's why you see so many artists get hooked on heroin or alcohol, anything that just silences the voice in their head so they can be in that flow state so they can create their best work.
It's no different than doing a PowerPoint presentation or making a speech, or having a great first date. It's about being present in the moment, and being true to yourself in that moment.
Brett: In an even more diffuse way, just sitting down and looking at a blank page or a blank canvas and feeling just that slight negative emotion of like uh, whatever my brushstroke is about to be is going to be wrong. Whether or not that's even a voice. I've always felt that present in anything that I am doing to some extent and most of the time just didn't notice it, and many times just didn't take action on things that I wanted to do or would have loved to have done but just didn't notice that I didn't do them because I avoided feeling that feeling. Then I avoided feeling that I had felt that feeling, and that's why I didn't do the thing I wanted and then justified it for some other reason. I just didn't have time.
Joe: That's a great example. It could just be a feeling. Then if you stop and say hey, what's the message behind that feeling, then you will be more aware of the voice. Oftentimes for different people they will be more aware of the feeling or more aware of the voice, and they are often in concert. The voice can be really subtle, or the feeling can be seemingly very subtle, just like the voice can seemingly be very subtle.
Brett: When you start noticing this voice and you start paying more attention and noting it, what are some tips for not getting into a resistance battle with it but also not buying into everything it says, which is I guess is what we do by default when we are not noticing there's a voice_
Joe: That's the thing. The thing about having no awareness of the voice and it is happening. Even in this moment, I have awareness of the voice happening. In this moment, I don't. When we are not noticing it is happening, it is far more likely to control what we are doing. That's a really good point you just made. There are so many ways. There is a plethora of ways of working with the voice in your head.
One whole category of ways to work with the voice in your head is just to ask how you relate to it. Voice in the head says you should have done better in that project, so some ways to relate to it would be okay, fine and then a subtle fuck you in response to it. Another way to relate to it is I see that you really care that I do a good job and I would love to ask you to use better management techniques with me. Another way to deal with it is to practice silence. Another way to deal with it is to love it. Another way to deal with it is to tickle it. Another way to deal with is it to really get in a massive fight with it and then see what happens when you are exhausted from that fight.
The main thing here that I really recommend is to play and to experiment. Oftentimes the underlying assumption is there is this voice. A, it is never going to change, and B, there is nothing I can do about it. C, it will always be there. What if it is like I am going to do a series of experiments with the voice in my head? I am going to play with it in different ways. I am going to laugh at it hysterically one day, and I am going to just notice it another day. I am going to love it the third day. There is so much flexibility in it, but there is something in our system that is so scared of having that voice in the head go away or to change that it convinces us that we have no flexibility or no options around the voice in the head.
Brett: When I have heard other people describe this in other books or other work, and there is even a little bit of it in this conversation, there is an assumption that the voice itself is not valuable. It would be better if we didn't have it. Here's a bunch of strategies to get rid of it. But I am curious what value there is in that voice because often the self-criticism that I experience of how I could have done something better is real. It is just that I feel ashamed that I didn't do it that way the first time, but I actually could have done better. Maybe the voice has something valuable to say.
Joe: There is a way of hearing the voice in the head and hearing the intention behind what it is saying, and that's almost always valuable. If you assume for a minute that the voice in the head loves you and it just really has a whole bunch of crappy strategies to love you but it really loves you, then there is a way of listening to everything the voice in the head says has a deep care. It is just not doing it really well.
If I told you you are messing up this podcast, hey, you are messing up this podcast, hey, you are messing up this podcast, look. You are still being silent. You are messing up this podcast. Why aren't you saying something, Brett? You are messing up this podcast. That's not going to make a great podcast. But the deep care behind that is it really wants you to be successful and so getting into a war with the voice in the head is you can't ever win that. The question is what relationship you want with it.
Another cool thing to think about is oftentimes the voice in the head is talking to itself more than it is talking to you. I am going to let that one sit for a second. It's almost projecting on to you. When the voice in the head is saying you are messing up this podcast, you are messing up this podcast, is it you or the voice in the head that's messing up the podcast?
Brett: There's something interesting in that where the voice in our heads often seems to map onto an actual person in our history or some blur of many people in our history that were caretakers or parents or teachers. A lot of the things that I say to myself in my head are things somebody else might have said to me in the past, and so I've just internally learned to say it to myself first before somebody else does it.
Joe: That's part of the care it has. It is trying to keep you out of trouble. It is trying to keep you from not being insulted, not being chastised, not having to feel the way it felt when you were three years old and being chastised. It often mimics very important figures in our life or it is reacting to very important events in our life. That's definitely how it goes, which is interesting because oftentimes if we had, let's say, a really critical mom and the mom just really criticizes us, at some point you are like you are full of it. You don't know what you are talking about. But you don't question your head that way.
If your mom is constantly like you should shave more, you should shave more, you should shave me, you are like you are the wrong generation. You don't know. But if the voice in your head says you should shave more, you should shave more, you should shave me, you are far more likely to buy into it. But you didn't even choose to program it. You didn't even choose what reality it agrees with. That was chosen for you, and yet humans constantly believe what's going on with the voice in the head, which is another way to relate to it. To actually see through the false logic of the voice in the head. The voice in the head is always contradicting itself. You were too cocky there. You were too humble there. You spoke too much. You didn't listen enough. You listened too much. You didn't speak enough.
If you really start looking at how the voice in the head operates, it doesn't give you actually a place to succeed often. There's no way out. There's a problem with everything, and yet we still buy into it. To really look and find out that there's a little bit of untruth in everything the voice in the head says, everything the voice in the head says, and to find that, it gives you a lot of freedom and perspective from the voice in the head itself, the recurring negative voice in the head.
Brett: What about the truth in it? What about the times where if I did say the thing I thought to saying, then I might have lost a client or a partner or angered somebody or gotten judged? How much of it is untrue? How much of it is true?
Joe: This is an interesting question, right? So let's say you have done something that insulted a client, and let's say the best thing is to say hey, I am really sorry about that. I did that. It's not what I wanted to do. It's not how I want it to be with you, and I apologize. Then that thing you did wrong can build trust, and can actually make your relationship deeper.
If you are in your head saying, wow, you screwed up with a client, and that happens once. It's not a reoccurring negative thing, and you immediately take action on it. Then whatever is happening is an effective, efficient cycle, but if you are saying it multiple times and doing nothing about it, or you are saying it 20 times and then doing something about it, that is not an efficient cycle. That's just self-abuse. There's is no need for that. It doesn't make you happier. It doesn't improve the relationship. It doesn't make them happier with you. It doesn't build trust. It doesn't add anything there.
The important thing is it is reoccurring, and it is negative self-talk.
Brett: Something I have noticed is when it is reoccurring, there is often some kind of double bind. There is like I really screwed that up. What I need to say is this, but I already said the other thing and I cannot go back on my word. Now there's sort of a fight between the different versions of the voice.
Joe: Yeah, exactly. How efficient is that? How is that helpful? Exactly. And there is a wisdom to it, and it is like what is it that you want. I want a better relationship with him, and I don't want to look like I am inconsistent. I want to be respected by this person. If you get in touch with that and you just name that, put it in a VIEW frame of mind, it is amazing to say wow, I noticed that I was being inconsistent here. It´s now how I want to be you. I always noticed I am having a hard time saying that I was inconsistent because I am scared you are going to look at me this way or this way. It is more important for me to be in my integrity than to try to look good in front of you. I apologize, and how can we proceed to build trust from here.
When the voice in the head is abusing like that, what's occurring is you are creating fear in your system. It is creating an anxiety, and then that anxiety makes you think in a binary way, either apologize or don't apologize. It doesn't give you the whole, vast array of opportunities in front of you at any moment. Also, that anxiety puts it so that you have like a false end. The only moment you can see is that moment of apologizing or not apologizing. You are not seeing the whole relationship and how it can get better over time.
That abuse, that self-abuse, turns into anxiety, and the anxiety prevents us from learning. The anxiety limits our options, the options we can conceive of. The anxiety stops us from seeing a very particular moment. That's another reason why an abusive voice in the head is not effective.
Brett: That thing you just said, that scenario where you were just speaking to the client was beautiful and I could imagine being. This has happened before where I am like what would Joe say. I am like I can't come up with what Joe would say, and I am like oh. What would I say if I was speaking so clearly from my truth that I don't feel like I have access to because a barrage of all these different voices. Then nothing gets said.
The thing you said to me the other day, which was like life is really great once you realize you are already wrong.
Joe: Yeah, there's another thing. What I did when I said what is it that I really want, and then I spoke the want. What you are doing is some version of what's the right thing to say whether it is through the projection of me or being completely high integrity. Doing the right thing, trying to make it right, is part of the anxiety.
Brett: That is the voice. That's what the voice is trying to do. It is trying to make you right. A fear of being wrong.
Joe: And that's how the voice gets more and more subtle. It sounds like a great thing. What would my highest integrity self say? That sounds like a great thing, but it is still trying to get it right. That's why I said to you that life is great when you know you are wrong because then you don't have to try to be right. Then you are just operating from that place naturally, that place of integrity naturally.
I find the much neater trick is just to say what do I want, and then speak into that want, which is far more vulnerable than trying to be right.
Brett: Absolutely. Being right is trying to say or do the thing that is perceived by both the voice in your head and others as everybody agrees that it is right, which is an impossible task.
Joe: Totally impossible.
Brett: What you want is something that can flow and change, and it can be true in the moment and you get what you want or not what you want and then learn more.
Joe: That's right. Also, there is this total freedom in identity. If you aren't worried about being right, then you don't need everyone to think you are right and you don't need to be right. There's a huge freedom in that. There's this amazing freedom in it. What's cool is that if you are there and every time you worry about being right or every time you are wrong and somebody is chastising you for being wrong, and you let that emotion move through, it disintegrates more and more of what some traditions would call the ego, but I would call just limited perspectives. It just starts to disintegrate your limiting perspective, and it allows your identity to be an internal experience of identity to be far more expansive and to need a lot less protection.
[BELL]
Okay, so this is the time in our podcast when we do something just a little bit different. We take a break from the intellect and incorporate our bodies and emotions into the conversation. We do this because it helps us integrate the information better, and usually it is a bunch of fun.
We crowdsource these exercises from our community, so if you have a good one, please share it with us. When doing the exercise, take it as a treat and as an experiment. Just do the activity and see what happens. As always, enjoy yourself.
[BELL]
Woman's voice: Hi everyone. This is Tara. Take a big inhale. You are going to keep your eyes open for this one. Our attention is going to be on our eyes this time. On your next inhale, you can use the inhale to sort of scan if you have any tension around your eyes. You can use the exhale to release any tension around your eyes. See how much you can let your eyes just rest in their sockets.
Many of us carry a lot of tension around our eyes. You can use your breath to continue letting your eyes relax. You are going to let your vision go soft so you are not going to focus on any one thing in front of you, just see how much you can let your vision go soft. Everything may go a little fuzzy. That's okay. Take another inhale.
I am going to take it one step further. With your eyes deeply resting in their sockets, see how much they can just receive the visual field in front of them. The visual field comes to them and all they have to do is they get to receive the visual field. Just notice how you feel different at the end of this than when you started.
[BELL]
Joe: Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the exercise as much as we did when we found it. Before we go back into the episode, I wanted to thank all of you who have been sharing the podcast and signing up for the VIEW course. The interest and support you guys have shown has been both overwhelming and humbling. It is a pleasure to know that we have something to offer that has been so helpful to you. All right, now let's get back into the conversation.
Brett: I can observe that any of my internal thoughts are actually trying to avoid feeling something. The thought might be self-criticism, which is trying to gain control over myself to avoid feeling whatever I felt by not getting it right in whatever sense. But also rehearsing a conversation or just overthinking about something a project that I want to do, if I find myself in a circle or a cycle on it, it is often that I am just trying to collapse the discomfort of the unknown into some framework of known. If I am trying to do that, to some extent that's impossible. It will just be an unsolvable possible. I will just keep doing it. When if I just let myself feel the powerlessness of the unknown, then all of a sudden those thoughts go away and I am actually freed up to take action.
Joe: What's cool about what you just said is that's a fractal or a micro version of a major thing that happens, whether it be the fear of death or a fear of taking a risk. To be okay with that feeling of unknown, to be okay with I don't know what's going to happen next, which is true. We think we know what's going to happen next. We get taught over and over again. We don't. We create our world so that we think it is predictable, and then something very unpredictable happens.
Brett: Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face.
Joe: I haven't heard that one.
Brett: I think it was Muhammad Ali or somebody. Don't quote me on that.
Joe: There's another one. I think it was John Lennon, which is plans are what you do while life is happening. That generally is to be in love with the feeling of confusion and mystery and unknown, and like all emotions, it seems like if we do that, then we don't make plans or if we do that, we won't be prepared. If that's happening, then the voice in the head has convinced you of that through some wonky logic. What actually happens when we get good with that is that plans happen far more naturally, organically. They flow far easier.
Brett: This brings up something else, another way that this has shown up in my life as stopping me from moving forward. If I get to the point where I am rehearsing a possible conversation, and then I feel like I have actually fully rehearsed it and then it was perfect, then all of a sudden it becomes completely uninteresting to have that conversation. A, I don't want to break its perfect image in my mind, and B, it becomes boring because there is no unknown in it. C, sometimes I will actually trick myself into thinking I actually had the conversation. It could be disastrous.
Joe: Yeah.
Brett: I can't count how many times I've been like wait a minute, didn't we talk about this. No, we didn't talk about this. Oh no.
Joe: Those are all the more subtle ways the voice in the head operates. You just kind of described maybe the voice in the head doesn't want to feel or the system doesn't want to feel rejection, and so the voice in the head starts with, let's rehearse so that you don't experience the rejection. Then the voice is like this is boring, and then the voice is like you probably had the conversation. That's how the whole thing works. There is always a way for it to insinuate itself, and the more you become aware of it, like I say, it is subtle until you see it. The more you see it, the more depth there is available.
All that is needed is to relate to it differently, and to love it and to be aware of it and not have a fight with it. Then you can moments that happen in your life that feel like big moments. Sometimes and sometimes they don't. All of a sudden, you realize the voice in my head is so much quieter. There is so much less of it.
Brett: What happens when you get to that point? What did it feel like when you had that 75% reduction of the voice in your head?
Joe: It's different from different people. For some people, it is hardly noticeable. It is such a slow progression. What I notice is people that were like really deeply depressed and then that kicks in, and then it is just like this life changing, holy crap what just happened. Some people resist it. There is this whole thing called depersonalization disorder. The Zen call it Zen sickness It can happen, and people are like wait a second, where am I. This isn't good. I need that back.
You can have all sorts of reactions to it. When it happens and you are aware of it, and you are not fighting with it, it is incredibly joyful. Your car has just become 75% more efficient. Your energy is far more aligned with the way you want to be going, and not second guessing yourself. It is more enjoyable, and you are more in the present, all that stuff.
Again, to have a goal to get rid of the voice in your head is to not love the voice in your head, and therefore, it is a very slow process. It is far better to just love the voice in your head as it is, and not try to get rid of it and not reject it.
Brett: It almost sounds like the framing of getting rid of the voice in the head is creating separation from it, but what we are actually going for is developing such a relationship with it that it is communicating with us so cleanly that it is just part of us, instead of compressing itself down into words and then hitting us in our logic battlefield.
Joe: Yeah, it is an interesting question. Eventually, that question comes up as you are talking about what is the voice in the head and what's you. What's the difference between them? I think that's a great question to be sitting with but not to be answering. To be in that question, what's the different between me and the voice in my head actually? That in itself can change your relationship with the voice in your head.
Brett: With that to sit with, what's another practice or maybe a homework assignment to develop this relationship further with our voice?
Joe: There's an infinite amount. They work differently for different people at different stages. When I see somebody, I can point more directly to what might be useful for them. Generally, there are two that come to mind. One is just tell yourself that you love yourself, maybe in a mirror, in a camera, and then listen to the response to you loving yourself, all the ways it makes you uncomfortable, all the things you say that you are not loveable for. That's all the voice in your head. if you want to excavate it, that's a great way to excavate it.
Another one, which is a more subtle trick is just to ask the question what's looking out behind my eyes right now. You'll notice that that often quiets the mind. It also kind of puts you in where your identity has moved from the voice in your head to awareness. Are you voice the in your head that's constantly talking or are you the awareness of the voice in the head talking? It asks that question, and you can do it at any time. It is a great practice in the fact you can be in a meeting, you can be in a fight, you can be going to the bathroom and you can say what's looking out behind my eyes.
There's a ton of versions of that question. The most common one is who am I or what am I. That's not a question to be answered. That's a question to be in wonder. It's to be in wonder in that question. But there are a ton of little hack questions like that that are available, but I would say start with one of those.
Brett: What about journaling? Writing down the voice in your head.
Joe: I don't have any problem. It is a great thing if you want to write what the voice in the head is saying to you. Great. Bring it into awareness. Even better, once you have done it, be an argumentative lawyer to it. Not an adversary, but an argumentative lawyer and find out what's a little untrue in each of the statements. Someone says I should lose weight. You should lose weight. According to who? What do you mean by should? Shouldn't you be the weight you are because the definition of should is what is, right? I have to lose weight because if not, I'll die early. What makes dying early bad? Who is to say that the best thing isn't for me to die early?
I know that's crazy, but look for anyway in which the logic might be. Also, I should lose weight. I've been saying it for a decade. It doesn't work, so what makes me keep on saying I should lose weight. Maybe I should say I want to lose weight. What's the response to I should lose weight. Most people's response is rebellion. They don't do it. There's all sorts of ways to just start looking into and analyzing and bringing a fresh perspective into the voice in your head.
Brett: It seems like the example you just gave, somebody asking those questions would get themselves more in touch what they are actually afraid of underneath the judgement the voice had.
Joe: You can bring VIEW from the first podcast and from the course. You can bring that same methodology and point it towards the voice in your head. Being vulnerable with it. Ow, it really hurts when you tell me I should lose weight. Being impartial with it, I am not going to try to get rid of you. What´s going on? What do you really have to say? Being empathetic with it, how scared is the voice in the head to be shouting at you like this? What is it so afraid of? To feel that, to bring wonder to it. You can bring all of that VIEW to your voice in your head, and you can dialogue with it in a journal. It is a great practice.
There´s really infinite ways to deal with it, to play with it, to have fun with it, and I just encourage people to experiment, play.
Brett: It seems like a great internal playground for VIEW, and then you might find that the same kind of VIEW conversations you start to have with the voice in your head are going to probably be somewhat similar to the conversations you might have with your first VIEW conversations with your family or your parents or your family of origin where many of the voices come from.
Joe: It will also affect all of your relationships. If you see through your own shoulds, and somebody says I really think I should, you see through their should, whereas if you believe your should, then you believe their should. If you believe your sense of rigid morality, then that is inhumane, then you will believe their sense of rigid morality that is not humane.
When you see through your own voice in your head, you area bastion of freedom for people because when they are talking to you, you don't buy into their limiting perspectives.
Brett: To wrap this up, can you ask a couple questions for our listeners to ponder, to integrate this conversation.
Joe: How do you want to relate to the voice in your head? What's the most fun experience you can think to do around the voice in your head? What would it take for you to enjoy the voice in your head just as it is without want it to change?
Brett: Perfect. Thank you, Joe. I really loved this conversation.
Joe: I really liked it. It felt really alive.
Thanks for listening to the Life in View podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW or to take a course, visit view.life
This week’s episode took an unexpected turn after co-host Brett Kistler had a difficult week, prompting an unplanned one-on-one session where Joe coaches Brett. In this session, we dive deeper into exploring how the relationship with self is reflected in the relationships with the people around us.
"My mind is flitting around in a million directions, going down rabbit holes, and my body is like hey, we have something important to do."
"Yeah, that's beautiful. That's always the way it works, right? The relationship with the self is reflected in the relationship with the people around us."
Brett: Okay, so this is going to be a really interesting episode. We started the call intending to dive into an episode on attentional black holes or perhaps on engineering our own heartbreak. But I have been having a rough week, and we ended up diving into what turned out to be a session with Joe coaching me. Here it is, raw and unfiltered. I hope you like it.
So throughout my life, I have this pattern of diving into something really, really deeply and hyper focusing on it, and then it starts to become hyper focused to the exclusion of other things and then ultimately to the avoidance of other things. Then, I build competence in the thing that I am getting hyper focused in until I start to get a little bit complacent, and then that thing ends up crashing and then I am left seeing the consequences of all of the avoidance in the rest of my life. Somehow, this has usually ended up happening in such a way that has left me better off than I started over time, but it really just feels like extremely wild swings, big ups, big downs.
Joe: Can you give me an example from like two years ago?
Brett: Yeah, an example from a couple of years ago was in 2017 I started getting, had been interested in, but started seeing a lot of people get interested in crypto, like cryptocurrencies in investing. I started to see all kinds of opportunity, and I just became very deeply interested in it. That seems like a good thing, being interested in something that's new and exciting, and potentially world-changing even if it is such early stages that it might not be world changing for years. But I, like many other people, got really focused on this possible future and kind of hanging my hopes on the financial gain that I was imagining I was seeing and the numbers in my financial accounts.
Also, at the same time, I was starting to feel like they become more important, higher priority to me than what was going on in my life. The numbers and the financial gain became much bigger than the numbers in my business financial gain. Also, the excitement of it became much bigger than my excitement elsewhere, and this has also occurred in other areas, like with base jumping. Just really getting into something that's super, deeply exciting and enlivening for me, or in a relationship, just getting fully swept up in it and disappearing attentionally from other areas of my life.
Joe: What makes you say disappearing intentionally?
Brett: Not intentionally, attentionally. My attention draws away from places that it used to be.
Joe: What would you make you just not say I was disappearing into it? What makes you give the caveat of attentionally?
Brett: I think I have a little bit of a self judgement around my attention. Throughout this process, there is a part of me that's like no, don't fully go here. There are other things you care about, and then there's sort of a negative feeling associated with not paying attention to the things I care about or finding that I care less than I did a moment ago about them.
Joe: How does that tie into, say, commitment? What's your experience of commitment?
Brett: My experience of commitment has over the course of my life been something that generally starts in the same way as I just described with a lot of fire and a lot of excitement. I am a very flowy person. I kind of go from one thing to another thing, and I am following some threat that just cuts across all these different areas of life. Very commonly, for me, the thing that I am following shifts or changes shape, and that doesn't mean that I am not interested in the thing that I was interested in before. But I start to feel like obligated not to change, like put myself into an obligation not to change in order to keep the commitment.
Joe: I see, so what's the difference between what you are describing as far as going down an attentional rabbit hole and being committed to something?
Brett: I mean going down the attentional rabbit hole is being committed to the exploration of that rabbit hole. It also feels like a disowning of other commitments, and there is shame in that.
Joe: If we were to ask, let's say, any woman in your life over the last 20 years, what would they say your relationship to commitment was?
Brett: That's a really good question. You would have to ask some of them.
Joe: If you had to guess, maybe they even said something to you at some point.
Brett: I mean they say various things. I would say they say I am a deeply committed partner, and also that I change. Something that they have said is that like when they are with me, they feel the commitment really strongly and then when I am not with them, then they feel the lack of it.
Joe: So this is the thing you are pointing to. You get into something. You are fully in it. That's all you are focused on. It's like a strong sense of an immediate commitment, but then the things that you have already started to some degree fall by the wayside. You don't feel the commitment towards them in the same visceral way, and they don't feel the commitment from you during those times of going deeply down the attentional rabbit hole.
Brett: Yeah, which then creates shame around that rabbit hole itself.
Joe: If you take the shame out of it, what's the problem with all this?
Brett: I guess the problem is that it just feels unstable, and that also looking back through my life, the consequences of it have been just these wild oscillations, which is something that I actually really enjoy. I do really enjoy having a life that just varies wildly from thing to thing, and I just go super deep into a direction that and go farther than most people might go in that direction.
Joe: Separate for me the difference between what you like about having a highly varied and I will call it intense life, and what you don't like about having a highly varied and intense life.
Brett: What I like about it is that I learn a lot, and I collect a wealth of different experiences. I grow. What I don´t like about it is there are these periodic tectonic shifts that I experience as painful where there is just a lot of resistance and I go into a period of perhaps months of feeling disconnected but not noticing how disconnected I am feeling until all of a sudden it just shows up, and I recognize how I disconnected I have been from things I actually do love and how much I have actually narrowed into a stressful relationship with a thing I am focused on.
Joe: Aha, so the thing is, what I am hearing you say is that you love going down these rabbit holes and the fact that you learn and you grow, but somewhere down the rabbit hole it moves from passion to stress. It moves from passion to obligation, and then in that you start becoming so single minded that you forget to live a life that's enjoyable through balance or through some of your other commitments. Is that what you are saying?
Brett: Yeah, absolutely, and I find myself unaware of basic logistical things that are important for kind of keeping my life together.
Joe: Right, and I am just curious. What if nobody ever gave you shit about that? What if like you did this and everybody was like that's cool, that's Brett being artistic or that's Brett doing his thing, that's Brett providing for the family, whatever? Whenever you did all that, nobody guilted you or shamed you or said you weren't there for me. How would your relationship with this cycle change?
Brett: Interesting, it's hard to even imagine separating those things because I believe that my doing things this way leaves people kind of left in the dark. There's a way that I am taking responsibility for other people depending on me, and then me going off in a new direction. Whether or not they even shame me about it or even show hurt at me, there is a way that I just project it or there is a way that I just take responsibility that they are experiencing of disappointment or abandonment.
Joe: I know your childhood enough to be able to point something, so I am going to point directly, which is. Maybe I don't know it well enough. Let's see if I remember correctly. How similar is this you going down a different rabbit hole than your family did on a religious basis?
Brett: Yeah, wow. I had not thought of it that way, but it does feel very much like that.
Joe: So stop talking about it for a second, and just feel that. Feel that place that you felt when you diverted from the rabbit hole that your family was in and stayed in around religion and you went looking somewhere else.
Brett: I felt very much like I was letting my mom down, and the pain that she would feel about my afterlife was my fault. I resisted that following, but also still bought into it. There are also other layers. Throughout my religious upbringing, there were times that we changed churches, and reasons that might happen was because we or my mom or I, however it was, would diverge from the prevailing opinion in the church or the group that we were in. That led to a lot of disconnection from friends and people that were really important to me. I am seeing now ways that I have recreated that my whole life, too.
Joe: As well as the obsession. I would assume that at some point you were obsessed with the religion or God or whatever that relationship was, as a kid.
Brett: Yeah, I went deep, and it was the basis to my youth group band. I went on revivals.
Joe: Here this is repeating, and if you feel that feeling in your body of that moment of recognition that you were causing your mom pain or at least that's the way it was told to you, that you were causing your mom for not believing in this and that whole feeling, where in your body does that sit?
Brett: There is an anxious tension in my chest and in my arms.
Joe: How similar is that feeling to the feeling like you have to do the thing that you are in the rabbit hole with? You have to focus on cryptocurrency over your relationships. You have to focus on air sports over. How similar are those two physical feelings?
Brett: It is the same physical feeling. It feels like the thing that blocks me from sitting down and doing my taxes or registering a car, things that are very mundane. I don't feel. My body doesn't feel in a mundane state to be doing them. It feels like I have to get up and go jump off a cliff.
Joe: Right, so in a weird way what happens is this natural passion shows up, and then as you start to relive the trauma. Maybe it's happening. Maybe it's not, of disappointing people around you. That creates an anxiety in you that then gets transferred probably both to them, which makes you want to not be around them and to your work, which makes you get more hyper-focused and stressed. Is that what we are concluding? What am I missing there, if anything?
Brett: That sounds very right. One way that I have continued to recreate that is by finding communities and go deep with those communities as I travel the world or whatever and sort of becoming a part of the community, but then also being like I am kind of not going to be there. I am only sort of partially in this community, but I've got all these other communities. I´ve got this other thing I am doing. I might just get up and go to the Arctic for a month. I won't be around, so don't depend on me too much.
Joe: Right. How much of that commitment or lack thereof is based on the fact that you also learnt as a young kid that you can't trust community? To some degree, there is a way of saying we can't trust you because you left the church, but the other way of thinking about it as a kid is community is stagnant. It can't meet me as I grow into my truth.
Brett: Right, or that community, there is another mirror to that where I see communities as tending towards homogenous group think and then I want to get away from that or at least keep distanced from it. That relates to something else that is a pattern to me. I really love to be a contrarian and feel very right when I think everyone else is wrong about something.
Joe: Right, all of this early childhood patterning as if there is a right and a wrong. So today, how does this whole thing cause you pain? From this perspective, from seeing it this way, how does it all cause you pain?
Brett: One way it causes pain is that this anxious feeling in my body is. I guess avoiding that has made it difficult for me to sit down and do basic things.
Joe: What's the anxiety avoiding? If you couldn't feel anxiety and you couldn't stay busy, what would you be left to feel over this situation where you are changing and the loved ones around you aren't meeting you?
Brett: I would have to feel the heartbreak of that I change and I am not stable. I might be a different person than I am today, and other people might be different than they are tomorrow and that I might feel abandonment or that they might feel abandonment.
Joe: I don't remember if we recorded the very, very beginning of this when we said hey, let's press recording, but you said engineered heartbreak.
Brett: Yeah.
Joe: What would be making you engineer heartbreak to avoid heartbreak?
Brett: I think there is a way that. This might be related to something that I do, where I put myself through difficult things to prove I can handle it. It almost seems like there is something subconscious in me that does that with this engineering of heartbreak.
Joe: I know in other podcasts this is the coolest thing. We have spoken about the thing that I am about to speak about I think at least three or four times in the podcast along and countless others, but when we are in it, when we are reliving that trauma, it is so hard to see it. But that whole idea of we are creating the thing by the way in which we are avoiding it, it is the way in which we are avoiding the emotional experience that we are recreating it in our life. It is the same thing we have talked about of the cell wants to get homeostasis. The body continues to produce these early childhood patterns until we can finally feel the thing that we couldn't feel as a kid.
Brett: A layer on that is one of the things that I feel is shame around not feeling the thing, especially now that I intellectually know all of this so well. My body just feels not fully up-to-date on this.
Joe: You are engineering heartbreak that you then avoid, is what you are saying, and then you get to feel heartbreak/shame for avoiding the thing that you created to feel that it is not easy to feel.
Brett: It is almost like it's the shame I am creating. It is almost like I've learned to be very okay with the heartbreak itself, but I am not okay with the shame.
Joe: Yeah, it is beautiful. What's wrong with shame? Literally, how does shame feel in your system? What is the discomfort of shame in your system, physically?
Brett: It feels like resisted fear, which feels like cowardice. That is something that I have judged myself for my whole life.
Joe: All of that was in your head, in your body, when you feel shame, what's uncomfortable?
Brett: There is a numbing.
Joe: Numb is comfortable. They even wrote a song about it, Comfortably Numb.
Brett: Let me get into that and see what I am actually numbing out. There is a feeling of curling up in a ball. There is a slight sickness to my stomach, a tightness in my chest, and an anticipation of rejection or pain and a hopelessness.
Joe: Just feel all that for a second, like allow all of that to be felt just as it is. You don't have to manufacture anything. You don't have to try. Just as it is, feel it.
Brett: How did you know that I started manufacturing it?
Joe: I refuse to answer intellectual questions right now. Notice what's happening. Notice what's happening to the discomfort of shame.
Brett: There is a slight shaking in my stomach, in the midsection.
Joe: How much more comfortable or uncomfortable is it becoming if you stay with the shame?
Brett: It is becoming a little bit more comfortable, but then my intellect comes in and is like it is just because you are not feeling it enough anymore. You are avoiding it.
Joe: What happens if feeling it is all that is required? What if it is just like you are a little kid that felt shame? Like when your mom told you you were responsible for her emotions and that her punishment for you going to hell was somehow your responsibility. What did that kid just need at that point?
Brett: I don't know if it is fair to say that she told me that. I am just a kid assuming it.
Joe: She was worried for your soul. That was happening.
Brett: Which is love.
Joe: Exactly, but the point is what did you need then? What would have made it different for you, better for you in that moment?
Brett: I don't know. It is hard to say that what I needed was for my mom to happily accept that she believed that I was going to hell.
Joe: How about just loving attention? How would that have been as a kid?
Brett: Yeah, my diverging beliefs being given loving attention or being given loving attention in my beliefs.
Joe: What makes you think that giving loving attention to your shame right now is somehow not enough, but it would have been enough as a kid?
Brett: I mean it feels. This is interesting. It feels like when I try to give my shame loving attention, it somehow misses. The attention misses the shame in some way. The shame manages to wiggle out from under the attention.
Joe: Yeah, chase it around the room. I know that sounds weird. Chase it around the room to give it love. I am going to love you. You cannot get away from me. I am going to love you.
Brett: I can feel it there subtly.
Joe: It is what kids do, by the way. It is totally what kids do. Kids feel shame, and you go to give them love. They just fucking hate it. No, no, no. Like little ones. They will fight you tooth and nail over it.
Brett: It is like hiding underneath the couch and peeking out under the skirt.
Joe: Exactly.
Brett: When I try to do this on my own, I immediately think I am just not doing it good enough or I am not finding it or that I must not be finding the root of whatever my feeling is.
Joe: That's the pattern. That's not the truth of it. That's the pattern. Literally, were you finding God? Did you get to the root of it? Did you feel like you weren't quite getting the whole thing? That's the relationship that you were taught to truth, to love, to feeling life. You weren't quite getting it.
Brett: Yeah, and that's what I feel with everything. I was just not quite getting it.
Joe: You are also not quite getting it as compared to other people. I think there is some reality to all of us not quite getting it. It would be impossible, but in your mind I've noticed that it is not like you are not quite getting it, like everybody is not quite getting it. No, you are special and you are not quite getting it. Do you know what I am saying?
Brett: This feeling I am special and I am not quite getting it.
Joe: I am special in my not getting it.
Brett: Special in my not getting. Also, I was in gifted in classes in school but also I just didn't do the homework. I just somehow managed to barely be scraping by in those classes, and everybody else, even people who seemingly didn't get the material as much as I felt I got the material, had their shit together in a way that just had them be doing the thing, doing the school, not getting talked to about being behind.
Joe: You are like recreating this pattern of not quite fitting into the social fabric. Now you are in a social fabric full of a whole bunch of people who are really smart and not motivated to follow all the rules and have done a whole bunch of creative things and are living, and you still feel like you are not a part. Probably all of them do as well.
Brett: Yeah.
Joe: You are not alone even in that.
[BELL]
Okay. So this is the time in our podcast when we do something just a little bit different. We take a break from the intellect and incorporate our bodies and emotions into the conversation. We do this because it helps us integrate the information better, and usually it is a bunch of fun. We crowdsource these exercises from our community, so if you have a good one, please share it with us. When doing the exercise, take it as a treat and as an experiment. Just to the activity and see what happens. As always, enjoy yourself.
[BELL]
Tara: Hi, everybody. My name is Tara Howley. I am going to lead you guys through some nervous system exercises. Go ahead and close your eyes and take a big inhale. You are going to put all of your attention in the souls of your feet. You might notice the texture of the floor under your feet. You might notice the temperature. You might feel your pulse. Just see what you notice with all of your attention in the souls of your feet.
That’s it. Go ahead and open your eyes, and just notice how you feel now compared to when you started this.
[BELL]
Joe: Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the exercise as much as we did when we found it. Before we go back into the episode, I wanted to thank all of you who have been sharing the podcast and signing up for the VIEW course. The interest and support you guys have shown has been both overwhelming and humbling. It´s a pleasure to know that we have something to offer that has been so helpful to you.
All right. Now let's get back into the conversation.
Brett: A question that routinely comes up for me is how does it anybody continue to put themselves in a position of working with or relying on me.
Joe: That's the pattern. There's no truth to that. However you have done it, you have shown up in your business. You have shown up here. You have shown up in your relationships, many of them for years and years. You can say that, but the paper, the data is different than what you are voice is telling you right now.
Brett: That brings me back to that piece where I can intellectually know a thing, intellectually know what I even on some level want, and my body doesn't line up with it. There is a feeling of despair in that.
Joe: Prove your body is not lining up. That's the story. Prove it. Your body is stressed when you are ignoring the commitments that feed you, that nourish you. Your body is aware of the shame that's happening. How is your body not participating fully here?
Brett: So there is a way that I feel that being true. The more I get off track, the more avoidant I am of the things that I care about, the more stressed I feel, so there is a way that my body is guiding me back towards my truth in that way. And yet, there´s something in my body that if that's not happening, there must be some opposing force. What is that? How is that my body being in alignment if there is an opposing force pulling me away from what the rest of my system seems to think is alignment.
Joe: I think I am a bit confused in the fact that it is opposing forces that keep everything in balance. So what am I missing?
Brett: Maybe there is one of the opposing forces that is getting too much weight in the decision.
Joe: Prove it. There is this idea that you are stuck on. Maybe it's your mind that is the opposing force. There is this idea that you are stuck on that somehow or another that your body isn't with you.
Brett: Maybe it is the inverse. Maybe it is my mind that is not with me.
Joe: In the moment of freeze, what's off line, your body or your mind?
Brett: It's hard to say which, but it does seem like it is true that one of them was offline. It feels like my mind is doing the thing that I describe myself doing to others to my body. My mind is flitting around in a million directions, going down rabbit holes, and my body is like hey, we have something important to do.
Joe: Yeah, that's beautiful. That's always the way it works, right? The relationship with the self is reflected in the relationship with the people around us. Right now I can sense a desire for resolution.
Brett: Yeah, there's a strong desire for resolution, which I am recognizing is wanting myself to change.
Joe: What's the resolution going to get you?
Brett: Alignment, joy, accomplishment, connection.
Joe: How is that not here right now?
Brett: Stories in my head prevent me from seeing it.
Joe: I feel connected to you. I'm enjoying the conversation.
Brett: I feel like I showed up to do a podcast, and then we just like dove into a session.
Joe: That's what happened.
Brett: Because I don't have my shit together enough to do the podcast.
Joe: Right, but there is a tremendous amount of connection and joy, and alignment in it. So what's the problem?
Brett: Because my head said there was a thing I was supposed to do.
Joe: Would it have been better than this?
Brett: I don't know. We could have had a really vague podcast discussion that I felt like disconnected from and judged myself for not being vulnerable in. It could have been that.
Joe: Right, exactly. So since the resolution isn't going to give you anything that you already have, what is it that you want the resolution for?
Brett: To feel like it is done, like complete, like I did it. I got there. It's all better now.
Joe: What if that never comes? What if there is no complete, no done, no heaven?
Brett: I mean it would be boring if everything was done.
Joe: I mean it even back in the day. The thing that you dismissed is that there was a finish line when you dismissed the religion.
Brett: And there was also a way that in the religion I was holding on to this idea of a finish line.
Joe: That's right.
Brett: When I was a kid, my logical brain was like well, I am a Christian. Ideally, I could just kill myself right now and go straight to heaven. Why not do that?
Joe: What if this is just the rest of the letting go of the story? The finish line part of the story is now gone.
Brett: The finish line part of the story has continued to be there all along. At any moment, I'll arrive.
Joe: What happens to your sense of self if you deeply accept that there is no finish line? You are never done.
Brett: I just feel a lot more relaxed in my body now. There's a way that doing work and taking on challenges doesn't feel like the last final sprint before the finish, so I feel less pressure.
Joe: What's left to do about this perceived pattern of abandoning your mom through cryptocurrency and air sports since you are never going to completely resolve it? It's never going to be completely done, what's left to do.
Brett: It feels okay to follow rabbit holes now. I feel less shame now around rabbit holing.
Joe: I don't know any human who doesn't rabbit hole. Sometimes it is the post office for 33 years. I don't know any human who doesn't do it. We are creatures of habit.
Brett: That's an interesting one. I consider myself. There's a way I shame myself for not being a creature of habit. I see people having structured habits in their lives that support them and create consistency. I see myself as not having that.
Joe: But you do.
Brett: Despite us having regular podcast recordings.
Joe: Even outside that, you regularly go down rabbit holes. You regularly get stressed out. It regularly serves you by getting you money, knowledge and wisdom.
Brett: I regularly create heartbreak by crashing and burning in ways that somehow I survive.
Joe: Exactly. Regularly recreating the circumstances for you to allow deep heartbreak and shame that's never been allowed before.
Brett: I feel clear. I am not having like squirmy, shame feelings popping up in my body, and I am not having running thoughts about this. There is a way that feels disorientingly serene.
Joe: That makes sense.
Brett: There is nothing to do, but that is in contrast to the story of there is always a million things that I am not doing right.
Joe: Where it gets even weirder is that the nothing to do does so much stuff.
Brett: There is a way right now that I have your voice in my head from another time of being afraid something will go away is the first way to make it go away, so I am like don't be afraid this will go away.
Joe: That is being afraid it will go away.
Brett: See, I am getting it all wrong.
Joe: Me, too. It is the fear that the serenity could go away. That's a possibility. All we did was see what was. We didn't do anything. You didn't become a different person. All you had to do was just see what was actually happening, and the serenity came in.
Brett: But isn't that in some way the state I was experiencing before going away?
Joe: Yeah, the difference is there is not a doing. There is an undoing. It was like I did something and I need to keep it. It is very different than I undid something and saw the truth.
Brett: I see.
Joe: What do you have to do to keep it?
Brett: There is a way that my way of trying to self explore this previously was a stack of doing things on top of doing things to get myself to feel whatever it was that was unfelt. That was just a stack of layers pushing back and forth on each other.
Joe: Yeah, they were all just in the way of the truth of what you are.
Brett: I don't have to do that.
Joe: Right. Exactly.
Brett: What's going to happen next? Am I going to do my fucking taxes, or what?
Joe: I have no idea. I don't know. I don't know what I am going to do next either, so it works out just fine. So just notice that all of the movement, so as you feel the serenity, this is just myself uncovered rather than something that I have created that I need to keep. Notice how much stuff. It is just automatic ways in which we cover ourself, and they are just showing up. That's the really cool part about this process is that you can just start to see, especially in these moments of clarity, you can start to see all the ways that you want to cover yourself up. You just found one of them, how do I keep it? That's one of the ways you try to cover yourself up, and then you just found the second one, which is like will I be able to get shit done. I have to get shit done. Think about mice or rats or beavers or dogs. They never have to tell themselves or be worried about getting shit done, but they are always doing shit. If they are not sleeping, they are doing something.
Brett: But none of them are building companies or promoting podcasts.
Joe: Yeah, but you aren't licking your balls. Dogs are.
Brett: We are not on video.
Joe: Yes, they are not doing as complicated things. They are not capable. We think we would stop doing the things that are interesting to us. That's silly.
Brett: I guess the most complicated things I have done have been things that have fallen together as I have been doing whatever.
Joe: Yeah, exactly.
Brett: Even the planning that brings me to places that I couldn't just wander to.
Joe: Just notice every one of these things, and they will come with a little visceral sensation with them. I am making the noise of the sensation. It's [breathes in]. They will each come with that, and that's the habitual way to cover ourselves up.
Brett: There's like a tensioning that comes with it.
Joe: Exactly, which is awesome. They are going to come, and then you get to see them and see through them. What if you just sat for the next three weeks because I know you create a life where you can do this. For the next three weeks, just watch them come and see through them.
Brett: Oh, but Joe, I create a life where technically I could do this but what I have actually been doing is thinking about all the things I am not doing.
Joe: Just to say one other piece to it, which I think is important. There is a nervous system piece to this, which is if you are operating under stress for an extended period of time, your body will go into a physical depression and not be motivated. That's natural. If a deer gets chased by a tiger for 20 days straight, it's going to definitely need to sit down and do nothing for a bit. There is a physical component to it.
Brett: Yeah, that's interesting. There is this like sitting down and doing nothing but being stressed about it requires that release, and then the depression. It's like see, I am doing nothing. That's why I am depressed. I've got to do something, and then it loops back on itself.
Joe: That's exactly how it works. You see this with like big time CEOs and when they sell their company, it is like bathrobe for two years. You see it all the time. It is like it would be a bathrobe for three to six months if they weren't telling themselves they should be up and doing something all the time, but because they tell themselves they have to be up and doing something all the time, it takes three times as long to recover, four times as long to recover. Okay, enjoy the serenity.
Brett: I am just going to take today to do that.
Joe: What a total pleasure.
Brett: Thank you, Joe.
Joe: Thanks for a great time.
Thanks for listening to the Life in VIEW podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW or to take a course, visit view.life.
What is wrong with making people feel better? When some of us think of codependency, we think of alcoholism or addiction but it can affect our lives in subtle ways both personally and professionally. Today we are going to talk about the difference between care and caretaking.
"If it ever crosses your mind that the person can't handle what you are going to say to them, what you want to say to them, if you ever think they are too weak or incapable, those absolutely are key indicators that you are in it, that you are in the caretaking side of things."
What is wrong with making people feel better? When a lot of us think of codependency, we think of alcoholism or we think of addiction, a lot of the extreme examples, but co-dependency is something we really do a lot in our daily lives, and this happens in very subtle ways in relationships, personally and in business. Today we are going to talk about the difference between care and caretaking.
Joe, today, I want to talk about something we have all dealt with before, which is a really common scenario where you want to make somebody feel better, and you think that this is going to help. You do something specifically with a goal of making them feel better, and it actually ends up making things worse in the long run.
We have talked about that in your courses, and we have labeled it with the term caretaking, which sounds a lot like care. People think about care as a good thing, and then caretaking becomes this thing that is disempowering. What is caretaking? How did you come to this as a concept worthy of inquiry?
Joe: Semantically speaking, you could call it co-dependence or caretaking, and just for the sake of this conversation, let's make caretaking the side that is in the lexicon as co-dependence, more on that co-dependence side, and caring for being something that's not in that camp. That's how I use the words, so I just want to define that for everybody who is listening.
If you heard, I was laughing as soon as you were talking about wanting to make somebody feel better because that's actually the way I would define the difference between caring for somebody and caretaking somebody. It is the idea that you are trying to manage their experience, and this gets particularly dangerous when you are managing their experience for your experience.
For example, the wife who comes home and is doing everything she possibly can to make sure her husband doesn't get mad at her. Is she doing that to manage her husband's emotions? Or is she doing that to manage her own emotion? Is she trying to avoid fear? Or is she trying to avoid his anger? If she is trying to avoid his anger, just for him, what would be the purpose of that? What would be wrong with letting somebody be angry? People get angry all the time. Humans are meant to get angry. All mammals have moments of anger. What would make you want to stop you if it is to try to manage your own experience?
That's where co-dependence of in this case what we are calling caretaking is. It is when you are trying to manage another person's emotions through what we call care to make it so that you don't have to experience your own emotional situation. You don't have to experience something you don't want to experience.
Brett: In a sense, it is taking care of yourself. For example, that wife, maybe what she is avoiding is being attacked in anger by somebody larger than her, and so she is trying to make him feel better, trying to manage his experience, trying to tiptoe around the lava in order to prevent her experience from deteriorating or going in a direction she doesn't want.
Joe: That's exactly it. I'll give you an example. I had a woman come to me and she was talking about this exact same situation. She was talking about how my husband gets angry at me, and I don't know what to do and there's nothing I can do. It was very much that she was not capable of changing her reality because she had this angry husband. She genuinely felt that. This wasn't something like her mind was wanting to be a victim in this way. It was generally she felt trapped. That's the feeling she was having.
I said, ah, BS, you like it. She didn't like me saying that very much, obviously. I got a smile out of it. She looked perplexed. I said tell me what would happen if every time he started getting angry, you just got up and walked out. You just consistently did this for let's call it 10 weeks. Every time he started losing his cool, you just got up and walked out. How long would he still be yelling at you? How would this work for him if this anger thing that he does stopped working? What if every time he yelled at you, you were like yeah, baby, I like to see your anger? Give me some more. Tell me how angry you are. Tell me how frustrated you are. You have nothing to be ashamed of. I can accept your anger.
If you did that for 10 weeks, how long would it be that he was getting angry at you? Obviously, I am not talking about if he is hitting her. If he is hitting her or being physically abusive or mentally abusive, that's not a relationship you want to be in. Even if you are in that situation, leaving is a far better situation than trying to make them feel better because you are just telling them that this works. If I get angry, you will stop being yourself and you will try to manage my experience, which gives me all the power in the relationship. That's what co-dependence is. That's what care taking is. You are trying to make someone else feel better so you don't have to feel it.
That's an extreme version of it, but there's everyday versions of this too. The most obvious one that you see is somebody sad. Somebody else says it will get better. What makes you want to take away their sadness? Is it that you don't want to feel their sadness? Is it that you don't want your own sadness? What's the problem with them being sad? Sad is beautiful. Good cries are amazing things for people. Is it because your mom and dad told you not to cry for 20 years? And so now you are just doing whatever you can to make sure you never have to hear tears. That's co-dependence.
On the other side of the equation, caring for is when you are moving, not out of any desire to change the person. Your desire is just simply to relish and enjoy the feeling of caring for somebody. It is an unbelievable joy to care for somebody. It is just a great experience to have, but you are not trying to change them in any way. Their reaction to your care is completely unimportant. The way you can tell internally that you are in one or the other is resentment.
Caretaking eventually will lead to resentment in you. You will start resenting the person, and they will start resenting you because they have no choice but to resent you because you are treating them like they are kids. You are treating full adults like I have to manage your emotions. I have to make sure you don't get upset. I have to make sure you are not sad. Eventually the person is like screw off. I am capable. I can take care of my own emotions. What makes you think you are better than me? That's the reason.
Then the person who is caretaking is like look, I've given you all this stuff. I am sacrificing myself every day for you. I am not speaking my truth. I am trying to position my truth for you in such a way that you can hear it, and you are angry at me. Forget you, then. This is the rigmarole that people put themselves through instead of just I am speaking my truth to you, and that's my responsibility. Your responsibility is to have whatever emotional reaction you want to have to it. I am not going to try to change that.
Brett: What about situations where the person really is dependent in some way, for example a child or an elderly or sick relative? To some extent, you want to care for them, and to some extent, you resent it also. But if you don't, you are not okay with the alternative of them being left completely on their own. How would you pick apart the care and caretaking in that situation? How do we know the difference?
Joe: There are so many of these that are very different from one another. They are very different from one another. A child is very different than an alcoholic father, which is very different than a mother who is bipolar, which is very different than somebody who is developmentally disabled. All of those are very different things. Everybody likes to clump them all in. Basically, them clumping any of this in together is saying wait a second, I don't want to stop being a caretaker because then I will have no control. What will my life be without control, which, by the way, is the same reason the abuser, or the bully, or the yeller is saying I am not going to stop yelling because then I have no control. Everybody has got their control in different ways.
Behind that question is mostly that. Behind that kind of question is wait a second, there are people I really have to take care of, and behind that is mostly that fear of losing the control that one does have. For instance, with a drug addict, there's whole rooms of Al Anon built to teach those living with addicts how to take care of themselves and not take care of the addict. That one is an easy one. That one is a complete illusion. When I say it is a complete illusion, what I want to say is not that the person is bad or ignorant. They might be ignorant, but they are not bad. It's actually they just can't see through it. They have been trained their whole life to take care of people emotionally. They think it is their job. It is very hard for them to see outside of that thing.
But with children, on the other hand, you actually do have quite a responsibility to take care of kids, and yet a lot of people care take kids. Don't cry, Billy. That's a perfect example of it. The only way you can really tell when you are at the difference is when your resentment starts building when you are trying to manage their experience so you don't have to deal with a certain feeling you are having.
Brett: Back to the kid or the addiction example, this is where a lot of these topics get the response from people. This sounds really great in theory. This is probably true for a lot of people, but my situation is dire. If I, for example, don't care of my addict brother, then the next thing that might happen is that he dies of an overdose. That happens for real all the time. And so like somebody may be like no, I absolutely cannot accept the possibility of my brother dying of an overdose, so I need to do at least the minimum of caretaking or care or enabling that should at least keep him alive. That can make this really, really difficult to pull apart. A lot of people always feel like their situation is different. Their situation is not the textbook case. Theirs is actually they are trapped. What advice would you have for somebody who feels that way? They feel resentment and they also feel like they have no other choice.
Joe: I would say first look at the other choices you have, and really ask yourself the question. For example, with the addict, if I don't pay for this addict to live, then they will be homeless. If I don't take care of them, then they will die of a drug overdose. What makes you think they are going to not die of a drug overdose or not go homeless if you are taking care of them? How does that work in your brain? Do you think that every single person who has a drug overdose is because their brother/sister/mother/father stopped caring for them? Do you think that every one of them that's homeless is because they stopped caring for them?
Taking a look at the other side of your logic and deconstructing it is an incredibly important tool. The evidence that I have seen is that the caretaking drives the person into the addiction further, and there's evidence of this where the alcoholics who have the hardest time to break alcoholism are the people who have independent wealth, and they have nobody particularly depending on them. They have no bottom to hit to get out of it. Most of the time the co-dependence is just making it so the person doesn't hit their bottom. You are actually hurting them. You are again trying to avoid somebody from feeling pain so that you don't have to feel the loss of your loved one.
If you were being honest with yourself, and here's the trick, feel the loss. Feel the loss before you even make your decision. I am not saying stop or stop. Just feel the loss. If I stop this, they are going to die. Feel your person's death, mourn it, go all the way through it so that you are making decisions that are based on what's best for them, not because you are trying to avoid the grief.
Brett: That was a really good point you brought up there about hitting the bottom. A lot of these difficult emotions, their purpose is for us to feel them so they can teach us the lessons they are meant to be teaching. If you are protecting somebody else from feeling their emotion and receiving their lesson while also using that as a tool to avoid yourself feeling the difficult emotion and learning your lesson, then you really can't get out of the pattern.
Joe: Yeah, and take a look at it the other way. Occasionally, I get to meet these beautiful people who have dedicated their life to caring for a mother or a father who is passing or a child who has such bad disabilities they can't leave their wheelchair. They have dedicated their life to these people in a way that's healthy. There is a care for. You can spot them a while away. The reason you can is because they have just gotten so soft and their heart is so big. There's a way in which they have used this experience of caring for somebody to dissolve themselves, to sandpaper their edges. They are just soft people. I don't mean soft like not strong. They are far stronger than most people. I mean soft as in they are not rigid.
If that's happening to you, it is a pretty good indicator that you are in the caring for camp. Then there are other people even if they are caring for those same people but more likely they are caring for an addict or they are caring for somebody who is abusive to them, and they feel like they can't get out of it. They are not getting softer. They are getting more and more neurotic. They are getting more and more spun up over the years. They are losing friends. They are becoming more isolated. That's another way.
In the long term, that's another way to tell the difference between which camp you are in. Is it softening you up? Is your heart getting bigger? Is there less resentment or is there more resentment and more feeling of trappedness and more spinning?
Brett: Let's talk a little bit more about some of those subtle forms because it is pretty common to talk about alcoholism or some of the deeper forms of co-dependence. For many people, I think that just feels like a separate category. I don't have these problems. That's not in my life. My life is great. Everything is good. Then just not seeing that there are always. There's only an asymptotic reduction of these habits it seems over time. Everybody does at least a small amount of it, and most people are doing some amount of it.
In a romantic relationship, for example, how can you identify the smaller forms of subtle caretaking that are occurring and co-dependence and transform that into care?
Joe: I had a friend once, and he had a strong faith. It was a Catholic faith. He was a sweetheart of a human. One day he came to me and he said I have a hard time, Joe, knowing when I am supposed to take care of myself and when I am supposed to take care of others. I said to him wow, so your God is a masochist.
Brett: Explain.
Joe: What I am saying is if your God has set up a world where it is binary, where it is either self-love or the love of another, then the design that this God has created is one that's masochistic. It is one that is to torture. It is not the way that I see the world working at all. What I see is the thing that is true in us is the compassionate treatment of ourselves and is also the compassionate treatment of the person across from us. Now, everyone says what's best for me is I just want to go out and drink, but I've got to take care of my kid. Is going out and drinking or partying really what's best for you? I am talking about what's really best for you and what's really best for them.
Somebody says what's really best for them is if I am really nice and take care of them. Is that what's really best for them? Or is what is really best for them to learn how to be independent, for them to be told the truth? That's the overarching way that I look at this is that the most compassionate thing you can do for yourself is also the most compassionate thing you can do for someone else. I see this all the time when somebody finally breaks through into this is what I want. When they are in a relationship where they are constantly caretaking somebody, and then they are like oh wow, this is what I want, I will almost always then ask the question and so what about that is not the most compassionate thing for the person you have been caretaking.
Brett: That gets almost into a different topic of what is the deeper want. You might think that what you want is just to keep the peace, the harmony in the relationship or not to get yelled at or not have somebody be sad at you. Is that what you really want? Do you really want to be authentic? I have run into this a number of times in my relationships.
Joe: That's exactly right. How deep are you going to go down that want hole? How deep are you going to go down that compassion hole? If you are going to go down compassion to the place where everybody is nice to each other, this law doesn't work. But if you go down to the deepest level of compassion, which is I am willing to sacrifice our relationship for my love for you. I am willing to sacrifice what you think of me. I am willing to sacrifice this person, you, who I love because I know it is what's best for you. Then the law works. Then God isn't masochistic.
But you asked a question, so I started with this story just so I could say when people are in the more gentle forms of caretaking each other, there[s some pretty easy signs. One is you notice that you are managing how you are going to say it. If you are worried about how you are going to say it so that the person across from you can hear it and accept it, and you have run over multiple solutions, multiple ways of talking to them in your head with the hopes that you are going to get it so that they will have a different reacting than they normally do, then you are definitely in it. Then you are definitely caretaking.
Brett: I resonate with you. I have experienced a lot of times where I will have some issue or challenge in a relationship, and then I will go to a safe space to process it where they aren't present. It is not really vulnerable to them. I am just kind of doing the process with whatever my group is, and then I am like oh, okay, great, now I have gotten to my core want. I have gotten to my authenticity. I know what I want. Now, what's the way I can say it in a quick paragraph that I can hide behind and that will exactly get this point across without me messing it up or having to hold my ground in a sense or truly feel into myself in the moment.
I think a lot of that comes from there being fear of constricting in the moment. This happens a lot of times where when you are away from the person you are having this challenge with, you feel relaxed. You feel open. You can feel the love for them. And then the moment you are with them, and perhaps you are being accused of something or there are emotions that are uncomfortable for you that are either being thrown at you or they are just coming up in the other person and they are uncomfortable for you, then we constrict. Then, all of a sudden, it seems we lose access to all of this stuff.
Joe: Yeah, that's the trick in all of this work. All of this work is those moments of defensiveness, those moments of resistance, how do we fall in love with them? How do we fall into them? How do we open up and allow them to permeate us? The more felt sense of it is how we open up and let it permeate through us. That is the kinesthetic or the somatic experience. The other way to look at that is to say when I get in front of them, I am totally going to constrict and I am totally not going to say the right thing. Great, fantastic! That gives you practice. It is like the best batting cage in the world.
You can even start the conversation and say hey, I am nervous that in the middle of this conversation, I am going to constrict and I am not going to bring my full, true self here. I don't want that. What I want is to love you with my full self. If you see me constricting, if you see me not being myself, please point it out to me, and just give me a couple minutes or seconds or whatever I need to get back to being able to bring my full truth to you.
Brett: What about accusations or attacks that come as a consequence of speaking our truth in this way? It may be not just from the person that you stop caretaking, but it may be from your entire friends' group or your family or everybody around you. It may be normalized that what you are doing in this caretaking way is actually how you are supposed to be and if you are not doing this, you are a bad person. If you are not enabling your partner or we could talk about the addict again or we could talk about elderly parents, if you are not taking care of your elderly parents in a particular way and everybody around you is externalizing this guilt towards you, what's the way to process that?
Joe: That's a good question. Before we get into that, there is something back that I want to touch back on, which is how you know when this is happening. We talked about a couple of the ways you can know it is happening, but there's a key one, which is if it ever crosses your mind that the person can't handle what you are going to say to them, what you want to say to them, if you ever think they are too weak or incapable, and/or if you feel like if I say this, they are going to fly off the handle at me, those are absolutely key indicators you are in, that you are in the caretaking side of things. If you think they are too weak, then basically you are treating them like they are weak, and they will get resentful. If you are scared of them getting angry, then they definitely have learned that getting angry gets them what they want, and you are delivering it for them. Those are just two other indicators that really let you know if you are in a relationship, that that's happening.
When you get really attuned to this, you will notice. You said it is asymptotic. The way I would make that very real is that you will just notice how often, just listen. Go to the person you love. Listen very carefully to every sentence you are speaking to them. Notice how many of them are subtle excuses or subtle hedges, not completely owning yourself, not completely owning your experience, hedging it, shaving it so that they will think differently of you than what you are scared they are going to think of you.
If you are scared about what somebody is going to think about you, and you are modifying your behavior in any way, that is a form of caretaking. It just gets more and more subtle. It is subtle until you see it. It just gets more and more subtle.
BELL SOUND Okay, so this is the time in our podcast when we do something just a little bit different. We take a break from the intellect and incorporate our bodies and emotions into the conversation. We do this because it helps us integrate the information better and usually it is a bunch of fun. We crowdsource these exercises from our community so if you have a good one, please share it with us.
When doing the exercise, take it as a treat and as an experiment. Just do the activity and see what happens. As always, enjoy yourself. BELL SOUND
Tara: Hi, everybody. This is Tara. I am a coach who works with Joe.
Come to a sitting position with your feet on the floor, and your hands on your lap facing palm up so your hands and your wrist are on your lap, palm up. You are going to keep your eyes open for this one.
Go ahead and raise your hands so your upper arms are next to your body and your arms are bent at the elbow with your hands in front of you, your palms facing you. You are going to start shaking them. Your hands are shaking back and forth at the wrists. It is like your middle finger goes back and forth from the back arm to the front arm, and your hands are just going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. You are going to do this for like 30 seconds. This is a Qi Gong move to calm the nervous system. Keep going. Keep shaking your hands at the wrist.
You are going to take a deep inhale through your nose, and exhale slowly through the mouth with like pursed lips. Inhale with the nose, through the nose, and exhale through the mouth with pursed lips. Your hands will keep shaking. We will do one more inhale through the nose. Exhale through the mouth with pursed lips. You will stop shaking your arms, and you´ll put them back down on your lap. Just notice how you feel. BELL SOUND
Joe: Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the exercise as much as we did when we found it. Before we go back into the episode, I wanted to thank all of you who have been sharing the podcast and signing up for the VIEW course. The interest and support you guys have shown has been overwhelming and humbling. It is a pleasure to know we have something to offer that has been so helpful to you. Now, let's get back into the conversation.
Brett: A lot of what we have been talking about seems like it is a one against one kind of situation where there is a person you are caretaking. But if you have, for example, a community, and you are concerned about what that community is going to think or how they are going to respond, then you are actually caretaking them as well as the entire situation.
Joe: That's exactly right. That can happen in the workplace. I see this in workplaces all the time where you have a group of people, and they are just not speaking their truth to each other. This is death. If it is in manufacturing, it is not as much of a death. It just means you are giving up a massive advantage, but if you are in a tech or a creative, this is death where people can't speak their truth and feel really safe about it and be just blatant and be able to be wrong and for other people to say I don't think that's right and for having that open discussion. That's where great things happen.
If you are going to be inventive or creative or do something out of the box, you need that. There are companies, back to your example, whether it be everybody wants you to take care of an alcoholic mom or everybody wants you to work from six am until 11 pm because that's what the company is doing. If you don't do it, you are going to suffer the consequences. Whatever that situation is, there is a real possibility that you will be ousted from the group. There's also an equally real possibility that you will force the healing of the group.
Brett: Bringing that into a business context, there's a real tragedy of the commons-esque thing about this. If an entire group is slowly trending towards optimizing for harmony, optimizing for fitting in, if there's an unseen value around being a team player, you are staying as long as everybody is staying after work, and it is really getting to the point where it is not good for anybody individually. Then everybody also fears if they are the one to speak up about it, then they will be ostracized from the group, then they are allowing the entire group culture to deteriorate.
Joe: And there's no leader, meaning there's somebody who is in charge, but there's no leadership happening. The healthy cultures are the ones where everybody is acting like a leader from time to time. If you mute people as the boss or if you, the employee, decide to be muted, you are killing leadership in the group because leadership comes from I am going to lead the way into a new place. You don't lead the way into the place you are at. You lead the way into the place that you have not been or that you are going to. The only way that happens is being the tip of the spear. That's how leadership works. You can't be the tip of the spear if the whole thing is optimizing for harmony and/or optimizing for competitiveness and/or optimizing for intelligence, even.
Optimization is for what's happening right now, and that changes in business. And so the people have to change as well, and new places have to be led to.
Brett: From a leadership standpoint, how would you apply that to accountability or discipline with regards to if there's an employee that's not meeting certain criteria? Maybe coworkers are trying to protect him because they like the employee, and so everybody hides each other's flaws or shortcomings.
Joe: The question is how to hold them accountable. The idea that holding somebody accountable, particularly accountable with love could ever be a problem is a good determination that you are in co-dependence. If I am speaking my truth, I don't want to work with somebody who can't deliver on time or at least tell me why they can't deliver on time and tell me how they are going to compensate for it. My truth is I don't want to work with somebody like that.
I also notice that people that work like that aren't happy with the way they work. It is not good for them, and it is not good for me. To own that want, and to say this is the reality I choose to live in, whether you are the boss or the employee is 100% acceptable. Now, if you say it to your boss and your boss gets pissed and you say it to your boss again, and they fire you, then you are going to get exactly what you asked for, which is a work situation in which people are reliable. If that's how you want to work, it is a good thing you are out of that situation with the job. If you are the boss, then it is a good thing you have lost that employee even if it is a short term pain in the butt because you are going to have a long term great team if this is the reality. You are also going to create a culture where everybody knows this is how we behave in this culture, and then it just starts having a gravity of its own.
The reason you wouldn't hold them accountable is because you are caretaking, and the reason you wouldn't fire them is you are caretaking. They will become resentful of you. That happens all the time in business where you see somebody who has been trying to be nice to their employees and their employees are resentful. You see the boss in the group next to them. They are dead straight forward, and they are very clear about their wants and the expectations. They do it with love and gentleness, and they are cared for and a deep sense of loyalty has been created by that kind of leadership.
Brett: A lot of the times when people start working with a new tool like this, they will do what they think is actually working with the tool, for example, not caretaking. They will actually end up avoiding and weaponizing the tool. An example of that is I don't care about your feelings. I am not responsible for them. It is not my job to make you feel better. They will say it in a way that actually pulls them away and creates distance. What are some ways to recognize that? What are some other ways that might happen as we start to work with this?
Joe: The first way it is going to happen is you are going to start judging other people who are caretaking of you. That's the first eh that happens in the process of learning about this. What's actually happening is that you are judging your own caretaker, that you have started a war with yourself about your caretaker. You have seen that it causes you pain. You have seen it is suboptimal. Then you have decided let's make an enemy out of this thing and try to change it, which is underneath the same thing you are trying to do by being co-dependent is trying to change somebody else or change yourself. That doesn't help. It doesn't do much. It is fine for a bit because it is part of the process you are going to go through. It's okay. There's no reason to start a war with yourself over it because you are not going to win. That’s one of the ways it is going to start.
Then the second thing is what you are saying is really true. People will start weaponizing it and say now I am just going to cut myself off from you in a different way. Our society likes to tell the story that if you are caretaking, then you are not cutting yourself off from people. You are caring for them. You are not being arrogant. You are not being rude. You are not being dismissive. But you are still cutting yourself off from them because you are not telling them your truth. You are managing them, just in a different way.
So then all of a sudden, if you decide to cut off from them in another way, like I am not going to talk to you or I am going to basically feel or have empathy, then it is just another way of cutting them off. In all of these things, what happens is your body will start constricting whether you are being co-dependent or whether you decide to be defensive in a more traditional manner or cut yourself off from them. You will start feeling your body somatically start to tense up. That's the indicator. That's the main thing.
The last thing that can happen is you can start going down that caring for route, which is a beautiful route. You can start feeling how soft you are getting, the benefit of keeping an open heart and allowing them to feel anything they need to feel or want to feel and not trying to manage their reality, and at the same time not closing yourself down from them. That becomes this incredibly inspiring place, and you start noticing how much benefit you and the people around you get. Then you forget to draw boundaries.
Then all of a sudden, it is like I can just manage myself to continually be open-hearted instead of I actually have to draw boundaries to maintain an open heart. You can't keep loving people without boundaries. A mom who doesn't have boundaries raises horrible children that eventually will be very abusive to the mom or dad, for that matter. Those are some of the pitfalls you can go into but the biggest pitfall is people will get through one layer of how they are caretaking, and they think they are through it. There are just more and more subtle ways.
Brett: The corkscrew.
Joe: Yeah, it is just the corkscrew. Exactly.
Brett: It reminds me of another subtly there. You were talking about how we will start judging the caretaking in others. Perhaps the progression is that we begin completely not aware of our caretaking, and thinking that it is care. Then we start to become more subtly aware of the caretaking, and we are like oh shit, I am doing this. That's bad. I can't be doing that. Then we start attacking the part of ourselves that does it, which makes us judge the part of other people that is doing it.
It seems there is another layer I have experienced myself that happens, which is I am done caretaking. I am not caretaking anymore, and what that means is that I am over it. I am done. I am better. All these other people are expecting me to caretake them, and they just need to be experiencing their emotions. I just need to let them experience their emotions because they need to process them. Then, all of a sudden, it becomes about everybody else having to process their shit and then I am just on this pedestal of like I am good. That has always led to some kind of heartbreak or challenge.
Joe: The people I see who are really able to care for others without any kind of abandonment of themselves, they often feel people's emotions when the person isn't feeling their emotions. You will see them weep. These are rare folks, but you will see them weep or take in the sadness the other person is avoiding. Any way that we are defending ourselves is an opportunity to lean in, love more, and accept ourselves and others.
Brett: Let's say somebody around you has started to address their caretaking habits. They are going this thing we were just discussing where they are starting to be blunt and rude with you. What advice do you have for anybody who is working with that?
Joe: Cherish it. If you are listening to this podcast and you see somebody who is finally standing up for themselves, they are going to be wonky and weird about it. It is going to be clunky, and it will change. That's guaranteed to change, meaning the person who has been co-dependent or caretaking and they stop caretaking, they are going to be harsh for a while, most likely. They are not going to go straight into loving.
The reason that that's the case is because they are so sure that if they don't care for people, people are going to attack them because their whole life they were attacked when they didn't abandon themselves for their mom, dad, or their sister or whoever it was. They are very sure they are going to be attacked, and so they are preparing for that attack. So what looks like they are being dicks is really them preparing for attack.
Brett: It is like courage of them challenging their inner assumption and just hoping it gets proven wrong.
Joe: If you see them doing it, the best thing you can possibly do is just say I am so glad that you are asking for what you want and I just want you to know I am not going to attack you. There's no need to be defensive. Then it is super short-lived. That's the trick.
The other side, which we didn't get to talk about too much, which is when you are starting this new way of being of not caretaking, most likely you are going to be a little defensive, which is going to make people attacking you more likely. One thing you can do is to hold yourself with love and care as you are doing it, and not need to defend yourself. You are just going to say what you have got to say, and if the attack comes, you are going to allow yourself to use it as a sandpaper, to use it as a way to clean yourself out or to cleanse yourself, purify yourself.
That's the best way to approach it, and at the same time, people are going to get upset with you. They are probably going to get upset with you even more the second time or even more the third time. If you stay in a loving, non-defensive stance, then the most likely scenario is they will see that there is this other way of being and they want to be that way with you. Sometimes that won't happen, and you will lose people. But either way, in a year or two, you will be surrounded by people who want to hear your truth, who don't want you to manage them, who don't want you to caretake them, who want to be sovereign and empowered next to you, not in you or through you. It might be a hell of a transition, but it is unbelievably worth it.
Brett: I have got one more question for you. This came from somebody within our community. If you had to pick between a vaccine for Coronavirus and a vaccine for caretaking, which would it be? Why?
Joe: Wow. I don't want to answer this question.
Brett: We don't have to. We can cut that whole thing out.
Joe: I don't want to answer the question because my answer is I wouldn't pick either. I wouldn't pull the butterfly out of the cocoon because it won't be able to fly afterwards. For me, it would be like do you build a vaccine for crawling or do you build a vaccine for a capacity to do mathematics in an eight year old. There are developmental steps we need to go through. All systems require something to challenge them so they can grow and be strong and evolve. If there is no challenge, there's no evolution. I don't want to get rid of our challenges. I want to learn how to embrace how, how to embrace the death that we face, to learn how to embrace the caretaking that we do, to learn how to embrace the innocence that tries to get us to manage other people to feel safe. That's what I want. It is not to get rid of it. It is to learn how to embrace it.
Brett: That's amazing. Thank you very much, Joe. I just realized when I asked you that question, I caretook you by giving you an out. I am going to sit with that until next week.
Joe: Awesome. What a pleasure to be with you, Brett.
Brett: Yeah, same here. Once again.
Thanks for listening to the Life in VIEW podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit http://view.life.
People often think of business as something that’s separate from life. They may say things like, “It’s just business.” In today’s episode, we explore the business side of VIEW and our integrative approach to business that serves as an extension of the values, mindset and strategies that we use in our everyday lives.
"To me, self-awareness is life. There is no difference. People think about business as something that's separate from life. I do that in business, or it's just business. To me, business is far more of an art form, and how you use it is far more important."
If you've been listening for a while, you have heard Joe and I refer to the workshops and online courses that this podcast comes from. What's the deal with all of this? Why do we want you to join our mailing list? What's our intention? Are we trying to suck you into something? What's this going to cost you?
Today I would like to bring some transparency into what exactly is going on with all this VIEW business. Joe, how did you get into the coaching business in the first place?
Joe: By accident. When Tara and I decided to have a kid and a kid was on the way, I realized that I had to stop sitting in a room, meditating all the time and make a little money. I went into venture capital. One of the realizations I had early on was that if I didn't bring my self-awareness practice, if business wasn't a way for me to continue to develop and understand myself, that I would never succeed at business. Then as I started to invest, I realized the mentality of the people that I invested in was the biggest leverage for successful investments.
I started sharing some of the knowledge that I had with them. That was successful in many cases. Then they started telling me that other people needed me, and I didn't have the time. I did a course, and then it just kind of happened. People, the line got long, and at some point I decided that this was far more my calling than investing and I was better at it, frankly.
Brett: With a lot of self-development programs, there is this way that self-development turns out to be a tool for somebody to make a bunch of money and inflate their ego. What makes what you are doing different from that?
Joe: Wow, I would love to say that I am different from that, but I am sure that is at play at the same time, meaning there is no way you can completely annihilate an ego. I think if you think you have completely annihilated it, that is ego in itself. I am sure my ego is at play, and making money, I enjoy making money. I definitely like it, but neither of them are the priority in my world.
Creating the business is far more about an enjoyment process for me. Maybe two or three years ago, I would have said I really want to bring this out to people because it creates happiness and I want to change the world. That's really not alive in me anymore. It's far alive in me that this is something I really enjoy. I get off on. I like watching people have life changing experiences. I like being a part of that. I like building something beyond me. I like seeing the value through the success of a business. It's really a matter of enjoyment for me.
Brett: You described your journey as you started out being interested in self-awareness and meditation, and you had a baby and realized you needed some money. You started to get into business and VC, and you wanted of course to bring your self-awareness practice with you and make that part of what you were doing in business. Then it became the business itself. How did you transition from being a venture capitalist and focusing on the quality of awareness of the people that you invested in into making VIEW a business on its own?
Joe: I was really just following the demand. I was just following people's requests, for the most part. I have a vision for sure, but it is incredibly informed by what people have asked for and what they want. I feel like it's the same. When you are coaching somebody, you start with where they are. You don't tell them what you think their agenda should be. You follow their agenda. I think business is the same way. You don't ask people to be different. You don't give them an agenda. You find out what their agenda is, and if you can serve that, if you can be of service to that, and it is aligned internally, then by all means, go ahead. That's what happened here. It was just the best way I could be of service that was inspiring and enjoyable for me.
Brett: Can you tell me more about what you are working on now inside and outside of the VIEW courses? What does that look like for you?
Joe: Yeah, too much. I think I am working on too much. We have the podcast going. We have the VIEW course going. We have the AoA course going. I have a group of 12 executives I work with every year as a coach and then we have an occasional in-person workshop, particularly for those executives but sometimes for others. Then, there's the creation of content, which is what we are doing now, just generally spreading the word so that people, if it's right for people, they can find it. That's the work.
Brett: When we first met, VIEW was only available through these small in-person workshops you just mentioned. What's so important to you about in-person work? What made you start exploring the online format?
Joe: I was ignorant, I think. The in-person work, I had a limited thought that it could only be done in person, and then Coronavirus hit and people came to me and said hey, we need this, this and this. We need it online. I thought no, no, no. Luckily, I didn't need the money. Eventually, I was sitting in my hot tub one day. I have this hot tub that goes way too hot, and I got some engineer to mess with it. I am boiling my brain.
I had this epiphany that the way I learned a lot of this stuff is very different from the way I teach it, and so I thought wow, I could potentially teach it online the way I learned it. That started the exploration, and only to find out there are ways that when it is done online, it is more powerful. It is stronger. There are some ways in which it is strong. It is stronger because it is more persistent. You have more time with it. You don't get the workshop high. It becomes an integrated part of life.
There are some experiences that can happen in person that are bigger than the experiences that happen online overall, on average. There are some exercises you can only do online, and some you can only do in person. That discovery and just try to make it better and iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate, which is how I do it. I never try for perfection. I just keep on improving. It just turned out that people really dug it. We got great MPS scores, and people really liked it.
Then I got really motivated because I realized it made me less involved, which is really a critical component for me in doing any of the work. If someone is teaching you math, you don't want them to have to be there every time you are doing math. That would be a pretty shitty teacher. I saw that the online version needed less of me, and that became really exciting for me. Then I got more and more inspired by the online work.
Brett: What are you trying to accomplish by growing VIEW as a business?
Joe: It is really just a matter of following my enjoyment. I think there is some freedom I have in the fact that I am not really trying to accomplish anything. It sounds kind of counter intuitive. You have to have business goals, and I do. You have to have a vision, and I do. But at the end of the day, I am really good with things not working because I am not attached to, tied to, my value isn't created from the business outcomes.
The vision is wouldn't it be cool for a whole bunch of people to be able to communicate this way, to have breakthroughs, to have happier lives, and to enjoy themselves more, enjoy each other more, businesses to be more successful, particularly businesses where people are open to self-exploration. Wouldn't that be awesome? It would be. It is a super cool thing. That's more of a symptom. The core is my own enjoyment. The core is what turns me on.
It sounds like that's a little bit hedonistic almost, but it's not quite that way in the fact that what I have learned over time is that when I am following the deeper call, there is more enjoyment in my life. It's not almost. It is an act of surrender. I am surrendering to the call, just like a baby surrenders to a cry. There's a movement that's happening. My enjoyment is a way for me to directly get in touch with that call, that thing that's pulling me, the gravity of my internal exploration, the gravity of divinity or oneness, whatever you want to call that thing, God. My enjoyment is the way that I get to gauge how deeply I am surrendering.
Brett: I love the way you described the vision was a series of run-on questions.
Joe: Shit, I didn't even notice. That totally makes sense.
Brett: You mentioned that you are doing this for your enjoyment and you do have business goals and a vision. What are some of the business goals? What is the revenue model? How does this work?
Joe: The first question that helps me answer the second question is what I want the money for, what the money is about. For me, money is just another tool in self-exploration. That's its highest purpose, and money is also as a secondary purpose a means of supporting people's energy. There's a definite need for a flow of money. Money stagnant is a destructive force in my conception of the world. The goals around money in particular are all about making sure the people who I work with are well paid, that they have good opportunities, that we get to do the stuff that we enjoy, and then the money towards the customer, the main purpose is if it supports the spiritual journey or not.
One of the things I think is really important is that you create a slate of products that are accessible for anybody's journey. There's free content for people who aren't able to afford and then other content for people who can afford. The reason that's important is because that exchange of energy is really important, meaning I was in Nicaragua. There was this group of people who were there to deliver food and clothing to these folks in Nicaragua. I was sitting and talking to them. I was like I feel like it is a bit destructive what you are doing. They were, of course, taken aback. I said to me if you just give them stuff, it teaches them that they can't take care of themselves on some level. I far more believe in an exchange. They were like these guys have nothing to give. Sure, they do. For instance, there was a sea turtle shortage because they had been killed. The community could do a sea turtle rescue, or they could help with the restoration projects for the sea turtles in exchange for it. There are lots of ways.
I think it is really important. A quote in a book called The Soul of Money, it sticks with me. It said, if you are here to help me, no thank you. If you are here to work together for our mutual freedom, let's get to work. I think the monetary exchange toward the customer needs to be there, and it needs to be something that's felt. If you are dealing with somebody who is a billionaire, to say I will do all this for $200 isn't an exchange of energy in the same it would be with someone who is working $10 an hour. It is really important that there is some way that that energy exchange can happen.
Brett: It has been a common challenge, I guess, that really good coaching has been disproportionately available to executives or high-paid tech workers, and meanwhile, a lot of people who are really struggling and could use a lot of this work the most simply can't afford to pay for workshops. But now that you are creating online self-paced courses that don't require your time to administer, what makes you run those as a business when you could give them out for free?
Joe: That's a question I have asked myself a lot when we were looking at the business model. Do we want to do this for free? The answer was that we didn't think that we would get as much completion and buy-in if it was free. That said, I do give it away for free often if the circumstances are right, if the approach is right. But just generally, the thought process is what's the way that the work does the best work inside of you, and that's how I think about everything. I think about it when we market something, for instance. I think about not how we get someone to buy a course. I think about how the marketing becomes the beginning of the course, how it becomes the beginning of self-exploration.
Everything I am doing is serving the self-exploration, everything from the way I bill to how we build the courses to the teamwork that goes into building the courses to how we price it. It's our best guess, and I am sure we are wrong but it is our best guess at how we can best serve the people, how to get them through the course, how to make it meaningful enough for them to value it so they give it the right love and attention.
Brett: That seems like a really difficult problem because you have some people for whom $300 is a throwaway and other people for whom $300 is the majority of a rent payment or their entire rent payment, and it could be argued that both need it equally or could use this work equally but just have completely different context for money.
Joe: It is. It is a really difficult thing. Hopefully, we'll provide stuff. The other part of the model is the higher end stuff pays for the lower end stuff, so the work I do in companies where there is a higher dollar per hour can pay for lower priced courses. Our own sustainability is definitely a part of us, and like I said, it is to make sure everybody in the organization or anybody I contract with has the ability to thrive in their own life. Because if we are creating something from a poverty mentality, then we are going to be projecting that poverty mentality into our teachings.
I think that's not going to work, but the idea for sure and a lot of the goals I have are about making it more and more available at different price points and different levels of commitment. I don't have a perfect solution by any stretch, and if anybody has one, please let us know. My experience of doing stuff completely for free has not been as successful as far as serving the population that I want to serve, the people who are interested. It just doesn't seem to work as well, and yet we still pull that level sometimes. I recently gave away the course to an organization that doesn't have the money but is doing great work in the world, and I assume will continue to do that.
Brett: You were talking about sustainability. There are a lot of examples of organizations, like business built around some kind of work like this, that turn self-inquiry into a business at scale only to have things go south or blow up for a number of reasons related to their requirements for sustainability, like training facilitators and then gatekeeping those facilitators and trying to keep a cut and then creating paths that become somewhat manipulative and create dependence. People end up becoming financially dependent on a community or a particular organization and feeling trapped. How can you maximize the positive impact of this work and scale it without it becoming corrupted by the needs of a scaling business?
Joe: I did an experiment on this before. I failed miserably on it. This one seems to be far more successful. I think to some degree I was making that mistake. I think it is the gift of the online component that's really showed me to some degree the mentality mess up. My perspective, I thought I was far more necessary than I was. The less necessary that I view myself to be in the work or that I view the organization to be or that our existence alone isn't necessary for the development of humanity, that we are just here to serve it, this kind of development of humanity, the less we have a risk of becoming one of those organizations.
So I think the need to be special or the need to be needed or the need to save, any of those needs are what create those organizations. The inner work is really the most important thing, and that clarifies the way the art of this business is expressed. Everything that I do is all about pointing people back to themselves. The less involved I can be, the less involved the organization can be, the better so that we don't create an organization where people need us.
Brett: What's your approach to intellectual property? You could say the way of being that VIEW points to is not new, and you didn't invent it. People have been discovering it through many different traditions. How do you consider VIEW to be in some sense your baby and something that you are stewarding and responsible for, and to what sense is it just out there for people to discover?
Joe: This is one of the hardest questions I wrestle with. I am glad you brought it up because it is a place where I could still use some clarity. On one level, there is a part of me that wants everything I do to be completely open source and anybody could use it for anything. On another level, I have seen that be really dangerous and destructive. These tools modified slightly can be used for nefarious purposes or at least unconscious purposes. There is a fear that that will happen, and I've seen it happen not even through people having bad intentions. It is oftentimes someone is like I can use this tool to help a whole bunch of people. They haven't looked at their own shadow, and so their shadow completely takes over the work. I've seen that happen quite a few times.
The iteration I am on now is that you ask permission to use any of the tools that are specific to us if you are going to go use them. We make sure that it feels right to us and that you have the right support to use those tools. I don't know if that's going to be scalable but that's what we do in our contracts with people who are taking the courses is basically you can't go and use this.
I remember one of the talks I gave and I was giving people all these tools I had developed and that were a synergy of other tools. About 80% of what we do, I don't know anybody else who does them, and 20% of what we do are taken from traditions or neuroscience or something that's like 2,000 or 3,000 years old from esoteric texts that I have read, everything in between. But the stuff that's novel, it came from my consciousness and so to some degree I feel safe in using those tools. What I have noticed is when people use those tools but their consciousness didn't create it, it can become more dangerous because they don't fully have an understanding of the tool.
More importantly, I created these tools from my consciousness and I want other people to create tools from theirs. Again, I want to be less involved and so as people create their own stuff from their consciousness, those are right tools for where they are and where the people near them are. It's just incredibly useful to have more of those tools out there rather than making them dependent on my tools. That's another reason that we basically have come up with a conclusion that you ask for permission to use the tools.
Brett: One thing I have heard some people have objections when they first encounter this work, usually through somebody else, is that it seems selfish. There are some shades of that in this conversation where you are talking about doing this for your enjoyment, and it needs to be an energetic exchange. You hear a lot of people talk about energetic exchange and using that word to disown they are actually charging for something, and they want money.
Joe: Yeah, I want your money. No doubt about it. I like making money. There's no doubt about that. But then again, that's selfish too. What's the answer I could give that isn't selfish? I have done a tremendous amount of non-profit work, and I can find the selfishness in that, too. There's incredible personal reward in being of service. I don't even know if the word selfish. I don't know if I even believe in it particularly. I feel like that's a word that some adult created to control their children.
The levels of selfishness seem a good way to gauge where you are in your own personal development. Selfishness of like I want this now, and I don't want you to have it. That level of selfishness just means you are in a tremendous amount of misery compared to somebody whose level of selfishness is to be of service to people. I am sure the mentality of being of service to people is a form of misery compared to another level of selfishness.
I don't buy into selfishness, but I think what you are pointing to outside of that, which is kind of a justification of narcissism through spirituality, is what I would call that. This idea that I am going to make myself special or big or I am going to get all of my ID needs met through the activities I am doing in the world, whether it be business or art or whatever. I am going to justify it with a whole bunch of spiritual talk, and things like I am going to listen to my truth, etc. I think it's a real risk.
It's not to pretend it's not there. It's not even like the risk is that I need to see if it is there. The risk is that I need to find the more and more subtle versions of that in play in myself. The lucky part is that is misery. I can find those parts pretty easily if I am just paying attention to where I am not aligned, where I am in friction with myself. That's the work. That's the work.
But from the outside point of view, there's really nothing I can say that somebody who is not being assertive with their own needs is going to hear that's going to make me sound anything but selfish.
Brett: How much concern do you have about these tools getting out there in mass, tens, hundreds of thousands of people taking these courses in a decentralized way and bringing this into their lives with all of their shadows? What concern do you have that this could become weaponized in ways you don't expect and unintended ways?
Joe: I hate this feeling. Now I am going to love this feeling. It is inevitable. I am going to say something that's a little risky here. There's an atrocity that occurs and it is through that atrocity that ten other atrocities are prevented. It's through the prevention of those atrocities that the next atrocity occurs. I don't see a way around good being corrupted into bad and bad creating the next good. It seems to be just the way of things.
It breaks my heart that I know to some degree that this stuff has already been weaponized. I know on a small scale someone is going to bring the VIEW and they are going to say something like, you are not asking how/what questions to their wife. Their wife is going to be like fuck the VIEW.
Brett: You are not in wonder enough.
Joe: Right, you are not in wonder enough. Exactly! Then it is just going to become a new morality and somebody is going to feel oppressed by the morality. Then they are going to be like screw VIEW. That thing is just blah, blah, blah. I don't know anyway for that to be prevented. It breaks my heart, and it has been happening. Look at what people have done with the words of Christ or the words of Buddha. They oppress themselves and others with them all the time. It is going to happen here. It happens with the internet. Anything, anything of significance gets used to oppress people eventually. Even love gets used to oppress people.
Brett: Or the idea of love.
Joe: Yeah, exactly.
Brett: Wrapping this episode up, what is your vision of a future five years from now where VIEW conversations are a thing that people just have all the time and it has become successful and just part of the social lexicon? What does that world look like to you?
Joe: It's all happening, and I am somewhat blissfully unaware I think is my version of the best case scenario. The best scenario is one in which and in a weird way this is already happening, where the repercussions of the work are far beyond my capacity to see them. They have extended into other people's work, and now there are new and better tools out there that have built on these tools. On a personal note, it would be nice to be continuing to be excited about the business and continuing to be trying new projects and funneling whatever resources we create into bigger explorations of self-discovery and the world. I have done it all inside a balance where my children still feel loved and cared for, and they know deeply that they are the priority over the work. That would be my vision.
Brett: Thank you very much, Joe.
Joe: A pleasure. You got me crying, man. Thanks.
Brett: Mission accomplished.
All right, everybody. Thanks for listening to the Life in VIEW podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we encourage you to rate and review the show and share it with your friends. We want to hear from you, so send us your feedback, questions or suggestions for the topic of our next episode. To join our newsletter and learn more about the VIEW community and online courses or to find the show notes from today's episodes, visit view.life/podcasts.
Links/resources:
The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist: https://soulofmoney.org/
Today's episode involves a coaching session between Joe and a woman in our community who is experiencing tension around authority figures. The conversation starts out with workplace challenges and very quickly ties into her relationship with her father, ultimately touching on how she can give and receive love. While listening to this conversation, we can observe Joe’s state of mind and how he holds the VIEW principles. These are the kinds of conversations that Joe has with participants and that participants learn to have with each other in the Art of Accomplishment course.
"Joe, I either want to fight myself or I just want to roll over and stay safe. I either want to fight against myself or I don't want to listen."
Today we are going to share a coaching session between Joe and a woman in our community who is experiencing tension around authority figures. The conversation starts off with workplace challenges and very quickly ties in to her relationship with her father, ultimately touching on how she can give and receive love. We've removed her name and other identifying information for the sake of confidentiality.
While listening to this conversation, pay some attention to Joe's state of mind and how he holds the VIEW principles. These are the kinds of conversations that Joe has with participants, and that participants learn to have with each other in the Art of Accomplishment course. Let's get started.
Joe: What do you want to talk about today?
Woman: I notice I freeze around people who remind me of my father, especially in work situations. This is what's happening repeatedly.
Joe: How do you see them as your father?
Woman: They don't see me.
Joe: Aha, how do you know they don't see you?
Woman: Because it's very clear they don't know how I tick.
Joe: What's the evidence?
Woman: I'm doing something. I'm motivated. Then they start to speak to what they think I am motivated by. They will be like good job. This is exactly what we need out of a team member who wants to step into leadership, whatever bullshit they are going to tell me. I'm like this isn't why I am doing this. I am doing it because I love it. I am doing it because I love it, not doing it for money.
Joe: What if they did see you and you can't recognize it? I am not saying that that's true by any stretch, but if it were true, what would it mean?
Woman: It would mean I am judging the shit out of them. I think that's true. I think it would mean. I do think that's true. It would mean.
Joe: What makes you judge your father? What made you judge your father?
Woman: I thought he was wrapped up in himself so much that he couldn't see anyone else.
Joe: How is that not true about you? It's a scary question for me to ask, but how is that not true about you, that you are wrapped up?
Woman: So much that I can't see others.
Joe: Or so much that you care whether people see you.
Woman: Interesting. I want to be seen it seems like again by certain people. It's because I am still wanting that one kind of attention I've decided I didn't get.
Joe: How is that not being wrapped up in yourself?
Woman: I think it is. It's wrapped up in my wanting.
Joe: What makes you judge people for what you are doing?
Woman: When they do it, obviously, Joe, it is way worse than when I do it. I'm a better person than that.
Joe: Okay, so you are sitting in the meeting, and the person is like oh, this is exactly what I want from a leader. What are you not seeing about them in that moment?
Woman: I feel like they are affirming what they want.
Joe: Right, so that's the judgment, similar to you being focused on what you want, to be seen in this particular way, but what are you not seeing about them? How are you not allowing them in? How are you not seeing them as a full person?
Woman: If they are telling me that that's what they want, I notice there's a part of me that closes to them first. I am like oh, you are not coming to meet me, so I am like tired of bringing myself to try to meet you.
Joe: One thing I just noticed, and I want to come back to it, which is you didn't answer the question, what is it that you are not seeing about them. You are telling me what it is that's hard to see about them, but I am going to detour for just a second because my curiosity, my wonder just went in this other direction. How is your relationship with your wants affecting your judgment about what they want?
Woman: I believe that asking for exactly what I want isn't very effective, which I think part of what's getting in the way. I'm not just explicitly asking for what I want.
Joe: Right. It sounds like they are not doing that either in that moment.
Woman: That's right. That's true.
Joe: If them not asking directly for what they want makes you feel unseen, what does it say about you not asking directly for what you want, if anything?
Woman: The logic is they are seen. I don't feel it. I don't want to feel it. I don't want to feel that.
Joe: How does it feel to just say it? I am not seeing anybody clearly. Right now, look at me. Do you think you are seeing me clearly? How clearly do you think you are seeing me? 100%?
Woman: Ah, definitely not 100%. Nothing is 100%. Okay, so but high. I don't know.
Joe: At what point do I get to feel upset at you for not feeling seen? What's the percentage?
Woman: If I see you anywhere in the 50% or below, or in that range, that's not good enough.
Joe: That's when I get to be upset at you.
Woman: Yes, definitely.
Joe: Whose criteria do we get to use? How do we get the data to know what percentage it is at? So as an example, how true is it that you don't want to be in a leadership position, generally?
Woman: How true is it that I don't want to be in a leadership position, generally? Historically, I have balked.
Joe: Now.
Woman: Right now? No, I definitely want to be in charge.
Joe: So they are seeing you.
Woman: I really do want to be in charge. No, that's true. They are seeing me, but if they are telling me, then it feels like they are putting power back over of like pat on the head, good job little leader. I am like fuck you.
Joe: So what they are not seeing is you already are a leader.
Woman: What they are not seeing is I don't need you to affirm me.
Joe: I just want it.
Woman: I just want it. Don't believe that your little encouragements. That's like the opposite. It's creating a power dynamic that I reject.
Joe: How much of this is about not being seen and how much of this is about your own empowerment?
Woman: Yes.
Joe: How empowering is it to care about being seen or about how they treat you?
Woman: It's not very empowering, but I really want it.
Joe: What I am noticing is there is a want component that's not fully lived. There's the being seen component that's not really lived, and there's the empowerment component that's not being really fully lived.
Woman: Yeah, want, seen, empowerment. Yeah.
Joe: How do you undermine the people who fall into that category, fall into the dad category? If in any way, how do you undermine them?
Woman: Definitely there is a way. How, let's see. I could think of a few things. One is I just immediately project that to try to control me or manage me even if they are really doing something that's really normal.
Joe: Just that thing, one of the ways you undermine them is project they are trying to control you, and what's your action?
Woman: I have trouble being productive. The more space they give me, the more I can be productive.
Joe: I got it. What you do is you stop performing for them. That's the way you undermine, got it. When that dynamic happens, how are you undermining your own empowerment? I am going to ask you three questions about each of these things, empowerment, being seen and whatever the third one was that I forgot.
Woman: Want is the other one. I am undermining my empowerment. Just the fact that I am responding to that, it feels like I am still surrendering my power on some level. I am still surrendering my power on some level.
Joe: To rebel against somebody or to do what they tell you, both of them put them in the control seat. One of the things is that by undermining them you have empowered them.
Woman: Right, and I have decided I am like helpless to do other. Like it is hard to figure out how to get out of that. Like eh, I am not productive. I want to be productive. It's your fault. Whatever.
Joe: Then, the second one was want. How is that you are abandoning your wants in that scenario where you are undermining them by rebelling them against them by not being productive because they have patted you on the head?
Woman: I feel like I am getting out of touch with the part of me that just simply wants to work on this project, wants to build this vision, wants to contribute to this company. Like the independent of the authority figure.
Joe: Okay, and then the third one was, empowerment, want and not being seen, so how is that you are preventing yourself from being seen in this scenario?
Woman: In this scenario, I am reinforcing a story. I don't know if that's right.
Joe: Let me ask a question. You have somebody working for you, and they've stopped being productive. What are your choices in interacting with them to get them to be productive or to accept that they won't be productive? What are your choices?
Woman: Sit down and talk with them and ask what's happening for them.
Joe: Right, so that puts you in the control position. What's the next one?
Woman: I can give them space, just say hey, everyone goes through ebbs and flows. Let's just see what happens over time. I could ask somebody else to check in with them, go around the side door. I could take the project away from them. I could adjust the project. Okay, now I need this scope and this time. I could micromanage.
Joe: How about give them lots of compliments in the hopes that they will respond to positive reinforcement?
Woman: Oh, right, I guess that's a thing. It's not a thing I do. It's not even a thing I think about. I am like that doesn't work.
Joe: Out of all of these options, how many of them would make you feel seen?
Woman: I do think sitting down and asking me what's up really vulnerably without their being any punishment energy at all. That would feel great.
Joe: How many people do you know who respond that way? If you were to guess, there's 100 managers. How many would respond in that way?
Woman: None of them, not many of them, maybe one of them.
Joe: We'll call it one percent of them will. In that case, you have proven that 99% of them can't see you, or what am I missing by saying that?
Woman: I don't feel like I need that all the time. What it really is I am specifically triggered if it is like, again, a man who reminds me of my dad because if it is a woman, no issues. I am like you can do any of those things, and I don't care.
Joe: There are these three things that all happen, wanting, disempowerment, and not being seen, and overall how do you see if you are creating this in your world, if any way? You might not see that at all. You might actually see it is all their fault. If there is any way you see your creation of it, how?
Woman: One thing I have definitely hit on is I am not letting myself be seen.
Joe: How would it be to stop right now and let yourself be seen?
Woman: Really scary.
Joe: How deep are you going right now in letting yourself be seen?
Woman: 20%, there's like a submission quality that's not the thing.
Joe: Beautiful. How is it to be seen without submitting, without surrendering in your complete empowerment?
Woman: It's so hard because then I just want to fight. It's the two, either I am like one of those.
Joe: How would it be for you to say to me? This is a scary one for me to ask. How would it be to say to me, Joe, I want to surrender to you or I want to fight you? I don't want to be with you. I just want to surrender you or fight you.
Woman: Yeah, I want to fight you or I want to roll over. I want to roll over and not get hurt.
Joe: How much distance did that just create between us?
Woman: How much distance? Something about sharing it felt kind of good, instead of like having an invisible fight happening. It felt like more clarity, like honesty, transparency.
Joe: How does it feel to say the opposite of it?
Woman: The opposite, I want to fight with myself. No.
Joe: Let's try that. That made me very curious.
Woman: Joe, I either want to fight myself or I just want to roll over and stay safe. I either want to fight against myself or I don't want to listen.
Joe: What's the opposite of fighting? It feels like you are still fighting a little bit.
Woman: I am. I am totally still fighting. It's just like softer. Maybe if I fight a little quieter, maybe if I do it like this because then I will also collapse the other side. I am like wait, stand back up, what is this?
Joe: How would it be to try it again and feel the feeling of fight or rolling over and then letting your body feel the exact opposite of those emotions?
Woman: I am like bringing myself back in. There's some like mild dissociation.
Joe: I notice you stop looking at me when you are trying to feel like.
Woman: Yep. I feel like I lose connection with myself when I look at you. I don't lose connection with myself. It's like a thinner path or something. It feels more difficult.
Joe: What would this feeling be if you weren't resisting it, if you weren't disassociating, if you weren't scared?
Woman: It feels really alive. It also feels like almost so alive that it also feels scary.
[bell]
Brett: Listening to this interaction, we can see how she feels like there's a dichotomy between rolling over and fighting. This is a false dichotomy that a lot of people hold. It's an indicator that you are in a power over state of mind, seeing the dynamic as a win or lose, zero sum game that someone is going to win and someone else is not. So many of our conversations are structured in this way, and it can be really hard to move from power over into empowerment. Let's listen further to see what happens.
Joe: So what I've heard you describe so far is something that feels alive and full of energy and undefended.
Woman: I repeatedly have things like maybe it's not safe, the things out here.
Joe: How am I feeling about you right now in your estimation?
Woman: You feel very calm and grounded. I don't know. You feel about me though.
Joe: About you.
Woman: You feel a kind of awe. It's really nice. It feels good.
Joe: How much of me is fighting you and how much of me is rolling over for you?
Woman: You are not rolling over.
Joe: If you had to guess, how much am I fighting you?
Woman: Very low, probably a tiny bit is like. Very, very low.
Joe: What's the fight, that little itty bit? What am I fighting you to do? What's the purpose?
Woman: It's a very light feeling of bringing my attention. There's just a very light touch to it.
Joe: There's some part of me trying to control you a little bit.
Woman: A little bit, it's like this guiding tension. Just a light.
Joe: There's a little bit. Impartiality is, I think, hard to get rid of, but there is a little bit that's like I want to know what the feeling is when it is unresisted.
Woman: Yep, sure.
Joe: If that's true, how would it be possible for someone to not some way want to control you? Even that is a subtle way in which I want to control you.
Woman: I don't think there's a way to not do that. I don't think I take strong issue with everyone trying to control me.
Joe: When needed, it sounds like it is a good reason to feel like you are not being seen.
Woman: It's certainly surefire excuse of me, not being seen. You are trying to control me. Yes, of course.
Joe: I can't deny I am still really curious. What is this experience of non fight, of non rolling over? What's your body's answer to that question?
Woman: Balance came up. I don't like the word equality. I think there's some bullshit in that.
Joe: We are definitely not fucking equal. How could we be? Our hand size isn't the same.
Woman: But like balance, there's still a meeting that feels balanced where it is not you or me or you or me.
Joe: How can we be balanced with each other without love?
Woman: How can we be balanced with each other without love? In my head, I wasn't tracking love so far.
Joe: Increase or decrease the amount of love you feel towards me and see how it affects balance, if at all.
Woman: That was fun. It's so automatic. I feel like just patterns in my face being like distance.
Joe: Distance, what's that distance? How does the distance relate to fight or rolling over?
Woman: It feels a little bit like it is still fight, in essence. It's like I am going to keep you at a distance. I will be over here, and you are going to be over there. I'm just going to manage this because if you get too close, it's fight. That's what I have decided.
Joe: And how does that relate to balance?
Woman: I feel off balance back. Physically, somatically, my body is defending back inside. I am off balance back. Ooh, I still feel a falling forward. That's the motion I am kind of holding. Love feels a lot like falling forward.
Joe: What would happen if you took that experience to this authority figure, boss, whoever it is that pats you on the head and says I see you want to be a good leader, that empowered, upright, non falling forward love? Non submissive love.
Woman: What would it be like?
Joe: I'll be the authority figure. You see what happens. Speak from that place and see what happens.
Woman: I have been treating you like a person in my head instead of the person who is here. Wow. I haven't given you a chance to get to know me.
Joe: Thank you for that. That really lets me know you are ready for leadership soon.
Woman: [laughs hysterically] Ouch.
Joe: How much of a relief, how much joy is there in that pain?
Woman: I go to be like but you are going to misinterpret that. You are going to make it uh.
Joe: How am I going to misinterpret it?
Woman: You are going to think [redacted] didn't hear me. Let me try to repeat myself. Or you are going to think she's not taking me seriously right now.
Joe: Oh, if I am the position of the authority figure, if you go ouch, then I am going to attack in some way. I didn't mean that as an attack. I didn't mean to hurt you. Stay in that place, upright and defended love. What happens from that place?
Woman: And it did hurt. And it is absolutely fine that you don't see the way it hurt. It's okay. Oh yeah. It's okay.
Brett: It was beautiful to see her come out of the session in her stance of empowerment. The stance of empowerment is one where you are open hearted but you are boundaried. It is one where you state your truth with courage and you are not worried about the consequences or another person's reaction. You are vulnerable because that's what's rewarding to you and not because of what someone else is going to do. To be empowered is to be in your truth while being open and loving.
Let's send some gratitude to our guest for her vulnerability in sharing this session publicly. It landed very deeply in me, and I learned a lot about myself and how I relate to power dynamics.
I am going to close with a few integration questions. Sit in wonder with these questions for a moment and just see what comes up.
How is your relationship with authority influenced by your relationship with your parents?
What stands in the way of you loving somebody that you judge?
What are things that you judge about others that you also judge about yourself?
Thanks for listening.
In the second episode of this two-part series on money, we are going to address another common misconception that people have, which is that money is bad and the root of all evil. What if we did not have to see money as a game or a means to an end? What if we understood that we could transform our relationship to it by simply recognizing that money is not personal? By seeing ourselves as human beyond the money, money can start flowing very differently into our lives.
"All that's required is to not have the money be personal, so you don't actually have to see it as a game. You don't actually have to see it as a means to an end. All that's really required is the money isn't personal. You just have to see yourself as human beyond the money, and then money has a way of flowing very differently in people's lives."
Brett: Welcome back, everybody, to our topic on money. Now we are going to get the second half of this discussion on the belief that money is bad. Joe, what makes it that people develop this belief that money is bad or evil?
Joe: What I typically notice is that money is bad comes because somebody felt that money hurt them. Maybe they had a parent who cared more about money. It felt like the parent cared more about money than they did about time with the kid, or that somebody with money did something bad or that somebody with wealth did something that made them feel less than.
Also, there are certain people that have internal perspectives that when something makes them feel bad, they attack. That's the way their personality system works. Just observing great wealth and the way that great wealth moves can make people feel like, if they have that moment of insecurity or I'm not good enough, then their natural response might be to attack, the way their personality works. I think for all of those reasons people think money is bad.
I mean you can see it all over our society. If you just start saying how people with a lot of money are bad, you will start getting a following. It's a fascinating thing. But it's often not just people with a lot of money. It's just money. The system sucks. What an asshole! He drives a $120,000 car. It's just like there's this whole set of judgment that comes along with money. I think they are usually some reflection or some sort of projection of our own relationship with money and/or ourselves or like I said earlier with our parents or authority figures or something like that.
Brett: What you were saying there with the $120,000 car, money can point at glaring inequalities in all of the things money can be a surrogate for. You might see somebody with a lot of money, and they are getting a lot of affection from people and a lot of attention because they have money. Then that makes you feel your lack of affection and attention, and maybe in the opposite framing of what we were talking about in the first half, instead of buying into it and being like I need more money and then people will love me, you instead just say fuck that, I don't want to play that game. Then money becomes this lava that you don't want to touch.
Joe: Let's take a look at a person in the $250,000 car. There's a person driving around in a $250,000 car. Some group of people are going to be like that guy is just a good person, cool. They've accomplished that. I like that. I like him or her. Some people are going to be like what a douchebag, a whole bunch of greedy, selfish. What happens to our system if we just see the person as a person?
They are neither good nor bad. They are neither more insecure, less insecure than all of the rest of us. They are just a human being flawed like all of us, healthy like all of us. Do we know if the person has that car because that's what that job requires of them because they need to exude status? Are they doing it because they are trying to get their mom's love? Are they doing it because their passion is sports cars? Or their passion is just really well-made machinery or really complex machinery? We don't know. We don't even know what's happened for that person. It takes the humanity.
Whatever perspective you have around money that takes the humanity out of the person, that's a prejudice, including that they are good or they are happy. I think that's the really interesting view to look at your own views around money. What are the daily judgments that you walk through the work with? How is it separating you from connection with yourself and other people?
Brett: I'm curious about some of the things that money stands in for that we can have issues with, like authority and with power. How does that happen?
Joe: I can't say neurologically exactly how it happens. I can point to some of it, but I can say how I've seen it work in me. What I’ve noticed is you get emotional patterns that happen. What I mean by that is when I had a green mohawk as a teenager, my parents worried 15% of the time. They worried over things like me, my haircut, if I was going to grow up right. Now my parents´ kids are fine, and they still worry about 15% of the time but now it is over if they are going to burn the chuck roast.
We seem to get into these emotional patterns, and as kids, we get into very specific emotional patterns and we are in theta brain wave, which is like where you go in the subconscious. It is how we program ourselves or unprogram ourselves often is most effective in theta. Kids are mostly in theta from zero to seven or zero to eight years old. They get into certain kind of emotional patterns, and as they grow up, they are going to place those patterns on something and probably some of equivalent importance in their life.
When dad leaves or mom leaves or they leave mom and dad, then that pattern needs to hit something else. Money is a great place for it to hit. It is a great place because you can project anything you want onto money. We were talking about it. You can project it is great. You can project it is bad. You can project it is neutral. There's evidence to show all of it. You can show how money created a society in which more people are able to thrive than any other society, and you can also look at how money creates all of the disenfranchisement in our society. You can just project anything you want onto money.
Since it is such an important part of our lives, it determines so much for most people, how they spend their time, what they can do and what they can't do in their mind. That, of course, Mom and dad used to be that. Mom and dad used to be the thing that said what I could and couldn't do, and now money is. Now money is the thing that says what I could and couldn't do. It's just natural for the emotional process to lay itself on top of money.
Brett: That emotional pattern could be about anything, and like what you were saying earlier, it's often about love. In society, money is just something that is so present that it's really easy for it to become about money.
Joe: Yeah, it's easy for it to become about money just like it is easy for it to become about your boss. You see that all the time. People think it's their boss, and it's not. They are treating their boss like their dad or their mom or a teacher that had an impact on them.
Brett: How does this show up in business? I have sort of examples here in my life with not asking for what I needed, feeling shame about asking to be paid more money for something and then finding myself in the position of not having my needs met enough to actually do great work or not having the needs of the project met enough for the project to work out really, really well because I was afraid to ask for money. This has happened over the course of my life in fractal ways, and so what's some other way you see this showing up commonly in business when people have this squeamish discomfort around money?
Joe: I see it happen in business in many ways not even if they have squeamish discomfort. I see people who think money is the way you determine if you win and lose in business, and to some degree, that's true. If you don't have enough revenue, you can't stay in business so you lose if you think of it that way. But there are some people who think that the most money wins and that that's the currency for a good business is who made the most money rather than who had the best impact or who has the happiest employees.
You see people who create fights and lose profit because they care about how the deal came out in a way of winning and losing instead of a way in winning and winning. You see that happen all the time. You see people avoid marketing and sales, whether they are CEOs avoiding it or employees avoiding it because sales and marketing is dirty because you are trying to convince somebody to do something for money. Then you see other companies say marketing is just education. We are just telling people we have a product we think is important, and we want to give them an opportunity to experience how important this product can be in their lives. That's a different way of looking at it.
Some people get off on convincing people to do things that aren't good for them, and they feel powerful over it. Some people just can't do that with their lives. It doesn't feel good in their system, or they realize that the short-term power is not worth the long-term disconnection with themselves. I think there are all sorts of ways I see CEOs who feel bad for asking for money or they feel like they deserve money. Both of them are going to not get enough money probably for the needs of the company. There are all sorts of ways of looking at it.
It seems like the people in the venture capital business who seem to do the best with money comparatively are people who see it as a game, as a means to an end or a game, a game meaning I don't take it personally, and a means to an end meaning my vision is to plant $10,000 trees. The money is the thing I have to do to get there. I think both of those two things depersonalize the money, and people who have depersonalized the money are more successful with it typically.
Brett: There could also be a danger in that because depending on what the game is, the game might just be a game to maximize money for a particular milestone, like let's just bring a company public, dump it on the public and then walk away with the bags. That could be a game that can have really negative consequences.
Joe: Correct, as is the other thing, having the money just be a means to an end and then to what. I think it all has a particular danger, and the good news is that all that's required is to not have the money be personal. You don't actually have to see it as a game. You don't actually have to see it as a means to an end. All that's really required is the money is impersonal. It's not a reflection of me. It's not a reflection of who I am. It's not a reflection of who other people are. You just have to see yourself as human beyond the money. Then money has a way of flowing very differently in people's lives.
Brett: There's a way that it can be helpful that is impersonal, but also there's a way that it always is personal. I think something that happens often is that people insist the impersonality of it and then separate themselves from the connection of the people they are working with.
Joe: The classic "it's just business". That basically is what you are saying, right?
Brett: It's just business. Kind of avoiding it.
Joe: That's totally personal. That's not taking it non-personally. That's taking it incredibly personally at least in the semantics in my head, so maybe I haven't explained it right. In fact, I can be confident that I haven't. Saying it's just business means that you have taken it personally. You have taken something personally. You have some level of shame or something to that effect, and you want to push that down. You want to push that emotional experience down.
Just think of it this way. You are about to get fired, and you have a choice. The person who is about to fire you can say it in many different ways. One way they can say it is, "It's just business. We had to let you go. It's just business. It's nothing personal."
Brett: Which is really personal because it's like I don't trust you to be able handle my telling you the real reason I am firing you.
Joe: Correct. Perfectly said. Just feel how that would land, and then you can have, "I feel really sorry that we couldn't do it. We wanted to and we tried, and we weren't able to keep you here." There's that way of getting fired. Then there's the way of getting fired, which is like, "This was our expectation of what you were to do here. We made that really clear to you. Those expectations aren't being met. My experience is that you are either capable of doing that, the stuff we have asked you to do, in which case you are choosing not to do it, which means you know on some level this isn't the right job for you and you are making sure it doesn't last in your world. Or secondly, you are not capable of doing it, and therefore, you must always be feeling like I am not doing a good enough job, which also isn't a really great thing for your world. It's clearly not a match." How do we move forward if this job doesn't match? How do we help you? What do you need so that you can get to where you want to go in your life next? How can we be of service in that that's mutually beneficial? That's another way to fire somebody.
To me, that's the least personal of those things. It's like this is the situation that we find ourselves in.
Brett: It's taking it the least personally. It's the least care taking, the least avoiding.
Joe: The thing we are avoiding is we actually feel bad for firing them, so we harden ourselves down and become assholes to fire somebody. If you have to harden yourself in any way, if you have to become defensive and build a wall between you and other people, you are taking it personally. That is a clear sign you are taking it personally.
We somehow get it in our heads that if we take it personally, we are scared or we feel guilty or we are sad. But the clearer sign of taking something personally is that you have shut yourself off to your own emotional experience.
Brett: Bringing this back to the money experience, the way we show up in the world with one another with all of our concepts and projections about money, there are many ways to take that personally and there are many ways not to. There are ways we can be successful, and then that will make other people feel shame. Then there are ways we can be unsuccessful by money standards, and people will still feel their shame somehow or something else.
Joe: That’s right. Your relationship with shame, exactly. Money is a projection. At some level, money is a projection. What if that were true for a moment? What if it were true that the money in your life, specifically to you, the money in your life is a projection? Maybe it's a projection of your value. Maybe it's a projection of your lack of value. Maybe it's a projection of your needs, of your lack of love. What if it was only that?
At the beginning of the conversation, I said I don't really know what money is. I think the thing that I am pointing to is when I take all the projections of money away, it becomes something I can't name.
Brett: When I do that exercise, letting go of money as a projection. Then there's this thing that immediately comes where it is like no, it is not just that. There are also environmental factors. There's the privilege that I was born or not born in. There was the luck I did or didn't have in my career and my business, or even just in my family relationship that patterned my relationship that's underneath money. My question is how you hold this concept where money is entirely a projection so that we can let that projection in, follow it and find out what's underneath it and love ourselves more, and also hold the truth that our entire relationship with money and our experience with money has also been influenced by external factors.
Joe: I mean this is the question of life. How do we recognize the unity that we are and the self-interest that moves every one of our actions? That's really the question you are asking. Even that is a projection, meaning on some level if I really look at the essence of what I am, it's also very empty, very massive and very empty. At the same time, who I am is the person who is driving the car and polluting the atmosphere. The person who I am is the person who is hurting somebody with the hamburger I just bought.
It's like this unbelievable concept. On one level, this unbelievable concept of both like the human side and this illusionary side coming together. This material side and the illusionary side of money coming together. How do you handle it? The answer that I found that creates the most freedom in me is with integrity. When I say integrity, I mean when I listen to my deep truth, when I am spending money or when I am receiving money, what does that require of me.
What do I have to do to feel most aligned around my behavior with money? That's the question that I ask. It doesn't feel aligned to have no money, and it doesn't feel aligned to accumulate wealth for the sake of accumulating wealth. It doesn't feel aligned to try to use my money to save people, just like it doesn't feel aligned for me to use my money or my non-money, my anything to try to save somebody. But it feels really important for me to use my money to work with people for our mutual freedom, our mutual saving.
There's this really interesting thing where it's like this moment to moment learning for me around money, where it is like how it feels right now, what this transaction feels like, how having a transaction feels compared to being in connection and having the money sort itself. This is the way I think that I want to live with money at this point.
Brett: Thanks a lot for that.
Joe: I notice I am nervous that people won't get to it because I realize as we are talking about money, there is so many. Really, it's like religion. There's no conversation about religion where you are probably not going to offend somebody. I think it's the same way around money. I don't think there's really a way for us to talk about money where somebody isn't going to feel like either we have poverty mentality or that we are part of the oppressive class. I think this is why people don't talk about money. This is why we don't talk about our credit card debt.
It's why any conversation that's happening in the world around money is how to make it or what's wrong with it. There's no conversation of what it is. There's no conversation of what the relationship is that we want with it. There's a little bit of a conversation right now with electronic currencies of what the rules are to it, but I mean this is the perfect example. If you create a currency out there that has rules of money that don't have shortage of supply as a part of that rule, nobody has faith in the currency. Is it the money's problem? Is it what we put our faith into that's the problem?
Humans naturally put their faith into things that have short supply, that they can hold on to, that have power, immediate power. That's where humans naturally put their faith, for a good reason. A spear is a good thing to put your faith in if you are a hunter, and it fulfills all those requirements.
Brett: You are hunting a limited supply of game.
Joe: Exactly. If you are making your own spears, there's somewhat of a limited supply. It requires effort because there's a limited supply. There's not just spears growing off trees. There's effort involved. This is what we put our faith in. If it's not money and we put our faith in something else, if it's not the US dollar, if it is not the Euro, and we put our faith in something else like Bitcoin, the question is what we are putting our faith in.
If we ask ourselves deeply if we are willing to our faith into something that has abundance, that isn't limited, that anybody can have at all, and that doesn't have short term power, and I am going to rest my entire family's security on the faith in this thing, the way we do with money, how does that feel? Money isn't the issue at the core. The core issue is that. If every human being on the planet put their faith in something that was in utter abundance and it was clear that we have enough for everybody, and I can give freely, I can have faith in long term investment. If we all had that, what would happen to the problems of our world? That's a really difficult thing to ask.
Brett: What would that be?
Joe: I have no idea. But it's a difficult thing to even ask. You and I in this moment.
Brett: It sounds like one thing that could be is investing in relationships, investing in trust.
Joe: Which is what communities without money have. It's what they do. I remember when I was young, I was in my 20s and I worked in the Hayes Valley Project in Head Start. I went from that into international stock lending. I remember saying one has money, one has community. One relies on money for survival, and one relies on community for survival. One generally relies on money for happiness. One generally relies on community for happiness.
Brett: Which were more successful?
Joe: It depends on how you measure success. What I noticed is the people with the community wanted the money, and the people with the money didn't always want the community. Sometimes the community was heavy for them because whatever they were taught. But both of them had poverty in one way or another.
Brett: Speaking of poverty, I have heard you say this a couple of times in some of the courses as well, using the term "poverty mentality". You were just saying earlier about feeling a little bit of fear in your system about how talking about money is like talking about religion, and everybody is going to be offended about something.
I have something about this word, the poverty mentality, that.
Joe: That offends you.
Brett: It's not even so much that it offends me personally, but I think it might offend a lot of people because they maybe associate poverty mentality is a thing that keeps you from having money, so then poverty mentality is this thing that's holding you back. That's associated with poverty, which is something that people are born into and don't have a choice of starting there. I am curious if it's poverty or if it is like a scarcity mindset.
Joe: That's a great question. For me, poverty mentality doesn't mean anything about money. I was born with a poverty mentality, but the poverty wasn't around cash though there was some of that as well. The poverty was around love, and the poverty was around attention. I wasn't getting enough attention. I wasn't getting enough love. I grew up into a life where I created a world where I didn't get enough love and I didn't get enough attention. It took a lot of work to switch that autopilot off in my life and in my system. That's what I am speaking to about poverty mentality. It's the false belief that we can't get what we need and what we want, generally, not specifically. We are not ever going to get everything we want, but that we can't have our needs met.
Brett: Living and recreating that in whatever way, whether it is about money or anything else.
Joe: Correct. That's what I am speaking to. I can see your point that just the word poverty could trigger, and it could speak to a class of people that didn't have a choice or a group of people who didn't have a choice around their financial situation. The term you used, I don't like using it for a different reason, which is scarcity mindset, because it feels ungrounded. It doesn't feel like it is as pertinent or real to me as the word "poverty", but I can see how that also is a bias.
Brett: Maybe we will find a better word someday.
Joe: Yeah, there's a flip side to every coin.
Brett: Thank you, Joe. This has been a really great episode. I think we could do a couple more on money-related topics, but for now, this is great.
Joe: Thank you so much for your time.
Brett: Thank you. Take care.
All right, everybody. Thanks for listening to the Life in VIEW podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we encourage you to rate and review the show and share it with your friends. We want to hear from you, so send us your feedback, questions or suggestions for the topic of our next episode. To join our newsletter and learn more about the VIEW community and online courses, or to find the show notes from today's episode, visit view.life/podcast.
Money can be a very tricky, emotional subject. Many of us have all kinds of projections and misconceptions around it. In this episode of a two-part series, we are going to talk about a common misconception that people have, which is that money is our savior and if we just had more of it, it would solve all of our problems. What if we learned how to effectively use money and accept its constraints in a way that would allow us to be even more creative than we would be without it?
"As long as money is here, you can choose to think it is good and I want it, or you can choose to think it is bad and I am going to want it secretly but actually I'm going to try to avoid it or you can say wow, this is the way the system works. How do I use it and accept the constraints of it in a way that allow me to be even more creative than I would be without it?"
Today, we are going to talk about money. Now, money is a really sticky subject. It's very emotional for a lot of people, and people have all kinds of projections and misconceptions around it. It can be a really tricky subject. We are going to break this up into two episodes.
The first episode, we are going to talk about a common misconception people have, which is that money is our savior and that if we just had more of it, it would solve all of our problems. In the second episode, we are going to go into the opposite misconception, which is money is evil and the cause of all of our problems and it should be avoided at all costs.
Joe, to get started, what makes people have different ideas of what money is?
Joe: I think it is because nobody knows what money is. There's one level on which you can look at money and say it is a complete illusion. It is an agreement that a whole bunch of people made and said this thing has value, and it has value because a lot of people say it has value.
On another level, money is this thing that buys you stuff you want. It's a great tool for creation and/or a great tool for manifesting things. But I think really few of us understand what money is. I know that the deeper I look into money, the more I see about it, the more I understand it, the less I realize I truly know what it is.
Brett: What is not money that people think it is? What is money not?
Joe: That's a great question. What is money not? I think the people subconsciously think money is love or money is power or money is their father's love or their mother's love. I think that is the subconscious misinterpretation of money that creates a lot of confusion for people.
I remember this one time when I was in, out of all places, El Salvador, and I was in a hammock. I was reading about how WhatsApp had gone public. This is back a while ago when I was a venture capitalist. The story was how this massive success happened with this small investment, and how there was this one venture capitalist who had kind of parted ways with his company just so he could invest in this. I remember it just hit me like a gut punch in the stomach. I immediately stopped and said what is this feeling. I closed my eyes and traced the feeling back to the first time I felt it. I remembered oh man, I've made money a surrogate for my father's love. I had a relationship with my father early on where his love was not something I could get easily, and so money had become this thing I couldn't get easily. The promise of money, like the promise of my father's love, was something that would make me whole again or at least I thought it would.
It wasn't my first iteration with my money. My first iteration with money is that money was evil, and that was also when I was really angry at my father. It's like I started to put points together to realize that my relationship with money and then I discovered most other people I meet, their relationship with money often follows a pattern of their relationship with the love of their parents or their relationships with love of authority or their relationship of something important in their early childhood. Money has become a surrogate for whatever relationship that is.
Brett: What are some other things that money can become a surrogate for?
Joe: Like I said, relationship with authority, relationship with parents in that aspect and then there's another aspect. Money can become a surrogate for security. Money can become a surrogate for community. Money can become a surrogate for power or empowerment. Money can become a surrogate for experience itself.
Brett: It seems like one thing that can happen is that we can build this belief that once we have enough money, we will be able to solve not only our problems but other people's problems around us and then end up in some really weird relationship dynamics with those people as a result.
Joe: Yeah, and it goes both ways, too. We can start accumulating enough money where people around us think they can get their problems solved through the money that we have. That usually breeds a lot of distrust.
Brett: How can we tell the difference between a healthy relationship with money and earning money, finding value in our work, finding value in what we do and having enough to have our needs met? How can you tell the difference between this hungry ghost aspect of using money as a surrogate for something that money can never fill?
Joe: The interesting thing is the mind can tell us we don't have enough money all the time, and there's always evidence for it. I remember this point when I was doing this practice, a gratitude practice, every day about what I did have because I was constantly thinking about what I didn't have. This was like early 30s or something, and I started to be every day appreciative for an extended period of time for the things I did have. I saw my whole world and aspect of money change.
One day I was driving a car, and I had had contact with 2 or 3 billionaires in my life at that point. I was driving the car, and my thought process turned to how I needed more money or some sort of coveting, something like that. I thought to myself oh, the billionaires I know, they think this way too. I'm a billionaire. It was such a strange thought. It's nonsensical, but it's like oh I have the same reality as a billionaire. No matter how much money they have or how little money I have, we are both walking around the world having the same thought process.
It is really hard to use the mind to feel like you have enough money. Logically, if you want to use the mind to find out if you have enough money, if you are alive right now and you are well fed, and you have a home over you, on some level you have enough money. There's this crazy lie that says I don't have enough money because X, Y and Z, but enough money is that you have your basic needs met is enough money. If you don't have your basic needs met, then there's a pretty good argument that you don't have enough money. Logically, the whole thing can be deconstructed pretty quickly.
The other way you think about money is oh, if I have enough money, then I can get what I want, whatever that thing is I want, when nobody can do that because money can't actually supply everything you want. In that way, you will never have enough money. What's really clear is intellectually if you are going to have a relationship with money that's peaceful, it's really important to be able to separate what you want from money, money being only one avenue to get there.
Brett: I can see a relation to this in business where there can be a belief that even as revenues are increasing, you just need more money to be able to meet this opportunity or solve that need or saturate some market. We could always be living in that story. In our personal life, it could be I just need a house with an office and a desk so I can do my writing. I need quiet space. I need X, Y and Z.
Once we become attached to something we have gotten, then we need that, and we can't imagine not having it. Then we need to continue to have that baseline amount of money, and so that seems to be part of this treadmill of feeling like what I have is not enough and what I really need is the next thing, ergo I need more money.
Joe: Yeah, right. This is a really natural human condition, not the needing more money. The more money piece is just the way that our modern society turns the story around the basic human condition, and there's something basic in the human condition that says there's something more I can be doing. There's something more I can achieve. There's something I should be doing so that I am safe.
If you ever look at mice, they are the same way. They don't have the thought process behind it potentially, most likely, but they do have this get up and go. I have got to do something. I have got to do something. I have got to do something. The way our society works is money is the most obvious way to do something.
When you can flip that switch, when you can say it is not resources, it is resourcefulness that I need, then everything can open up. Just the idea that you need money to do something is a limiting belief system. There are people who have started their businesses from nothing. What did they need to start their business? Apparently nothing.
There are other people who very wisely say being capitalized is a really important part of my business, so I am going to go out and get a bunch of money because it is important for growing my business. Both of those two things can be a very sane approach, but when it becomes insane is when you think resources will solve for resourcefulness. It will never work.
I've walked into so many companies and so many homes with so many people who think that resources will make a difference, and it doesn't. You look at all of the lottery winners, and they have the resources. But it doesn't make a difference, and it is gone soon. Then you see people who have nothing and they are resourceful, and they get the things they are after in the world.
Life isn't set up for us to get everything we want, and definitely money isn't set up. At its basic construct, it is set up to be deficient, meaning that the monetary system. The amount of money out there can't pay for the interest on top of it that is out there, so there is always a shortage of it. The system is built that way just as our internal system is built that way, meaning that we as human beings have a tendency, almost a natural urge to feel like there's something we have to do and something more that we have to accomplish.
What's really weird is if you meet somebody who doesn't have that, there are one of two options. One, they are depressed, or they become acquiescent. In another way, there are so few of them that are quite at peace and they have done a lot of work to really feel into that discomfort and to channel it in a different direction.
Brett: That reminds me of sort of there is this neurobiological aspect of loss aversion where when we experience a loss, we experience it as twice as intense as an equal gain, which sort of biases us towards always wanting to gain more. It sounds like what you are describing as this gratitude practice gets beneath the root of it. The more that you are able to appreciate what you have, the less you are stuck in the treadmill, which then means you are less in fear because you start to see more of the possible solution space than just the opportunities that money would open up for you.
Joe: Correct, and I think there is another aspect to that which is just as interesting, which is if we motivate ourselves in the world through fear, then we are very scared to let go of the fear because then we think we will be unmotivated. A lot of people, if they really deeply confront that kind of itch they can never scratch, they are scared to lose it because they are scared they will be a couch potato drinking beer.
What's interesting is where action comes from if it doesn't come from that fear. Where does action come from if you feel secure?
Brett: Yeah, that seems related to how a lot of our activities we might intrinsically enjoy can get wrapped up in money, and we think they are not worth doing if we aren't getting paid. We might not feel like we are going to have value ascribed to us by society if nobody is willing to pay us for the thing that we want to do.
Joe: Or vice versa. I know plenty of artists who lose their desire to be an artist when they are getting paid for it. It completely changes their whole enjoyment of the activity once they are getting paid. It puts a pressure on them, and then they feel like they have to perform. The having to perform takes all of the joy out of it.
Brett: Once you start depending upon what you are doing to make money, then you are going to start forming the thing you do to be doing it in a way that gets money, so you are going to be more critical of your performance and more critical in this like market aspect of what people are willing to pay for rather than letting what is flowing through you to just freely flow.
Joe: I'm not sure if that's even the healthiest version, to let what's naturally moving through to freely flow. Meaning Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, that's some crazy constraint. That is some crazy oh my God, I have to make everything fit into this ten-syllable blah, blah, blah, and yet accepting that constraint increased the creativity.
Or I think about Michelangelo, and painting the top of the Sistine Chapel, one of the holiest places on the planet. What does he paint? He paints God reaching with all of his might to touch man, to be in connection with man and man kind of laid back not even willing to lift a finger. What a commentary to say humans aren't even willing to lift a finger? Maybe even the people here in this church aren't even willing to lift a finger to touch God. How do you get away with doing that? How do you get away with getting paid to paint this on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?
On some level, seeing the constraints of money is freedom, and if you learn how to work within those constraints, it creates a creativity that's amazing. As long as money is here, you can choose to think oh it's good and I want it or you can choose to think it is bad, and I am going to want it secretly but actually I am going to try to avoid it. Or you can say wow, this is the way the system works, and how do I use it and accept the constraints of it in a way that allow me to be even more creative than I would be without it?
Brett: How can we accept the system works and continue to work in it to our benefit while being conscious of any systemic, inbuilt I guess you could say injustice in the system or just like inefficiencies? Without buying into the way the system works is the optimal way we could have a financial system.
Joe: That's a great question. By no means am I saying we should all accept the way the system works and not move to change it. What I am saying more precisely is that it is very healthy to accept the way the system works even if you want to change it. It is very much if you are interacting with another human, you cannot accept the way that they work and you can accept the way they work even if you are asking them to be different, even if you are approaching them in a way that is going to get a response that you don't want. Asking somebody to be different, asking something to be different instead of accepting them is a very inefficient path to having people transform or money transform or the system to transform.
If I am like screw you, this shouldn't work, fuck you, do this thing, why aren't you doing this thing, that's not a great way to get you to change. If it's more like I love and I accept you, and this makes me uncomfortable, I would prefer that we interact in this way. That's a far more effective way to do it. It takes a lot less out of me, and it is the same way with changing a society. Acceptance somehow is conflated as acceptance means that I am not going to draw boundaries, or I am not going to ask for things to change or I am not going to do things to change it. Acceptance is this is how it is at this moment, and I am not going to fight how it is in this moment. I am going to work to change it for the next moment is 100% possible with the acceptance.
Brett: Something else you touched on was how this affects interpersonal relationships. I am curious how having a concept for money, and we are talking right now about the particular concept of money is good and that it is going to solve all of our problems, how does that get in the way of our relationships and the way we view each other and the shame that we might approach a relationship with? Or the judgement or admiration?
Joe: Money is the kinkiest thing on the planet. At least on the West Coast, you can sit down and ask somebody about their sexual preferences, what's going on there, what kind of things they like, and they are more likely to tell you about that stuff than they are going to tell you about their credit debt or how much they make. It is the kinkiest thing, and it is an incredible cause of disconnection in ourselves and others to admit that you are poor or to admit that you are rich. Both have a certain level of shame in them that make it so people don't communicate that stuff.
People get really uncomfortable. I'm very open with my money situation. This is how much I have made, and this is what I have done, with friends, and you can just see the discomfort. It doesn't stop me, but you can see the discomfort on their face. It's just not something that we want to talk about because it brings up feelings of disconnection and shame in everybody. It is the kinkiest thing right now on the planet is money. It is amazing.
Really, it's just. I mean the system is not benign by any stretch, but it's a tool with pluses and minuses. It's a tool that can be changed, and yet it has become a god or a deity in the world. It's an amazing thing. I even hesitate to say all that stuff because then in somebody's mind, money is bad. They will hook onto that and go oh yeah, people make it a deity. Getting a rich man into heaven is like getting a camel through the eye of a needle. In my world, it's not a rich man or a poor man that has a hard time finding joy. It's a person focused on money whether it be If I get more of it, I'll be happy or I am unhappy because I don't have it or money is bad. It's just whenever money becomes the conscious or unconscious driver of things, it's very hard to find joy, which is how I am translating heaven.
Brett: You pointed to a lot of the shame that's around money, the shame of having money and the shame of not having money, the shame of not having earned money that you have in some particular way that you feel makes you deserve it. But then there's also on the other side pride. There can be pride to having a lot of money and then building a self-concept around that. There can also be pride to having no money and sort of flexing on that.
Joe: There's no difference around somebody having pride around their money situation, whatever it be, and somebody having shame around it. To me, those are two sides of the same coin. There's an empowerment stance around money, which is like oh, I will be me no matter what the money situation is. I will have my freedom because I do no matter what the money situation is. That's an empowerment thing. If that's the state, if that's the internal stance, not faked, but actually owned, then what happens to your pride or your shame around money?
Brett: Closing this segment on money being good, that concept of money being good, I am curious. You pointed earlier to how you can change the system if you work within the system, recognize the system is there, maybe not working entirely within it. But recognizing the system exists and you navigate the system, and you can get your needs met, and then you can change the system, how has the system changed you in that journey?
Joe: Yeah, I mean I do think the system has changed me. I don't think I can even point to all of the ways that it has. I think that's really hard. I don't think I could fully understand the ramifications of all the ways the monetary system has changed me.
What's fascinating about that question for me is I am raising two girls, and I want to raise them with a healthy relationship around money. Part of what I want to teach them is money is always here when you need it, and that attitude is the best way to make sure money is always here when you need it. Also, to respect money, to see it as a powerful force. Manmade or otherwise, it is a powerful force in the world, and to give it its due respect.
Also, to see the cosmic joke of money, and to see it is a representation of human consciousness and how money flows is very much how human consciousness flows. The stock market in a weird way is the mental outlook of a portion of a society and a way a portion of our society feels. I am pretty confident if you took all the caffeine out of all the major cities that we would have a financial depression. The stock market would go down.
It's just this fascinating thing, and I want them to experience it the same way you would experience a flower or a cactus or any landscape, but not to feel like it has power over them and to be a victim to it or to hate it or love it, love it in the way of like greed, not love it in the way of having love for it in the way you might have love for a flower or a tree.
To some degree, I feel like all that's healthy, and on another degree, it is a system in our world and any system in our world affects the way that we think. It doesn't matter if it is the architecture that we live in. It is really hard to be able to determine how that architecture affects our consciousness. I see people with a ton of money, and there are ways that they start doing things that are more about their own entertainment. Typically, they get out of touch obviously with people who don't have that level of money, just like people who are really poor are out of touch with the issues of somebody who is really healthy.
There are some of those obvious things. To this day, I will spend a part of every week going and interacting with people who I would not normally interact with, and sometimes those people are homeless and sometimes those people are very poor and sometimes those people are very wealthy, just so I can constantly feel how different perspectives live and to be a part of that. But I don't think I can really say specifically with any kind of integrity all the ways in which money affects me.
What's also interesting to me is that and what I've noticed is that as my relationship with myself changes, my relationship with money naturally changes to. The more that I can love myself, the more I love money as it is. The more I feel empowered, the more I feel empowered with money. The more I am grateful, the more I have an attitude of gratitude with my money. The more I feel being of service is a joy, the more I am of service with my money. It is a really fascinating thing of like is it a reflection, or is it the engineer, or is it both. What's that dance? I've never lived without it. I'm a fish in water. I can't see what it has done.
Brett: Thank you, Joe. That wraps up this segment. Keep listening for the following segment, the belief that money is bad.
Thanks for listening to the Life in VIEW podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW or to take a course, visit view.life.
We are taught how to defend ourselves from a very young age. But few of us are taught the pragmatic power of love. We build a series of walls we can put up whenever someone makes us uncomfortable. What if those very walls create a drag-on life that slows down our dreams? What if love is an easy-to-use tool that turns all that friction into forward momentum?
"Love can't really exist without empowerment. You can be fond of. You can be scared of losing, but to actually love in a way that is beyond you, that is a deep welcoming, the only way you can deeply welcome, is to feel deeply empowered to not be worried of the result."
We are taught how to defend ourselves from a very young age, but few of us are taught the pragmatic power of love. We build a series of walls we can put up whenever someone makes us uncomfortable. What if those very walls create a drag on life that slows down our dreams? What if love is an easy-to-use tool that turns all that friction into forward momentum?
Today's topic is Love Over Defense. Joe, we've all heard, "All you need is love. Love will tear us apart. Love is the answer." We get hit with these phrases all the time, but it's hard to tell what anybody really means by love. What do you mean by love?
Joe: That's a good question. That's a big one. Before I say what I mean by love, let me say what is often considered when people are thinking about the definition of love. One of the things that I see is, that people think about it, they dissect it the way the Greeks did, which was there's the love of friendship, like the love you'd have with a friend, the love you'd have that’s romantic, the love that you would have with God, the love that would be very much dissected by who you were loving and how they had different visceral experiences in the body.
For me, I think about love slightly differently. I think about love as in, there's a love that feels a lot like peace and there's a love that feels a lot like enjoyment and there's a love that feels a lot like care and there's a love that feels a lot like a deep welcoming. When I'm speaking about love, I would say that it's closest to a deep welcoming. They're all components of love. It's not like one of these is a better love than the other or one of these is a separate love than the other, but that deep welcoming seems to be the biggest leverage point. It's what seems to activate everything else the most.
Brett: What makes that the deepest leverage point?
Joe: I'm not sure if I have a great answer for that outside of experience. It's a dance, for sure, meaning that, when I really put myself out there and deeply care for myself or care for others, then that absolutely helps me have a deeper welcoming of all life, all people, all parts of myself. What I notice is the focus on that deep welcoming towards self, towards others, towards life, that seems to have a very big influence on my sense of peace, my sense of enjoyment and my sense of care.
It just seems like it has the biggest turbo booster. In my life, what I've noticed is different ones at different times have bigger turbo-boosting potential, so to speak, but that deep welcoming seems to be the center of gravity for all of it.
Brett: It sounds like what you're saying is that the deep welcoming is letting information, letting the world be seen by you and be felt by you and letting it impact you.
Joe: As it is, yes. Exactly. It's allowing myself to be touched.
Brett: What would be the next most important leverage point?
Joe: For me, I think it's care. It's self-care and care of others. If you look at different religious traditions, you'll see that they fall into these different categories. They're focused on these categories, more or less. The Buddhist piece has a big emphasis. Daoist enjoyment has a deep emphasis and the Christianity care has a deep emphasis.
For me, the care one seems to have a big impact. There's something about being generous and being giving that also dissolves the self in such a way that it creates a lot of peace and a deep welcoming. It's another really influential one.
The dilemma with the care one is that all of these ways of loving, they have a dark shadow on the other side. The peace side of things, for instance, can become disassociation. The enjoyment side of things can be hedonism. The care can be codependency. A deep welcoming can become an apathy of sorts and it can become a giving up of responsibility. All of them have a way to have a shadow take over them.
Brett: It sounds like, that the deep welcoming and the dark shadow, that the apathy, a lot of that seems to relate to surrender and the way that people talk about surrender. How does this relate to surrender for you? Many traditions have surrender as an important part of the journey to love.
Joe: Yes, that's exactly right. Surrender, it's a path to love and it's also the result of love. Or the other way to say that is, surrender is a path to a deep welcoming, but it's also the result of a deep welcoming. So many traditions have surrender being the first step. The first step is to surrender to Jesus, or in Buddhist monasteries, for instance, in China in particular, the first Buddha that you see is this happy, fat Buddha who's plenty and that gets you into the temple.
Once you're into the temple, then it's surrender. Then once you've surrendered and it’s surrender to the teacher, to Buddha, or to the teachings, or to the Dharma and then beyond that is compassion, is a deep care of self and others. They have different Buddhas or different archetypes in the different stages of the temple, depending on how far in you are allowed to be. It is a great description of how that journey works, generally.
In the Western world, however, surrender has some connotations and some issues that I don't know whether it's just people thought of surrendering differently then as they do now. The dilemma, generally, with surrender is that it's been used to subjugate people. It's been used to have people follow without their full authenticity involved. I stray away from the word for that reason.
The real key is, what are you surrendering to? If you surrender to Jesus, you're not just surrendering to Jesus, you're surrendering to the concept of Jesus in your head, or what you think the scripture says. Surrender is so incredibly powerful and it's very, very much a deep welcoming, when you're surrendering to that very quiet call inside of you, to that impulse, to that thing that is always there and always knows the right direction.
Brett: That we always have a voice in our head that shoots it down, perhaps surrendering to that. What do we lose by not emphasizing surrender, given that it's been so useful in so many traditions, but also there's this problematic aspect and particularly, in the way that it's conceptualized in the west? What do we lose by you not emphasizing it in your conception of love here?
Joe: What we lose in not emphasizing it, is another way to lose our identity. In general, all of these methods, the deep care, the surrender, the silence of meditation, all of them are just ways to get past the illusion of self. It is to evaporate the identity, to see yourself beyond the small me that you think you are, to see yourself outside of your everyday cares and worries. It is to not be able to identify with the voice in your head anymore. That's generally what all these paths are pointing to.
There's other less known traditions, too. There's a way of losing your identity in a group that's healthy, unlike most of the ways people will lose identities in groups. The Quakers had some great work on that as well. There's lots of ways to do it, but these are the big ones and love itself is that same thing. It's an expression. That's why, in some of the writings, you'll see people talk about love as your inherent state, because love, as you walk down that path of love, the identity evaporates as well and you see that your identity is love. You are love and love is what you are, just as you are nothing and nothing is what you are. It is when the sense of self dissolves into the whole, if you will, then love is the result, not emptiness is the result.
Brett: It seems like a lot of people are onto this love being so healing, but there are just so many ways that you can get caught in an eddy or a backwater or in a shadow. What are some of the main misconceptions about love that we hold?
Joe: Everybody's a little bit different here and people's misconceptions of love are based on their childhood. If the thing that you looked for to be your role model of love beat you, then love is painful. If the role model that you looked to was critical, then love is critical. If love meant being nice, then love is nice, or if love meant not holding boundaries, then love is not holding boundaries. Whatever you experienced love to be when you were young, those are usually exactly the misconceptions you hold about love.
Societally, however, there's some pretty big normal ones. There's nice. Nice is a big one. If I'm nice to you, then I'm loving you, which is horribly inaccurate. That being compassionate is often a very sharp sword. Being compassionate is often saying a hard truth in a loving way with an open heart.
I remember when I was a kid, I lied all the time. I was compulsively lying. I was a freshman in high school and it was to make people like me. This guy, his name, I remember it was Alex Bellini, this was like a week before the end of school and he said, "Hey, Joe, we all know that you're lying all the time and we would all like you so much more if you didn't." It was the most profound act of love that I had experienced to that date. I'm sure it was scary as shit for him to say and nobody else had said it. Nobody else had given me that information and my lying just stopped. Nothing else needed to happen. My lying just stopped at that point or reduced by 97% or something like that.
That's an act of love, but that sure as fuck wasn't nice. I think a lot of times people mistake being nice-- because they think that if they love somebody, there's not going to be conflict or something like that. That's just not how love works.
The other thing that's often the case is a lot of people are scared to be in love, because they have a conception that love doesn't hold boundaries, as if Gandhi didn't hold boundaries, as if Mother Teresa didn't hold boundaries. Love is holding boundaries. Great mothers-- the thing that we think as loving as mothers, they hold boundaries all the time. That's another one I think that people really have a problem seeing, that love is holding boundaries.
I think that the other one that's most commonly not seen, is that love can't really exist without empowerment. You can't really love if you're not empowered. You can be fond of, you can be scared of losing, you can really, really, really want, you can desire, but to actually love in a way that is beyond you, that is a deep welcoming. The only way you can deeply welcome all the good and the bad and the dangerous and the unknown and the mystery is to feel deeply empowered, to not be worried of the results.
Brett: What are some other examples of how this has shown up in your life, or just shows up in people's lives day to day?
Joe: Wow so many-- you see lovers, husbands, wives say that they deeply love each other, but they're constantly trying to change each other or they're scared of losing one another. That's not love. That's a habit. I don't think it's really possible to love somebody fully and want them to change. Then you're loving them if they show up a certain way, or loving yourself that way is another example of it. Being in a job and being scared to get fired is another example of what isn't love. There's a famous coach who used to say, “Lead with love.” and if you're scared of getting fired, you can't lead with love. Then you're leading from fear. There's a lot of things like that.
The thing I think that people don't really understand is, people say, “Love is the answer”, or “Love will find a way”, all those things about love, but nobody really talks about the mechanism of what makes love so powerful. What makes it, that if I love a part of myself, or if I love a part of you, I have more power over that part of you than if I don't. What makes that happen is the question that I think a lot of people don't fully understand. The best way to look at it is internally, which is, if I love an aspect of myself that, so far, I haven't been able to love, it gets to move, it gets to express and it gets to evolve.
If I'm saying that that part is bad, I'm containing it, I'm holding it, so it can't move and so it can't evolve. That's how the mechanism works. It's like, if I love you unconditionally, then you don't have to be constantly managing yourself and then evolution can double-time it. That's how it works, is that, that loving of ourselves and others or a situation is one of the best change agents for it. The only difference is it's not changing in the way that you want it to. It might change in the way that you want it to, but it's going to change in a way that's best for it and you, but that doesn't always correspond with what you want.
The mechanism of love is that you allow for something to be able to move and therefore, it can evolve instead of holding it in place. It's just like if you have a kid and you want them to evolve, don't stick them in a room with no lights on. You let them play and explore and learn and grow.
Brett: So, this allowing something to move, allowing things to move feels a lot like undefendedness, which brings us to the second half of this topic of Love Over Defense. What do you mean by defense and how does that relate to this?
Joe: On the mind side, defense is any way that you've decided that there's separation. "They don't understand. I'm better than them. This course moves too slow for me." Any way that you're creating separation between you and other people, that they come from an inferior race. They are better than me. They come from a better race. All of it, all of that is separation and that's the mental place.
Somatically, it's literally like a wall, typically, in front of you, typically, somewhere from the perineum up into the top of your head and it's stronger for different people in different places, but it's literally, you can just feel like the “crr--” shutting down. And on a gut-level it's a subtle fear. That's what defense is.
Brett: Clearly, there are times in life when you need to defend yourself and we've talked a lot about how boundaries are a part of love and that can feel like defense.
Joe: Yes. The thing is, we mistake that defending ourselves can't be welcoming. That's the way that I would say it. Just because I have to draw a boundary or I want to draw a boundary, doesn't mean that I can't love you. Just because I am in a fight with you, if I'm literally going to say, "Okay, I can't allow this person to throw trash all over my front lawn," so I'm in a fight with you, it doesn't mean that I can't welcome you. I think that this is best in any religious book I've ever seen is, I think it's the Bhagadavida and-- Oh, I'm so bad with names.
Brett: Bhagavad Gita.
Joe: Yes. It starts off with a man who's about to get into a war with his brothers, with people that he loves and he prays to, I think it's Krishna, who has the conversation with him, which is what most of the book is about. He says, "Hey, you got to fight." He doesn't say, "No, don't fight." He says, "You got to fight.” It doesn't mean you have to give up loving to fight. Life is tension, generally, call it a fight, call it tension. Life is tension. If I took all the tension out of your cell, it would die. If I took all the tension out of your body, you would die. Tension and life require one another, or at least life requires tension. If you give it up, then you're dead.
The only thing left then is how you hold it. How do you hold the fight? That's what this book really talks about really well. It's like, "Okay, this is the fight, but how do you hold the fight?" That's the same thing here. Like, just because you've engaged in the war doesn't mean that you have to stop loving people. That's the confusion that I think most people feel, is, that if I am going to be in tension with you, then I have to give up my love for you, which is not at all true.
Brett: Right. I can think of any circumstance where I feel like I have a conflict with somebody, it's so easy to drop their humanness. To make them an other, to make them wrong, to make them an obstacle and that never helps the conflict.
Joe: Right. You can still love them and still overcome the obstacles, so to speak. They don't have to become the obstacle.
Brett: How do we start cultivating that love, that allows us to experience the fight in a different way?
Joe: This is why I think I call it a deep welcoming more than any other reason is, because there's a visceral experience of that. It's like, if you close your eyes right now and you deeply welcome yourself here and love yourself just as you are right now, that's it, that's all there is to it.
We can make it more complex and I'm sure we will in this podcast, but that's all there is to it. How do you deeply welcome yourself in this moment and in the next moment and the moment after that? It's a very somatic experience to be loved.
Brett: Yes. I just did that and the first thing was I noticed tension in my body and then it just immediately relaxed.
Joe: Right. It's literally like you have a feeling of love for something. Maybe it's for your dog, or maybe it's for your child, or maybe it's for your mother, maybe it's for a friend. How do you give yourself that same feeling that you have, that you give to them? How do you feel the same thing you feel for them for yourself?
That's the best way to cultivate love, because our capacity to love all the bits of ourselves is directly correlated to our capacity to love everybody on the planet. The more that you learn to love all the parts of yourself, the more you're capable of loving everybody on the planet.
Brett: What else can we do?
Joe: Well, one thing for sure is if you can't love yourself, then love your resistance. It doesn't really matter in the moment what it is you're capable of loving. There's no time when we're incapable of love for anything. If you find yourself, like, "I just can't love myself right now," then love the fact that you can't love yourself.
Also, the other thing you can do is, again, we've talked about this a little bit, but don't mistake love for caretaking. Loving yourself, loving somebody else isn't caretaking them. It's not saying yes, even if you want to say no, it's not going against your truth. It's not trying to make them happier. It's just having a deep welcoming for who they are.
Brett: What if you identify ways that you're caretaking and you're afraid to stop doing them and then you realize, that you're not loving and then you get hard on yourself about that?
Joe: Oh, you've got lots of choices there. You can love the fact that you're a caretaker. You can love the part that is so scared that it thinks that it needs to be a caretaker. You can love the part of yourself that thinks, that getting angry at yourself will actually change anything. You can love the part of yourself that is really wanting what's best for them and yourself and doesn't know how to get there. All sorts of parts to yourself to love in that circumstance.
Brett: Anything else that we can do to cultivate this love?
Joe: Yes, drawing boundaries is really good. That's a great way to really cultivate love in yourself and in others.
Brett: Describe a boundary that you might set with yourself.
Joe: Oh, that's a good one. First, the thing is people think about boundaries as a form of separation and I just said like, mentally, defense is separation. I think it's important to talk about that paradox first, which is when you draw a boundary, you're doing something that's good both for you and for the other person and that's really the opposite of separation. It's the same, actually, with being compassionate. There is nothing that you can do that's truly compassionate for you that's also not compassionate for those around you in that circumstance. It's the same with a boundary and that's the important part of a boundary. The important parts of boundaries are, that, when you draw the boundary, it increases your love for the person, no matter what they're going to say to the boundary.
I know that I'm drawing a great boundary when I'm doing that. When it opens up my heart to the person that I'm drawing the boundary with. If I'm drawing a boundary to myself, I use that same thing. It's like, what's the thing that actually opens my heart to myself when I'm setting a boundary?
Brett: What's an example of a boundary you might set with yourself?
Joe: Let's say a boundary that I might set with myself is, if I am noticing myself getting angry, I am going to separate myself from other people, so that I don't get angry at them. That would be a boundary that I would set with myself.
Brett: Elaborate a little bit more on how that helps you love yourself.
Joe: If I'm angry at people, then I have shame, then I have blame, then I have a whole big mess, usually, that I have to clean up. None of that stuff is really loving and it's also making my anger wrong and making parts of myself wrong. In that boundary, I stop making myself wrong. The trick is when I'm literally thinking about drawing it, it doesn't feel like an oppression. It feels like a gift.
Brett: That makes sense. The part of us that we are drawing a boundary against might otherwise feel defensive against us making it wrong.
Joe: I would say with, drawing a boundary with, not against.
Brett: With. Right.
Joe: That's the subtle thing about boundaries that people think. The subtle thing about boundaries is that it's against, because we value this idea of freedom so greatly in ourselves. That's the other part of drawing a boundary that's so important. The other part of drawing a boundary that is so important is, that you're not asking them to be any different. You're saying, "I'm going to be different."
If I'm drawing a boundary with-- this is different with children, obviously, but if I'm drawing a boundary with a friend and that person, to use the same example, has a tendency to get angry, I would say, "My boundary with you is when you get angry, I'm going to walk away and happy to re-engage with you whenever you're not yelling at me. Or if you're yelling at me, then I'm going to walk away and I'm happy to re-engage with you." I'm not asking them to stop yelling at me. I'm not asking for them to stop drinking. I'm not asking for them to stop. I'm saying what I'm going to do in these circumstances.
Brett: Like creating a background of safety in connection, regardless of how they act so that they don't have to be a certain way.
Joe: That's exactly right. It's the fully empowered move. It's taking full responsibility for yourself. If you start trying to love yourself to change yourself, it won't work, because trying to change yourself isn't loving yourself. What happens for a lot of people is they start to feel the power of love and they start to feel how loving unconditionally starts transforming the world, they start wanting more of it and so then they start loving to transform the world and then it stops working. Because if you're trying to love to transform the world, you're not loving anymore. It's a really important thing to see that the love, if it gets tainted, it just stops working.
Brett: As we were cultivating this love and the defenses that creep in taint that love, at the same time as we're working to cultivate love, how do we work on lowering our defenses as well?
Joe: Yes. There's a feeling when we lower our defenses, what we're actually doing is allowing a whole bunch of emotions we don't want to feel to be felt. Those emotions purify us. They start to dismantle that sense of self and it literally feels sometimes like it's burning away or that it's melting or something to that effect and so, there's an intensity to that.
Every time we lower our defense, there's this little thing inside of us, is like, "Oh, we're going to be fucking destroyed. We're going to be destroyed. Don't do that. If I lower my defense, I'll be destroyed. Don't do that." There's an intensity with doing it.
Brett: Well, there's a truth to that too, like a part of ourselves does get destroyed.
Joe: Exactly. There's a great saying by Pema Chödrön, I'm going to paraphrase, it says, "Open yourself up for annihilation, because that way, you can find out what part of yourself can't be annihilated." That's what you're doing. You're just allowing that purification to happen and you know it, because there's an intensity to it of, oftentimes, a fear as well and to feel into that, to step into that deeply is the move to make around the defenses.
Surrender is another really good move in these moments, it’s, you're not surrendering to the circumstances. You're surrendering to not defending yourself. What do I mean by that?
I had a great experience with this. There was a man and I was on the Board of Directors with this person and he was bad for the company. He also had this tendency to whatever I said, he would do the exact opposite thing. What I did was I told him, "Hey, I'm going to try to remove you from the board, I will stop trying to remove you from the board at any time that we can actually work together well and that you're in your thought processes aren't just against mine.
We love contrarian thinking in boards typically any board I've been a part of, but this was just contrary for the sake of contrarian, it wasn't contrary because it was independent thinking.
Anyway, so every time, for like six weeks or six months, I would call him up and I would say, "This is what I'm going to do and this is what I suggest you do." He would do the exact opposite of that the entire time. By doing exactly the opposite of what he said is how he got himself removed from the board. If at any time he would have said, "Oh, I see." And called me up and talked to me and said, "Oh, wow, you're really giving me the advice." I was constantly able to give him the advice that was actually the best for him. I was constantly able to say, "This is what I think is best for you and for it to be accurate." It is also the fact that he couldn't do it that led to his removal from the board, which was best for the company if he couldn't learn to work with people and be collaborative.
Brett: That's fascinating. I'm curious, how you differentiate in that story love over defense versus knowing what's best for him and versus controlling him through suggestions.
Joe: The main difference is what you're feeling internally. I am welcoming him as he is and at the same time, I am making the call, that says this company is better without you. That's my call to make, just like it's his call to make and he was making the call that the company would be better without me, or that whatever, China should win the war, or Korea should win the war. Those are calls that people are going to make. That's the war. You have to call what you think is best, but that doesn't mean I ever had to close my heart to him.
The way that I could act to not close my heart to him is to constantly tell him, "This is actually what I think is the best thing to do," and to tell him, "I'm going to keep on telling you to do this stuff and as long as you keep on-- I gave him the whole map. I told him the key, I gave him everything to get out of it and he chose not to do that. It was literally me at the time, it was the first time that I was like, "Oh, I am in a war, how do I maintain an open heart?" The way I could do it was to give him every opportunity I could possibly think of. That's the only difference.
I think the thing is from the outside it might not look different at all. From the inside, it's a far more effective way to fight a war. You hear this from people who are fighters all the time, try to get your opponent angry, because if they get angry, they'll be less effective. What happens if the person you're fighting has a big open heart for you and they're still determined to win?
Brett: How angry did this board member get?
Joe: He got pretty angry and there's definitely multiple occasions where he called up yelling. Then, for me, that was the practice. He would call up yelling and I would just keep on opening my heart and keep on feeling the discomfort and keep on feeling my emotions and lots of heartache for me. There was a lot of heartbreak in it and that was my purification was that heartbreak.
Brett: Tell me more about that heartbreak.
Joe: I have this saying, that every time my heart breaks, it increases my capacity to love. Heartbreak is like the feeling of it breaking open to expand or the feeling of expansion of the heart. That's the feeling. It's interesting. I've obviously never given birth, but when my wife talks about birth, she goes, "I don't know why they call them contractions when they're really expansions," but there's a feeling that it's a contraction as well as an expansion. In heartbreak, that's the visceral feeling of it, for me, anyway. There's this feeling of heartbreak that just totally increases my capacity to love.
Another great example of this was, I don't know if I've shared the story, but there was a time when I was just totally bothered by all inane conversation. Just two people talking about going 65 miles an hour on the way to Santa Barbara, whatever it was, would just drive me nuts. There's this day where I recognized that I shut down when this was happening and so I was like, "I'm not going to shut down, I'm going to sit there. I'm going to feel whatever there is underneath this."
I would hang out with people, having inane conversations and I would just weep. I would just cry. Probably at times, I had some idea of why I was crying. I think at the crux of it, I was crying because I had just shut this entire part of life off. It's like I'd cut off a part of myself and as I opened it up, there was just this pain of like, "Oh, wow, I've lost this for so long."
Brett: What was it that you had lost?
Joe: The ability to connect in this fashion, that I had judged this way of connecting. One more way of connecting with people that I had separated myself from, because of my own self-definition. I just weeped. It was very awkward. Sitting there crying, they'd be like--
Brett: You did this with them in their presence?
Joe: In their presence, yes. It was awkward at times and they'd be like, "What's wrong." I'm like, "Yes, it's nothing. Don't worry about it." I'd just keep on and then they keep on. They're used to having those levels of conversations, so asking me about this twice wasn't really going to happen.
Then all of a sudden, I was just completely able to enjoy the more superficial way of connecting and even found out that there's some of that super "superficial" way of connecting that's not superficial at all. That connecting over flowers or connecting over food, there's a very sensual, non-heady level of connection, that is quite sweet and has a depth that deep conversations don't have.
Brett: Something juicy in that story for me is, that you started weeping in front of people and then they asked you what was going on with you, inviting depth and then you were like, "Oh, it's nothing."
Joe: Yes. That's exactly it, because I wanted to feel the heartbreak. I didn't want to disturb the thing that was breaking my heart. Once you realize that heartbreak increases your capacity to love, then it's like, "Man, I want it. I want that heartbreak," because I know that at the backside of it, there's so much more love available to me.
Yes, if I could shut it down, I'd shut it down, because I'd want to just keep on feeling the pain of a superficial conversation, so that I could feel that heartbreak. It was the same with this guy. It's like, just to feel the heartbreak of the fact that here's two people who want something great to happen in the world, who want this company to be successful and this is the only outcome that I know how to create. I didn't have the capacity to really get them on board or bring them along or whatever. I don't know if I could have ever, but that heartbreak and that incapacity to feel into that totally increased my capacity to love.
Brett: How is it that experiencing that heartbreak can be experienced as not discouraging, but as empowering?
Joe: I think you have to live through it a couple times. I don't know if there's another way to do it, but to just live through it a couple of times. I think that once you live through heartbreak and you realize how much it increases the love in your life, then it's just like going into a hot sauna. If you go into the hot sauna the first time, you're like, "What the f-- are you guys doing? I'm out of here. My skin's burning, what the hell?" I'm talking about like a real sauna, not an American sauna. There's nothing logical about doing it, but then you do it a couple of times and you're like, "Oh man, I can't wait to get back to the sauna." The same goes to the cold plunge, the exact same thing. The payoff is so great that you're like, "Let's do it."
Brett: It really seems that this love thing seems to be the crux of all of this teaching.
Joe: Yes, absolutely it is. The first real week was VIEW, which is vulnerability, impartiality, empathy and wonder. That's really unconditional love. If you put all those three things together, that's another great pointer to unconditional love. You feel vulnerable, because you're open and welcoming. You're impartial, because you're welcoming as is, not telling them how to be. Empathy means you're open and feeling them. You're allowing yourself to be touched and wonder is this basic nod that the universe knows more than you do, that it's still a mystery and will always be a mystery. That really prevents you from wanting to try to change stuff, change things.
We start off with VIEW and we end with love and they're very much the same thing. They're the whole thing. Everything we've done in this course has been to move us towards a greater state of love for ourselves and others. I think the thing about it is that it can't be done out of order. A lot of people will move straight to love, they'll say, "Okay, I'm just going to love everything all the time." I think that's great. Don't get me wrong, but it just doesn't seem to work as well to love everything as an escape, or to love everything as a bypass, or to love everything so that you don't have to feel it.
To love everything means that you're really happy to feel everything, that you're happy to express everything, that you're happy to be wrong about everything, that you're happy to be empowered and you're happy to feel helpless. It's a deep welcoming of life and a lot of times people will use love as a way to cut off a certain portion of it.
Brett: The question I was about to ask, but you've just explained it, was what makes it that you didn't call this work the art of unconditional love?
Joe: Oh, I don't want to answer that question. [laughs] There's a part of me that says you answer as a business guy, but also as a coach. You meet people where they are. You meet people with the problems they think they have and most people aren't walking around going, "I just don't know how to love enough."
The biggest problem I have is that my heart isn't broken enough. I don't get enough heartbreak. Most people aren't walking around saying that, so you meet them where they are. Luckily, the unconditional love piece and especially with the emotional fluidity, the empowerment and seeing yourself as inherently good, which is the crux of the fulcrum that the love uses to create its leverage.
Brett: It reminds me of where I first met you, which was a consciousness hacking talk entitled, "How to Make Better Business Decisions". I was, "That's what I need to do."
Joe: Exactly. Check it out, though. Have you been making better business decisions?
Brett: Absolutely.
Joe: Yes, see. That's the cool thing, you can actually deliver on the promise, but you can deliver on it so effectively, only because you're speaking to the deeper truth. I think the other reason, just to say it, is that semantically everybody thinks about love very differently. If you say you've got 20 different viewpoints immediately, it just makes it harder to really go through the process.
Brett: I think one of the main resistances to doing some kind of group work around unconditional love is, that it'll trip people's cult triggers. Maybe another question is, what is the difference between doing this kind of work in a group and finding unconditional love together and a cult?
Joe: Well, this is the surrender piece. This is why I don't use surrender. That little thing about surrender that's in there, it's basically I'm going to ask you to give up responsibility for yourself. Whereas everything that we do is very much pointing directly at, “Take responsibility for yourself. The wisdom is inside you.”
If you look at how I interact with students, I'm mostly asking questions and I'm also saying, “Tell me what your instinct says, tell me what's moving you”, because I trust that more than I trust me. I might know the terrain. I might know the map. I might know the six most likely places that you want to end up, but only you know where you are at this moment and know what the next move is and that's the big difference.
That's why I don't emphasize surrender because as soon as you emphasize surrender, people think, "Surrender to what?" If I do say something like, "Hey, surrender to the ineffable part of yourself," then all of a sudden, there's a definition, "What is that? How do I do that?" and then that definition becomes what you surrender to instead of the thing itself.
Brett: I think a lot of that, what you're speaking to comes from when people get into a teacher role, they end up subtly asking for people to surrender to them, because it sounds like that comes from a lack of trust in people's internal work. What is it that makes you feel so trusting, when you are working with somebody on one of our Q&A calls, somebody who's miles and miles away and could have just freak out and close the laptop and then go do something insane? What makes you feel so much trust for their internal compass, that you feel safe doing this work with them, without the sense of control that would lead to them surrendering to you?
Joe: That's a great question. I've never been asked that question before. It's funny what happens in my system when you ask it, is just like this deep sense of humility. The intellectual answer I want to give you is, because that thing in them is the same thing that guided me. I just wasn't lucky enough or I wasn't ripe enough to be able to be given someone to guide me in this way. I had to trust my own, so I just trusted in that way.
I think that's part of it, but there's another part of it too, which is, it’s experience. It's just so many times, I'm like this, "I can see where the path leads," and I can watch the person just instinctually make the next right move over and over and over again. Not just that person, almost everybody, that I--. Whenever I question it, I'm like, "Oh, that's going to be like a backpedal." It turns out it's the perfect backpedal for them.
I don't mean that in a hippy way of everything's perfect, just the way it's supposed to be. I mean just like roses know how to grow. They just know how to do it. Grass just knows what to do. Birds just know what to do. They just know it. I don't have to trust them. I don't have to trust the trees and people. There is a center of gravity just asking. All they have to really do is, just get out of the way. All my questions are literally just questions to help them see themselves. There's no question I'm asking that's underlying point isn't just to have them see themselves.
Brett: Wow. Thanks, Joe. This has been another amazing episode.
Joe: Yes, what a pleasure. I'm sad that they're done. I'm glad that they're done because I could use a little more free time, but I'm sad that they're done, because I'm not going to get to play with you for a couple.
Brett: I'm excited to see what kind of playing happens again in the future.
Joe: Yes, it will for sure. What a pleasure, Brett. Thank you.
Brett: Thank you.
Joe: All right. Bye.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.com
Resources:
Pema Chödrön: https://pemachodronfoundation.org/
The accumulation of power seems like a good idea at first. Then we see how deeply insecure some billionaires and leaders of countries can be. What if no amount of power could ever make you feel safe? What if it was just another thing that could be taken away from you? What if being empowered is the key to the only security that truly sets you free?
"Power is control over other people and empowered means that you are not looking for control of others. You are just being you despite the consequences."
The accumulation of power seems like a good idea at first. Then we see how deeply insecure some billionaires and leaders of countries can be. What if no amount of power could ever make you feel safe? What if it was just another thing that could be taken away from you? What if being empowered is the key to the only security that truly sets you free?
Brett: Joe, what makes this distinction so important?
Joe: The empowered overpower distinction. I think there's a deep confusion in us as a people and internally between the two and that confusion is what creates the subjugation that we feel both in the relationship to ourselves and the relationship with the outside world. To clarify that confusion, to actually see that we are always a choice and that choice is always empowered, whether we want to admit it or not is a way to set us free from that subjugation.
Brett: Power is real. There are people who really do have power over us and there are situations in which we have limited control. That must be partially responsible for our situation.
Joe: Yes and no. The thing is, that we're all interdependent, everything is interdependent. It's like a gigantic machine if you will or a gigantic ecosystem. Who has the power, the ants or the mountain lion or the rabbits? If any of them go, the whole system changes. The whole system is dependent on all the other parts of the system. In that way, yes, there are things that have power over us. If you're a deer, deer ticks have power over you and mountain lions have power over you, but if you're a mountain lion, deer have power over you because if the deer disappear, you're screwed, you're not eating. There's a way of looking at it that says, "Oh, wow, everything that I'm interdependent on has power over me." You can look at it that way and it's absolutely true.
The other way to look at it is that, our choice is ours. We get to choose and we might not like the consequences. We don't always have control over the consequences. I think when we don't have control over the consequences, that's when the mind wants to say, "Oh, somebody has power over me." But there's nobody on this planet that isn't dependent on somebody else or something else.
Take the most powerful person in the world, if people stop buying their product or if people rebel against them or if the price of oil goes to $20 a barrel and all of a sudden, their money to control their society goes away. Everybody has something like that. It's something that I think about oftentimes when I'm thinking about CEOs and my experience in working with them is that they have more bosses than anybody. They have their key employees who they need to keep happy, their customers they need to keep happy, their shareholders they need to keep happy. They have Board of Directors they need to keep happy. There are so many people who they are dependent on or they need their approval or they need them to buy into their vision in some way.
There's nobody in this system that isn't dependent on other people. There's nobody in this system that isn't scared to change the system because of consequences. As one person is sitting there and saying, "Hey, if I stand up for myself, I'll lose my job." There's a CEO that says, "Hey, if I don't give my quarterly numbers, I'll lose my job. If I don't get to the quarterly numbers, I'll lose my job." There's a billionaire that's like, "Wow, if I don't keep on finding more oil, I'm going to lose my fortune."
There's something everywhere, everybody's got something. In that aspect, absolutely, everybody has somebody who has power over them. I think we often think about the people who diversified, like lots of customers or lots of people as more powerful, meaning that they're not dependent on one person. They're not dependent on one customer. They feel more powerful on our system but, everybody's dependent.
Brett: It sounds like what you're pointing at in terms of power, when something has power over us, it's setting the constraints of our environment. If we have power over someone else, we have the power to set the constraints for the system in some way, but that doesn't tell the whole story. There's what we do within the constraints and which constraints we buy into or don't.
Joe: That's it. Inside of the constraints, you're completely empowered. The way that you show up inside the constraints, the constraints have to adjust. Meaning, if you are scared of losing your job and you say, "Forget it, I'm going to show up the way that feels right for me and if I get fired, I get fired." You will change the system. There's no way for it not to change, even if you get fired. There's no way for the system not to change. There's no way that the way you interact with the system doesn't affect it.
Brett: Even the structure of a company or even the interpersonal relations in your team will change if you're not being the same cog in the ecosystem that was existing before.
Joe: That's right. You see this. Working with CEOs and working with billionaires, you see this all the time, that there's a whole bunch of things that they want to affect change on that they can't. They don't know how to or that nobody knows how to or it's just beyond their control. It's not like anybody in any situation doesn't have something that they're not able to affect the change on. There're billionaires that I know that if they could control everything, they would have more billions and there're billionaires I know, that if they could control everything, everybody would have social and economic equality but they can't, just like we can't, you can't, I can't, nobody can. As long as you need to control a situation to feel empowered, then you are subjugated.
Brett: That's not real empowerment.
Joe: That's right.
Brett: Where does this come from? Where does this yearning for power arise from if not empowerment?
Joe: Fear. If we're making the distinction between power and empowered and I think that even in our language, oftentimes, when someone says, "I feel powerful," they mean empowered. As far as the semantics we're going to use, that means empowered. Then some people are like, "I feel powerful, meaning I have control over you." People who want to feel powerful control over situations just fear. They are scared. On some level, we all are scared when we are looking to find power. Now, power might come to us and just because I have power doesn't mean I'm scared, but if I'm looking for it, then I'm scared.
Brett: How does achieving some sense of power actually satiate or affect that fear, or does it?
Joe: It doesn't. It's like any addiction. There's a short-term high that you get and then it's over. I remember when I was in one of my poorest times in my life when I had the least amount of resources and my attitude towards money and power was changing. I was driving in my car and I was thinking, "Oh, I don't have enough." As it turned out at that time, I knew several billionaires and I went through the list and I'm like, "Oh, they're driving around right now thinking they don't have enough either." Like, "Oh my God, I'm a billionaire." My situation, their situation is no different. They can affect some change in a way that I can't, but I can affect some change in the way that they can't.
Brett: I could imagine a situation where a billionaire even feels more powerless, because they realize they have all this money and they're actually not able to change the world. So they don't get to believe that money would solve that problem for them.
Joe: That's right. That's the thing is, one of the best investors I ever met said that if you see somebody who thinks that money is going to solve their problems, don't invest. They're dead right. Capitalization doesn't solve problems. It makes them bigger often.
Brett: You throw money at problems and you end up with bigger problems that require money to sustain.
Joe: Yes, that's right. It's like this illusion, once you have the power, then you got to worry about holding on to it. Another billionaire guy told me at one point, he said, “Everybody works, Joe. Everybody works.” If you have a billion dollars, you got to work to maintain it. Everybody works.
Brett: If you're going for social capital, you have the billion dollars. You still have to work to maintain social capital and connections.
Joe: Yes, or you've got $54 billion and you can't affect an election. One guy with maybe a billion dollars can beat another guy with 54 billion. Both of them can be beaten with somebody with less than a million. Power isn’t accumulated by more power. It makes it easier in some forms of power, but sometimes having large amounts of power actually make it harder to accumulate power.
Brett: In the current election cycle, trying to get elected as a billionaire takes you down a whole bunch of notches already.
Joe: Right, or being a really big shot investor with a lot of power. On some level, there's some benefits to it and on other levels, a lot of people follow you, which creates complications as far as liquidity and other things. It's the same thing with somebody who has the power of leadership in a small community. On one level, there's certain things that they can affect change around that other people can't and in another level, there are certain things they can't.
There's a certain balance that is struck in any leadership position and some things can be taken away from you more readily and some things you can't affect change on. It's something that I realized when I was in Boards of Directors. Sometimes in certain Boards of Directors, I had more power being off the board than I did being on the board. Being on the board, I was part of the dynamic and I couldn't help the leadership see through the dynamic. My capacity to help people see through the dynamic was more powerful than having a vote.
Brett: Everything unseen and behind the curtain kind of thing.
Joe: The way that I define power is, that power is the thing that can be taken away from you. Empowerment can't be taken away from you. Power is control over other people and empowered means that you're not looking for control of others. You're just being you despite the consequences. Power is looking to find safety. It's an expression of fear. Empowered is standing in the face of that fear and being truthful to yourself.
If you think about every story that we've ever heard, it's always the story of the person who goes against the consequences for their truth. This is what we long for in ourselves is that, “I'm going to be empowered in a way that I will do the right thing despite the consequences whether I'm saving somebody from a burning building or whether I'm risking my job to be authentic.” That's what empowered is.
Brett: Yes, burning building was a good example because, running into a burning building to save somebody, the fire has power over you. There's nothing anybody's going to do to change that, but you are going into the burning building to do your truth, to try to save somebody regardless of the consequences. You're willing to experience and feel the consequences of coming up against something with much greater power than you.
Joe: Yes, that's right. There's the material power, like money or gun or fire and then there's also just the power of influence over you or other people. What I noticed is that when people act empowered, eight times out of 10, maybe seven times out of 10, the consequence that they're scared of doesn't come to pass. Even though the moment before they take that action, they're pretty sure it's inevitable. If I'm saying I'm going to be true to my wife even though I might lose her, eight times out of 10, I'm not going to lose her. If I'm saying I'm going to be true to myself even if I might get fired, eight out of 10 times, I don't get fired.
If you're actually going into a burning building, I don't know what the odds are. It is not something that I have enough experience with. I will say, the other part of that is that even when you act empowered and things don't go the way you want them to go, they end up going the way you want them to go eventually. Meaning, yes, maybe your wife leaves you but eventually, you get in a relationship that works for you. Meaning that as you act empowered, as you act in your truth, the world that can handle your truth surrounds you and that becomes your reality bubble.
We're all in these echo chambers. If I believe one political thing, I'm going to be in an echo chamber of verification of that. If I believe something else, I'll be in an echo chamber that verifies that. It's how our consciousness works and if we're true to ourselves, we end up in an echo chamber that is true to ourselves.
Brett: It seems there's a difference between the actual constraints that our environment places on us and then the predictive constraints that we are simulating, that we are actually acting on, which are not exactly the real constraints of the environment. If we start operating in a way that doesn't fit the constraints of our immediate environment, we may end up losing a partnership, we may end up losing a job. If we stick with operating as though the world had the constraints that we want, eventually, we will only end up fitting into a system that fits those constraints.
Joe: That's right. You see this in great leadership. I would say that one of the ways that you know that you're empowered is that you're acting in a way as if your reality is already true, that your vision is already true. If you're a civil rights leader, you're acting as if you are already equal and free. You're being that example for everybody to follow and you're assuming that everybody will treat you that way. It starts bending the world into that way of treating you. If you feel like you're less than, then your civil rights movement by its nature will have more friction in it. More people will treat you as you're less than.
It’s the same with anything-- if you're acting as a leader of a CEO and you're like, “Of course, we're going to be successful,” and you’re acting like you're successful. When you're in the negotiations, you're acting like you're successful, then the world wants to bend towards that. It doesn't mean it bends towards it all the time, but it wants to bend towards that. That's what being a visionary is and that is, if you're empowered, then that visionary nature starts becoming more and more obvious to you. It just becomes something that starts happening.
Brett: That brings up an interesting subtlety, the idea of acting as though you're already successful. It seems like there could be ways of performing success that are not beneficial, but the actual belief that you are successful. How would you distinguish between those two things?
Joe: The way I would distinguish between those two things is, that there's a great story. It was an admiral in the Navy who got into a POW camp in Vietnam and he was asked who made it, who didn't make it? He said, “Well, who didn't make it was easy. That was the optimist.” The interviewer is like, “What do you mean optimist?” He said, “It means that they thought they were going to get out by Christmas or by the next season or whatever it was. They didn't make it, because when that came, that timetable came and left, they became defeated and they didn't make it.” He said, “Well, who did make it?” He said, “Well, that's clear, it's the people who thought that they would get out. The people who maintained that vision of their own freedom.”
Brett: In that sense, if we find ourselves performing successfulness and then, signs of failure come, then that can just completely break down and we'll actually just believe our failure and that'll be the end, whereas realizing that this business can entirely fail and I still feel empowered as the person who can be successful.
Joe: Correct and will be. It might be the next business. You see this all the time when people are transforming. When they're changing, they have this massive breakthrough and then they go, “Oh!” then, they feel disempowered because of the power of the pattern and they’re like, "How do I keep it? How do I keep this breakthrough?" As soon as you see that, as soon as you see somebody start wrestling with how do I keep it, you know that it's going to be in flux. You know that it's going to pendulate back and forth for a while.
But when the person sees it so clearly that they're like, "Of course, this is what's happening," then it's over. Even if it comes back a little bit, it's over. The whole process is quicker. If somebody has been getting angry a ton in their world and then all of a sudden they have this breakthrough of like, "Oh my gosh, it's not that I'm angry. It's that I'm hurt." They start crying and they see this new reality. They're like, "Yes." Of course, they don't need to hold on to it. Then you know that that change is going to be smooth and quick. If they are like, "Oh my God, I see it. How do I keep it?" Then you know that they're not fully empowered.
Brett: That's a belief that's fragile then and that they don't really have it.
Joe: Exactly. In that belief system, they still feel like this thing has power over them, this influence. What's interesting is, of course, it has power over you, of course and it's exactly that that you need to enter into. It's exactly that helplessness that helps us become empowered. What I mean by that specifically, because that can be incredibly confusing is, that going through the feeling of helplessness is what creates, oftentimes, that sense of empowerment.
Brett: Yes, that's important, because what you were just saying earlier is that the power itself or the seeking of power as a deep expression of fear and it seems like that would be the fear of feeling the helplessness, the fear of being helpless. If you just move through that helplessness, then you end up on the other side feeling empowered.
Joe: That's it. You just said it better than I could.
Brett: Is there anything else you want to add to the definition of empowered?
Joe: Yes. Empowered really is a feeling. It's a state. It's not a life condition. Meaning, you can be a billionaire and feel empowered and you can be in poverty and feel empowered. It's not really about how many resources you have. It's about your resourcefulness. It's knowing that you have the courage to do what's true for you.
The other thing about empoweredness is that you can't really love without it. If you look at all the people who we see as beacons of love, there is a deep sense of empowerment to them. If you close your eyes and you go inside and you feel what it is to be unconditionally loving and then you feel what it is to be unconditionally empowered, you'll notice that they're two sides of the same mountain and you can't get to the peak without both sides of the mountain.
Brett: I'm curious about what some of the different ways are that we allow ourselves to have power taking over us. What are some of the types of power? There can be economic power, there could be emotional power. I think a lot of this could allude to the victim-savior-bully stuff that we've discussed in some of the other episodes.
Joe: When we're in fear, which is often when we're seeking power over another person, we're often in a victim, savior or a bully role. That is a good sign that you're in the power over. You can have power over somebody by being a bully. That role we know really well. Our society agrees with that one. They're like, "Oh yes, that person's a bully. They want power over."
But you can get power over people as a victim too. I was watching a television show about magic and for whatever reason, they had this group of moms and they were all talking about guilt. They were all laughing and smiling over how guilt was a good way to control their kids. It's like, "Right, that is how people can control through the victim." Like, I'm so fragile that you can't tell me your truth. If there is somebody in your life that you can't tell your truth to because you're scared of hurting them, then you're being somebody who's controlling through victimhood.
It's the same way with a savior. You can control people by saving them. You see this in very wealthy families all the time. They maintain control over their children by making sure that their money is there to save them. Or the Al-Anon saving the alcoholic. It happens all the time. There's all sorts of ways in which we are trying to have power over people. They mostly fit in the three categories, which is victim, savior and bully.
Brett: The example with the rich people with the money doing the savior thing, I think there's many ways that that could apply to philanthropy as well.
Joe: Yes, absolutely.
Brett: Philanthropy can be done in a way that is entirely disempowering and that it can be done in a way that is empowering and I think a lot of that would come from the mindset of the people involved on all sides of it in the system.
Joe: That's right. When I did a lot of philanthropy with schools and with kids, I would stay away from working with anybody who was coming from a place of guilt, that they were doing it because they felt guilty because their philanthropy just didn't work. If they were trying to help people, I would also stay away from it. If they were working with people so that both they and the people they were there to serve were being helped, then those were effective.
Brett: What's an example of how that would work? Philanthropy failing, because it came from a place of guilt.
Joe: I was in Nicaragua at one point and there was a group of Canadians there that had brought a whole bunch of clothing for this village. They all felt really great about themselves. When I asked them why they did it, they were all like, "Oh, I just feel bad that we have so much and I want to spread it." There's nothing wrong with it, but it just isn't successful. I remember sitting with them and saying, "Hey, there's all these turtles here that are going extinct." All these people could be saving the turtles. What if they earned their clothing by helping the turtles? How does that change this whole system?
What it does change is, it makes people have an equal exchange and so they feel empowered. If somebody's just giving them stuff without an exchange, then it's actually quite disempowering because now you have power over them because they need you to give them stuff. In the '70s in Africa, you saw where food drops would happen. Then when the people who had the walkie talkies that helped the food drops happen went away, the native people tried to build fake walkie talkies and act like the person with the walkie talkies to get the food to drop.
It's like you're not teaching that person how to fish. You're giving them fish. When people act out of guilt, that's usually how it works, because they feel like they have to give. Good philanthropy is an exchange. It's not a gift. It's a recognition that you're getting as much from it as you're giving.
Brett: That segues to another interesting thing from earlier in the conversation about your empowerment is something that you have to give up. You choose to give up your empowerment. Let's talk a little more about that.
Joe: There's a choice that you make and every time that you feel like you've been disempowered or that someone has power over you and you can't be true to yourself, then what's actually happening is that you are choosing to avoid a potential bad consequence. That's a choice that you're making. You have to choose that for it to be the case.
Mandela had everything taken from him except his life. He was crushing rocks. He was beaten. It was not pretty for him and yet he stayed empowered. He continued to make choices and knew the choices that he was making despite the consequences.
Brett: How does that work in daily life? Like with a job or perhaps with a receiver of philanthropy, trying to become empowered, but finding that the moment they become empowered, they stop receiving gifts and so, it's easier not to.
Joe: Yes, it's really true. It's harder to raise money for something that's deeply empowered too, it's interesting that way. But then again, the people who truly feel empowered don't need to raise as much money. They have other ways of making things happen. Yes, it's a good question. How does it happen in daily life?
One of the ways that I work with my clients on this often that makes it really acute is-- and I mentioned it a bit in the beginning, but I'll use a different example. It's like a husband that's deeply unhappy in his marriage. I'll ask the question, what if you act exactly how you want to act and see if they leave you, see if the divorce occurs. That's an empowered act. It's like, "Oh, I'm not going to compromise my authenticity, my truth to keep your love. I'm not going to compromise my authenticity and my truth to keep the job. I'm not going to compromise my authenticity and my truth to avoid the conflict and that's when people feel disempowered is, when they don't make that choice. That's when people complain about somebody having power over them.
Brett: Right? Like believing that we're not going to be able to find another job, if we leave this job or believing we're never going to find another partner, if things don't work out with this one and we don't conform to this structure we're in.
Joe: Yes. Then that becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly when you're dealing with one-on-one relationships, but then when it comes to being in a company or being in a country or being part of a geopolitical system, it becomes a little bit harder to see, because the change that you're creating is just less palpable. It's because it's a numbers game and so it becomes harder for people to see in that way.
But that's an intellectual thing. On an emotional and a gut level, you feel it right away, you know it right away when you are acting empowered in those situations, say, "Oh, I'm going to be this way," and I see it all the time. It's like if you look at the people who are breaking the social norms in a way that is liberating for them, that are the front runners or the trailblazers, if you look at those folks, they are the ones who are not buying into the consequences.
Brett: It's contagious then like, if you're looking for a social change, it requires empowerment on a population level. It might feel from a disempowered place that if you're the only person who becomes empowered, you're just going to get steamrolled by the system. Yet, you look at examples like MLK and it's, one person was empowered enough to have like a halo around them, creating more empowerment.
Joe: Yes and he died. Right. There was somebody who had a gun and that's real power and it affected change. He had real power and it affected change. Both of the men who shot and the man who got shot in this particular case, both affected massive change in the world. The difference between the two is one felt empowered and one felt disempowered. The change that we affect when we feel disempowered usually doesn't serve ourselves or humanity.
Brett: Yes, that reminds me of the archetype of the rebel, somebody who feeling what they think is power, ends up destroying their life and others in the name of their truth. Whoever shot MLK felt like they were following their truth and you see this all the time. Let's talk about that.
Joe: Yes. It's really hard to see the difference sometimes, especially when you're in the middle of it and it's subtle until you see it and when you see it, it's clear. If you are in blame for another person or shame for yourself, then you are disempowered and you are trying to accumulate power. If you are not in blame or for others or shame for yourself, then that is empowered. That's the emotional way to know where you're at.
Brett: Or guilt I guess, guilt and shame can be distinguished as well a little bit.
Joe: Yes, guilt and shame. We'll put them together. Those are such-- semantically, that's a very interesting thing and it's very culturally based, but yes, guilt, shame, blame, all that stuff is a good indicator that you're disempowered.
Brett: Earlier we were talking about the drama triangle with the bully and the victim and the savior and how that's based in fear. Can you relate that to blame and shame?
Joe: Yes, so oftentimes, that fear is based on the sense of helplessness. That sense of helplessness is because we believe the story of blame and shame in our head. When you feel like someone else's making your life X, Y and Z way, then you're in blame and there's a helplessness and there's a fear that you will lose complete control and therefore, you need to have control over. Or, there's a shame, like, “I'm inherently bad.” There's no way out of that. It's a deep feeling of helplessness and we're scared of feeling that helplessness, so we then move into the drama triangle or the fear triangle. That's how it works. It's that helplessness is the feeling of that blame and shame felt all the way through, that we don't want to feel.
That's the amazing thing about feeling helplessness. Feeling helplessness doesn't make you more helpless. Feeling helpless makes you more capable. It's so counterintuitive, but if you do it, you know it, right, because so much of our decision-making process is based on trying to avoid an emotional state. The emotional state of helplessness is one of the ones underlying most of our avoidance.
Brett: What are some of the indicators for each of these particular roles? If all of them are fear state being set into place with blame and shame and we need to feel helplessness to get through them, what are some of the indicators for some of these particular roles of victim, bully and savior?
Joe: The reason I don't call the drama triangle very often and I'm more prone to call it the fear triangle is because, the victim, bully and savior correspond with fight, flight or freeze, which are the states of fear. Fight is pretty obviously bully. Right? It's like, when I'm scared, I fight. When I'm scared, I freeze, that's more victim. When I'm scared, I fly, that's savior and that's the harder one to understand. But what happens is, I run away from myself in my own experience and I try to fix you, so that I can feel safe. If I can make it so you don't get drunk, I'll feel safe. If I can make it, that you're happy, then I'll feel safe.
I'm running away from myself going into you to try to fix my issues and so, that's why I call it the fear triangle. There's a feeling for each one of them, right? It's kind of the indicator. The indicator is, if I am feeling all alone in it, that's the bully. If I feel obligation, that's the savior and if I feel stuck, that's the victim. In actuality, we'll feel all three of these things if you really slow it down for a minute and you'll notice that you'll feel all three of these things in a moment of fear.
My wife comes home, she's in a horrible mood and I feel helpless that now my mood is going to be screwed up and the house is going to be screwed up and the kids are going to be screwed like, “I can't do anything.” I might feel alone, like, "Oh, God, I can't. I'm the only one who has to fix this thing." Then I feel, "Oh my God, I got to do something for her so that she feels better and then I'm stuck with this thing." It's like all three of them can happen slowly or quickly. But there's one that usually we dominate in situations that are dominating us in situations. Most people tend towards fight, flight or freeze most of the time.
Brett: Yes, I personally tend towards the savior.
Joe: Yes, I have tended towards both savior and bully. Those are the two places I'll go depending on the circumstance. Yes and often in quick succession.
Brett: Let's talk a little bit more about how this works in companies and in teams.
Joe: It works in a number of ways. The first is, you see this happening all the time in companies and teams, that somebody is acting like the victim or some group is acting like the victim. Some are acting as the savior. There's different ways that they're trying to create control. The less empowered the team feels, the more drama and that's a great-- as soon as you walk into a team, if it's super political, it's just like everybody feels disempowered. You just know it. Where everybody feels empowered and they feel like they can affect change, there's so little politics that are going on. It's a great litmus test.
Brett: Right, because politics is a control mechanism.
Joe: Correct. Yes, it's that fear. Drama. That's the thing that you see in politics everywhere. I don't mean politics as in people running countries. I mean politics. It might be people running countries.
Brett: People being political.
Joe: Being political, right. It's a deep expression of fear and people trying to capture power. Exactly. It's because everybody feels helpless and feels like they're not actually able to affect change in a way that's meaningful.
Brett: How do you affect this kind of change in a company, whether you're leading the company or you're within the company or at the bottom of some ladder?
Joe: Yes. Well, this is the tricky bit, because as a leader of a company, you want your people to be empowered. You also, often out of fear, want to limit their capacity to affect change. I don't want the new mail clerk to decide what my initial public offering price is going to be. It's this constant balance of people feeling empowered. You wanting people to feel empowered and at the same time, a fear of having that power runaway or this lack of control. This is the balance and the subtle war that's happening oftentimes with leaders.
You'll hear it all the time because they'll say something like, "I wish everybody would act like the owner of the company." They mean that to a point, meaning they want everyone to take responsibility like that, but they don't want everybody to have all the benefits and they don't want everybody to have all the choice that they have. There's this very interesting balance that happens. What's happening in those companies is that the empowerment and the roles have gotten confused.
If everybody can feel empowered in their role and their role is defined and how decisions are made is defined, then people feeling deeply empowered is incredibly good for a company. As soon as those roles aren't defined well, as soon as people don't know what they have to do to be successful, then a whole bunch of empowered people just creates a lot of mess.
Brett: It sounds like there's a bit of a paradox here, where having well-defined roles and well-defined processes is structure and that could be something that people feel has power over them. Then also what you want is them to feel empowered to push back and change that structure or work fully within the structure and also perhaps challenge it. If you don't have structure like clear goals, criteria for success, loving accountability, transparency, then what happens there? There's a powerlessness in having no structure.
Joe: That's right. Yes, if there's no way to affect change or make decisions, then what you'll have is this crazy politics with people trying to get power so that they can feel safe. Yes, you want to have some sort of structure that allows itself to change and a structure that doesn't change without very specific things happening, so that people can feel safe that they know what to do, that they know what success means.
This doesn't matter if it's AA or Enron. In AA, there's a very particular structure that has to happen. There's 12 steps. There's the way that the meetings get run and that structure happens. It's important or people can't feel safe in those environments. In Uber, there's very particular structures in place. There's, "I'm going to rate you five stars or not," and there's another structure of making sure that drivers don't rip other people off by tracking them on maps. Those structures are really incredibly critical or people don't feel safe.
Will those structures need to change over time? Absolutely. But, you need the structure for people to feel safe and know what their roles are. Then you need to be able to make room for people to grow and change their roles. The Constitution of the United States does a pretty good job of it, too.
Brett: Yes, sets a structure.
Joe: Yes. That's the balance that you're constantly looking for is, “How I create the amount of structure that makes people feel safe but also gives them autonomy and gives them the capacity to feel as empowered as possible.”
Brett: Includes mechanisms for that structure itself to be updated to match reality.
Joe: Absolutely. Right, that's it. That's how looking at company-- and what you see typically is, the more transparency and the less structure that creates safety, the more elegant the structure is that creates safety, then the more successful the company. Taxi cabs becoming Uber is an example of this, less structure, less infrastructure, but it creates actually more safety.
It's the same thing that happened with GM and Toyota. Toyota became more decentralized than GM, which was at the time, the most centralized company. That decentralization, but still maintaining the structure, is what usually gives those companies a competitive advantage. The reason is, because it creates more empowerment with the employees.
Brett: It seems like this would also promote scalability for a company, because if you have 100 empowered decision-makers instead of three, then more decisions can be made and more information can be processed.
Joe: That's exactly right. Yes. You saw that there was a-- I can't remember, it was one of the Malcolm Gladwell books talked about, how in this war game that the Pentagon does, this small band of people beat the US Army, because their decision-making was happening at the bottom. There was some set of principles, some set of structure that they could all operate within. That's basically how you do it. It was in David and Goliath, was I think his book. You see that all the time and you see it in business books as well, like Reinventing Organizations, where the same principle is there.
Brett: Yes, another war game example, just war example, would be when Rommel first encountered US troops in Northern Africa. He was like, "Oh, these guys are totally green and completely disorganized. It'll be a cinch." Then, not long after, he was writing letters back to Germany like, "Wait, don't underestimate these people. You can cut off an entire unit from their command and somehow, they'll still figure out how to fight."
Joe: But this isn't just an external thing. This is an internal thing as well. When you become more empowered, you start operating on a set of principles and that set of principles, you're going to operate on whether it's comfortable or not. If I have a principle that basically says, "I am not going to work with assholes," and somebody says, "Here's a billion dollars to work with an asshole," I'm going to say, "No." It's a set of principles. I'm not going to operate any differently than that. If I have a set of principles and it's like, I'm going to be transparent with people and tell them my truth despite the consequences, that's my set of principles. I'm going to do it no matter what.
That's when all the drama in me starts disappearing. That's when I feel empowered is, I've given myself a structure that it doesn't change very readily. It takes some time to change that set of principles, but I'm going to operate in that way no matter what. That helps me feel deeply empowered, which is strange. It's like a set of criteria that I live by that actually makes me feel empowered.
Brett: Yes, as though this entire process of inquiry into values is to create a more and more consolidated, elegant structure by which we live our lives, so that we don't have to think about the complicated consequences and how the consequences are going to play out of, “What if I say this to my boss? Or speak my truth here or leave this job?” It's just, this is simply how I want to live and I'll accept the consequences if that's what it takes.
Joe: That's exactly right. Yes, that set of principles is what frees us. If you look around at the people who you just saw like, “Holy crap, they didn't have resources, but they were empowered and they changed the world.” That's something else they all have in common. They were living by a set of principles internally and externally. Not perfectly, obviously. We're humans. We are not made perfect, but it's generally how one lives their life. When you see somebody who's living by a set of principles, you'll also notice that they never are blaming other folks. They're never worried about somebody's power over them. They're addressing it.
Brett: That also will affect your opportunities as well. When I'm hiring, I'm much more interested in the resourcefulness and the ownership, the self-ownership of the person rather than the skills listed on their resume. People really detect that in any counterpart that they might work with.
Joe: That's right, I'd rather pick the right mentality than the right skillset, for sure. I obviously like to pick both when I can, but yes, that's right. This is what happens internally, like I said, as well as externally, the drama internally goes away when we feel empowered internally, when we don't feel that we will make the choice even if it's uncomfortable. Even if I have to feel helpless, I'm going to make that choice. Even if I have to-- I'm not going to have power over somebody else or try to have power over myself.
I will rather feel the discomfort of the fear and the helplessness. I'll rather enter into the shame. I would rather allow my own destruction as far as the destruction of my identity, my identity as one who's put upon or my identity as one who's valuable. I'd rather allow that to be destroyed, rather than move into fear and act from fear and try to have control over somebody. It's an internal and an external thing. When you figure it out internally, you have no choice but to act externally. If you feel like you are subjugated by something externally, then you also feel like you're subjugated by something internally.
Brett: That sounds like a great point to wrap this up on. Thank you very much, Joe.
Joe: Yes. Pleasure, Brett. Thank you very much.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.com
Resources:
Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations, https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/
Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants
When we consider how we want life to be in the future we often create a list of things that we have to improve about ourselves. Yet we rarely consider that we could succeed in “improving” every aspect of our lives, and by doing so, completely lose touch with who we are and what we want. What if learning who we are creates a future far better than what we think we want? What if it creates a future better than we could imagine?
"I will watch people and if they are just following their intuition, they will just pick the next thing. This is what we do, when we are just following our nature. My nature, my authenticity improved me in ways I didn't even know were happening."
When we consider how we want life to be in the future, we often create a list of things that we have to improve about ourselves. Yet, we rarely consider that we can succeed in improving every aspect of our lives and by doing so, completely lose touch with who we are and what we want. What if learning who we are creates a future far better than what we think we want? What if it creates a future better than what we could imagine? Today's episode is about valuing authenticity over improvement.
Brett: Joe, let's talk about authenticity. What is authenticity?
Joe: Authenticity is an endless spiral in one way and the fact that it's evolutionary by nature. We think that there is an authentic self and it is the solid thing, but it's not. It's as we discover ourselves, there's always more to discover. As we discover ourselves, we transform. Authenticity is really a path more than a destination. The way that you can identify when you're on that path of authenticity is, it's always about the process. It's never about the reward. It's never like a means to an end. It's like a river. It's very much like a river in the fact that there's a way that a river wants to run and that's the natural flow of the river.
Next year, you'll come back and that river will run a different way. Authenticity is constantly changing, but there's just this natural flow to it. In Daoism, they call it the way. It's a very natural course. They call it self-discovery. They don't call it self-building. We're not building ourselves, we're discovering ourselves. That's why ultimately the path of authenticity is a path of self-realization. It is finding out the truth of who you are. Somehow, for some reason, the more we discover who we are, the more that we evolve, the more that we change, the more that we show up in a way that is far more gentle, or loving, competent, capable and strong.
Brett: Can you talk a little bit more about self-realization?
Joe: Yes, self-realization. There's a story of, I think it's in the Upanishads. I can't remember which tradition. So many times traditions have really similar parables. There's another parable very much like this about a tiger, but this one's about a musk deer. This musk deer is moving along one day. There's a smell and it's like, "What is that smell?" It just feels like a memory. It feels like a calling. It's like something gets opened up in this musk deer. His impulse is like, "I need to follow this thing. I need to follow it."
It goes searching for the place where the scent emerges. It wants to find the origin of that scent. It looks and looks and looks and looks and it's almost upon its death, still looking for the scent and falls off of a cliff and punctures its stomach. It realizes, at that moment of death that, "Oh, the thing that I've been searching for comes from me. That scent emanates from me." That is the movement of self-realization. The thing that we're looking for in all the self-improvement, what we're actually looking for, is ourselves.
Brett: How can you relate the story of the deer following its own scent to our path of self-realization?
Joe: The search of the deer looking for the scent is the self-improvement. It's like, "Once I eat the right diet, then I'll be good enough, or I'll be awake, or then I'll be loved. Once I look pretty, then I'll be good enough and then I'll be loved. Once I lose enough weight, once I meditate enough, once I have no more negative thoughts, once I stop thinking," whatever it is that you think you have to do, become rich enough. Then you'll have it and you'll find the scent that you're looking for. The scent you're actually looking for is you, it is to understand yourself.
It's the only thing that really solves the issue. It's why you see so many executives and I've worked with so many executives who are at the top of their game. They've made a successful billion-dollar company and they're miserable. They did everything that they thought they needed to do to improve themselves, so that they will be loved or that they would accept themselves and nothing's really changed. As soon as they start on that path of self-realization, as soon as they are looking for their own authenticity and they no longer are willing to sell that authenticity or bargain that authenticity for a result, when it stops becoming a means to an end-- it just is like, "This is my authentic expression." Then their life starts unfolding in happiness and joy.
Brett: Let's talk a little bit more about that scent trail then. How would you define improvement?
Joe: Yes. Improvement is basically, “If this, then this”, in terms of the self. It's like, "If I get sexy enough, then I will have the lover that I want. If I lose enough weight, then people will like me. If I have enough money, then I'll feel secure." Improvement is thinking that you're going to get a result from it. Authenticity is the opposite. It's, "This is what I'm going to do despite the consequences, because it's my authentic truth." That's basically what improvement comes. It comes from the idea of ways that we don't want to be who we are. The other way to look at all the ways we think we need to improve is all the ways that we don't love ourselves just as we are.
Any point where you can't unconditionally love yourself, whether that is because you yell, because you don't work hard enough, because you're lazy, because you're a pessimist, whatever it is that you are telling yourself that you have to change, they're just ways that you're not loving yourself. They don't typically change. We just keep on telling ourselves that we don't love that about ourselves and we keep on telling ourselves that we have to improve it. When we actually accept our authenticity, those things just naturally move. They just shift.
Brett: Reminds me of a quote that I've heard before, where somebody is speaking to somebody as though they were a child. They ask the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Instead of thinking to ask, "How do you want to be when you grow up?"
Joe: I have never heard that. That's beautiful. How do you want to be when you grow up? The other way to think about self-realization I think it's a Pema Chödrön quote. It's basically to constantly offer yourself up to annihilation, so you can find out what's the part of you that can't be annihilated.
Brett: What are we annihilating, these built up ideas of who we are?
Joe: That's exactly it. The things that we think we are that we have to defend, you can tell them because you're defending them. It's like when someone's like, "You didn't do that very well," and you go, "er." Then you are defining yourself as somebody who's competent. You're not able to love the incompetent part of yourself. Authenticity is, "This is how I'm competent. This is how I'm incompetent." Being able to own that. Then in the owning of the lack of competence becomes more competence.
It's this thing where, oftentimes, with executives, helplessness is this big thing where they feel it. Authentically, they feel helpless, but to allow themselves to feel helpless is incredibly difficult because the fear is, "If I allow myself to feel helpless, then I will become more helpless." But if they authentically own their helplessness, then they become less helpless.
Brett: I think there's also a fear of being seen.
Joe: Yes. That's right.
Brett: Fearing that there will be consequences to that.
Joe: Yes. That's how you know that part of yourself that needs, wants, to be destroyed. It's the part of yourself that doesn't want to be seen in that way, whatever that way is. "I don't want to be seen as blank, a hypocrite. I don't want to be seen as helpless. I don't want to be seen as greedy." Whatever it is that you don't want to be seen. "I don't want to be seen as weak."
Brett: How would you separate improvement from growth? Even in this process of finding your authenticity, you can get better at it. What is that if not improvement? Don't we need some form of improvement, whether we're tracking our growth in some way to see where the trajectory is going?
Joe: The question is, what would make you need it? What will happen if you don't have it? I think that's where the key is. Does growth happen? Absolutely. I always use this metaphor of an oak tree because when I look out my window, there is an oak tree. The oak tree grows. The growth happens. Does it need to? No. Is it looking to improve itself? No. It's nature.
Another way to think of our authenticity is our nature. Our nature is to grow, our nature is to improve, our nature is to learn. If you take a little kid when they're babies, they can't even walk. One of the things that they smile most at is when a face comes at them sideways, not when a face comes at them straight up and down. Straight up and down face is the face that they see right before they feed. That doesn't make them smile as much as a sideways face, which means, "Oh, we're here to play." Play for a kid is learning and we have this natural desire to learn. It is authentic in us. We have a natural desire to grow. It's authentic in us.
This just all happens very, very naturally, but it's when you think you have to improve to be good enough or when it's not just the nature of your life. You look at a six-year old kid, they're constantly wanting to learn and grow and it doesn't stop. It doesn't stop unless someone has kicked the love of learning out of us, it just keeps going. I don't think we have a need to do it. I think the thing is, that improvement is just happening naturally and that's authenticity. But if you are looking to improve yourself, then you are putting the brakes on the process and you're often going in the opposite direction of the river.
Brett: How do we address that fear of becoming stagnant if we don't improve or just to be measuring? Measuring where we're at and then measuring that according to some scale of value that we've created.
Joe: That's a great question. First of all, question your scale. That's the ultimate thing. It's easy to play a game when you have a measurement. It's hard to play a game when you don't. If your measurement for life is how much money I have in the bank, then you can play. If the measurement is how kind I am to people, then you can play. Then you have something to measure to.
If you start really questioning those measurements, what do you mean by kind? Do you mean having the most positive impact? How do you measure positive impact? What's the difference between kind and nice? What if I was deeply truthful, but I wasn't kind? Why is kind more important than truth? These questions, as soon as you start really looking at the end, if you really deeply look at the end, then it gets really scary.
That's when the stagnation fear really shows up and you're like, "Oh, all the progress that I thought I was making might not have been to the right end. Maybe there's no end." This fear sets in and it's almost like this fear, like it's going to be nihilistic or something like that. Even the idea that it's nihilistic is just another way of trying to create meaning out of a situation, but the nature of life doesn't really require meaning. There's no other part of life that requires meaning except for humans.
Life wants to evolve, it wants to grow, it wants to improve. It seems, as it turns out, most humans, when they understand themselves more and more, there's a deeper and deeper compassion that shows up. There is a deeper, deeper amount of empowerment that shows up. What you find is, the things that you think are opposite, such as love and being empowered, they turn out to be the same thing. That the pinnacle of loving is empowerment, that the pinnacle of empowerment is loving. You can feel this. If you just stop for a second and close your eyes and you feel what it would be like to unconditionally love the world. You just let that settle in your body for a moment. Your love is so big and so great that it expands everywhere. It's not weak love, it's not love like I'm going to let people abuse me. It is the kind of love that a mother has, that's a great mother. They have boundaries.
Then you let that go for a second and then feel what it's like to be completely empowered. Feel what it would be like to not have to worry at all about the future, to not have to prepare, to not have to plan, to just know that you are capable of handling any situation, to be like Superman on a mountaintop with no Kryptonite in the world, or Superwoman on the mountaintop with no Kryptonite in the world. Nothing can touch you. That feeling of empowerment.
Then just feel the two next to each other. How are they different, if at all, this full empowerment, this full love? That's how it moves. The fear of stagnation, the fear of, "Oh, there's no meaning. There's no place to go and therefore I'll stop moving," it hits the human psyche for sure. It's definitely a part of this human psyche, at least in the modern world, but life doesn't require any of that stuff. Life can't stop moving. Try to not improve for a week. Take two weeks and do your best to not improve. Don't learn anything, don't grow, don't have any realizations, don't have any recognitions. Try that for two weeks.
[laughs] I told someone to do that once and they were like, "Oh my God, so many recognitions, so much realization," because they stopped trying. We feel this all the time when we're on holiday. You have two weeks off and then you come back and you perform better. It's smoother. The whole thing works better. You make better calls because you weren't actively trying to improve for two weeks. It's just the nature of life. We, by our nature, learn and want to grow.
Brett: Something that came up for me in the exercise that we just did, was that both in the unconditional loving the world state and the feeling fully-empowered state, there wasn't any fear. But the concern of stagnating is just fear. The fear of stagnating is the thing that I know for me, in my life, I have spent a lot of time in the fear of stagnation. That has constricted me in those times and led to-
Joe: Stagnation.
Brett: -stagnation.
Joe: Exactly. That's how it works. We invite the things that we're scared of, that's our nature. Our nature is to invite. If we have a fear of something, we're inviting it in, because we want to. We want to learn and grow from that experience, we want to face that fear. The fear of stagnation invites stagnation, the fear of loss invites loss, the fear of abandonment invites abandonment.
Brett: Let's try to bring this back into more concrete examples to make this real.
Joe: Yes. I'll do a couple of them. One way to look at it, is kids and their learning. Kids, we were just talking about, their nature is to learn, they're curious, that's what they're genetically programmed to do. All humans are. Somehow or another, we can put them into a school system, tell them that they have to improve and get A’s and then they stop wanting to learn. It actually happens to something like 47% of highly intelligent kids fail high school.
Brett: Yes, I did really great in school up until I got an IQ test that told me I was smart and then I got my first B+. This was like fourth grade. Then it was just like, "Screw it."
Joe: Yes, you stopped trying.
Brett: To hell with this whole thing.
Joe: There's a great psychological test on this, that basically if you tell a kid they're smart and then they try and they don't succeed, they'll stop trying because then they will prove that they're not smart. They'll just stop trying, so they can maintain the identity of smart. It's some fascinating work. That's an example of it. Now if you take kids who've been unschooled, I think it's called non-schooling or unschooling or something like that, where kids have been somewhat traumatized in their school situation, so their parents pull them out. They say, "You can't watch television. You can't do things that are destructive, but you can not do any work until you're ready."
They often times don't do any work for three months or six months. Then all of a sudden, they're like, "I want to work." Those kids, when they want to learn math, they can learn basically fractions to calculus in something insane, like three months or five months or something like that. You can read the studies on it, because they want to learn, because it is their desire to learn in that direction and they want to do it and they will do it. It's like one is moving with the authenticity of the situation and one is telling the kids that they have to improve to be good enough. It's like a punishment and reward situation, so that's one aspect.
Another way is a personal story from my life. I was in high school and I started smoking cigarettes. I was socially awkward at the time. I had issues. My upbringing had some turmoil in it. I was constantly telling myself I should improve by not smoking. I was constantly telling something that I needed to improve in. Then just by nature, I got drawn into hacky sacking. I just started to hacky sack all the time and I just really enjoyed hacky sacking. It just became this thing.
Then about 10 years ago, I was with one of my daughters. My daughter's having some problems in school and this occupational therapist came to us. Then said like, "Your daughter has something called sensory processing disorder." It just basically means that the neurology isn't really melding the way it would with other kids and it makes you very sensitive to stimulus through your senses. I said, "How do we solve this thing?" She was like, "The way you solve it is through doing exercises across the midline that require coordination," et cetera, et cetera. Hacky sacking would have been a perfect example of that. If you look at me, before hacky sacking and after hacky sacking, I became socially more fluid. I became less sensitive.
When you have sensory processing, it's a bit of like a nerd’s disease, more likely to wear glasses, you're awkward and clumsy, you don't do as well socially, that kind of stuff. All that changed with me hacky sacking. My nature knew what I needed, knew what was needed next and did it without anybody telling me to, without anything happening. I watched this happen all the time with clients. I watched clients all the time. I know basically the dance steps of transformation. Everybody does them a little bit differently.
Sometimes chapter three comes before chapter one or whatever, but I will watch people. If they're just following their intuition, man, they will just pick the next thing and I would be like, "Oh my God, they picked it perfectly again." This is what we do when we're just following our nature. Then smoking, for me, on the other hand lasted until I was in my 30’s, as a perpetual habit into my 30’s and that was all the ways I was supposed to improve. My nature, my authenticity improved me in ways that I didn't even know were happening.
Brett: That's fascinating. I can think of a lot of experiences in my life that are a lot like that. One of them being joining a 18-month course where I felt like an intuition. It felt like a lot of money at the time. In retrospect, it was very little. It was just like, "Man, this seems like my kind of thing." I don't even know what it is and I didn't. When I got there, I was like, "Wait, this isn't really all that."
Joe: Yet, it transformed your business too, which is the insane part. That's the other thing.
Brett: Yes, but more than that in my life.
Joe: Exactly. That's the insane part. That's a great example of it as well. It's when people come, because they often come to me, because they want to transform their business and we transform their life by them taking their natural steps and their business naturally transforms. If they would have just focused on their improvement, their business may or may not have transformed.
In this way, the reason I use this methodology of working on personal stuff is because that always transforms the business. It has a hundred percent success rate as the person transforms their attitude towards, their business will transform and so will their business.
Brett: Let's relate all this back into the concept you were talking earlier about self-realization and self-discovery.
Joe: That's good. If you look back to my journey, let's hear it from my journey for a second. For the early part, I got really deeply into awakening, enlightenment in the non-dual sense of the word, not like woke culture. I'm talking about like the Christ consciousness or enlightenment, whatever religious tradition you have, has a word for it. At the beginning of that journey, I thought it was improvement that would get me there. Once I ate the right diet, or once I did the right exercises, or meditated hard enough or blah, blah, I would become enlightened.
That was the improvement side of things. It's a slow, arduous, painful process. It luckily moved enough for me to realize that it wasn't about improvement. It was just about the recognition of who I am. When that happened, this question appeared to me, it was, "What am I?" I asked that question for 10 years, maybe 10 times a day, I would ask that question. That is really what transformed everything for me. Just being in that question for that long with that level of wonder transformed everything.
It was funny. I was seeing a guy at the time. I was reading every non-dual teacher I could find. The only guy that I had met personally, who I thought, "Wow, this is a person I would want to learn from," was a guy named Adia Shantay. I got up and asked him a question once in front of this big auditorium of people. I said, I keep on asking this question, "What am I?" All I get is silence. Some dude in the back just started laughing and I was like, "That's not funny?" Adia smiled and I can't remember what else happened.
I remember about three years later, I was at a meditation retreat when that question, what am I, faded away. The question never gets answered. It just expires and then it expires like a firecracker, but it expires. I was in the back and somebody got up in the front and asked the question, "What am I and nothing." I just started laughing hysterically, as if that nothing wasn't the answer and that's what it turns into. That recognition of self is something that just unfolds into nothingness. That nothingness is incredibly free and incredibly potent and capable.
Brett: So, who are you now?
Joe: [laughs] Yes, that question has expired. There's an exercise on this, just to go back and forth and ask somebody, "What are you?" Over and over again, "What are you? What are you? What are you?" See what happens as all your answers expire. But if I had to put, what am I, in words right now, which is an exciting thought process, I would say, "What am I? I am infinitely you. I am everything and nothing in the silent vastness that everything arises in and so are you."
Brett: Then what happens once that question expires? It sounds like there could be a trap here in thinking that, "This question of who I am has expired. Now I don't have to prove myself and there's just nothing to do." What am I going to do to just stay in that cave and meditate until-- ?
Joe: Yes, there's a thought that says that that might be the case. In fact, some people go through that for a while. I think it's because they're like those kids, who needed to be unschooled for a while, when they have that recognition of their essential self in that way, that there is this need to just sit there for a while and do nothing. It becomes a bit dissociative. Eventually, it's no longer satisfying. We just become more and more human. We like to play. We like to learn. We like to grow. It's our nature. It's our authenticity. Once we have been let out of school, we realize there's nothing that we have to do to improve ourselves, because our essence is unbelievably beautiful, miraculous, a dream that we never thought even possible coming true, that we couldn't even have thought of coming true.
There's this natural desire to rest for a while, potentially. But eventually, you want to move, you want to dance, you want to play, you want to be alive. Then the journey turns into, "How do I be alive? How does my authenticity really want to be alive? How fully can I embrace this life?" There's a book called The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I don't even know what it's about, but the title is amazing. That's what it is. Life becomes, "How do I allow myself to be more and more vulnerable to the unbearable lightness of being?"
Brett: I love that. Both of us are the kind of person who would recommend a book or reference a book that we haven't read just because of its title.
Joe: [chuckles] The title. I highly recommend that title.
Brett: [chuckles] The title.
It seems like there could be another trap here where we have somewhere where we want to go and we're like, "Maybe improving myself along the particular metrics that I have in mind right now, maybe that's not the best way to get there, because authenticity is the best way to get there. If I just get more authentic, then I'll become this thing that I want to be and get to where I want to go."
Joe: Yes, that's right. That is a real trap. It's like, you'll see this happen oftentime in tools. You get this tool that you start working with and in the realm of self discovery and you get this tool, it works really well for a while and then it stops working. Some of the times, it stops working, because you're using the tool to change yourself instead of loving yourself, so it stops working. Some of the time, that tool stops working, because you've co-opted it into improvement, instead of recognition. It's really the same thing, to improve yourself isn't to love yourself as you are. To find the authentic expression of you, is to love yourself as you are and to know that that authentic expression will naturally change you, just like the natural flow of a river changes the river.
Brett: That could mean your goals will shift.
Joe: Will shift. Yes. I've seen a lot of things not change as people go through this journey and I've seen a lot of things change, but I've never seen the goals of a person not change through the journey. That always changes. What's often interesting is, the goals that they used to have, just get met naturally without any effort or thought process, because they become just a step in what's necessary for them to evolve into their authenticity. I had a goal for years of having enough money to blah, blah blah. Somewhere along the line, I just didn't care at all about money. Then money just started rushing in. That's a really typical story. Not always, but it's a very, very typical story.
Brett: We've talked about how wanting something is good. We just had a whole episode on what you want, how wanting itself is critical. Then we're just talking now about how wanting something from ourselves or wanting something in our future can lead towards this constant improvement process and away from our authenticity. What do you have to say about that?
Joe: Wanting is critical, what you want is really inconsequential. What you want is directionally correct, but it is not the end all be all of anything. That wanting is what pulls you. That wanting is the natural pull of evolution, of authenticity. That's what it is. What you want is a strategy to get there. There's 10 or 20 strategies. What you want is inconsequential and there's no reason to attach to it. It is to follow your wanting and then to watch how you're wanting changes and watch how what you want changes.
Brett: What happens if you're going through this process and the things that you want just change so rapidly that your life starts to feel disconnected or disorienting?
Joe: You're very fortunate. You might feel disturbed depending on your personality type. Some folks will find that to be a beautiful free ride and some people will feel like-- there's that quote, that sometimes falling feels like flying for a little while. People will be like, "I'm flying, which means I must be falling." In actuality, as they say, the bad news is you're falling, the good news is there's no bottom. That is part of it. Rumi called it, a Sufi poet, he calls it a holy confusion, that not knowing. It's called the mystery for a reason.
It's absolutely what happens and the goals shift and then the goals disappear. Then there's like no goals for a while. Then after there's no goals for a while, there's very specific goals and then there's just this movement that's like-- how did I describe it? The goal is to live principled, because you know, that living principled will make you happier than any goal that you could ever achieve.
Brett: That's something that's entirely within your power too?
Joe: Yes, it becomes choice-less at a point, it becomes outside of your power. At some point it's like, "I just can't not live with principled, because it's too damn painful."
Brett: Give us another concrete example of how that works, when what you want is inconsequential, but the wanting itself isn't.
Joe: I can give you a funny one. I'm sitting with my godson and his father and he has been a friend since high school. This story is going to be one of those stories that lets you know, maybe you don't want to have me as a friend. We're sitting there and we're having lunch together at this restaurant and my friend tells me about how his son stole $50 from him, bought a vape pen and was vaping in the classroom. I'm just listening. Son is in those teenage years.
All of a sudden, five minutes later he's like, “The problem with my son is that he just doesn't have ambition. He just doesn't want to do anything.” I was like, “What? Of course he wants to do something. Do you know how hard it is to do what he did? Stealing $50, he planned that stuff out. That's ambition. Then he went and did it. Then with the knowledge that he could have gotten caught, which is totally ambition and then he figured out a way to go buy the vape pen. Then he had so much ambition to do it that he did it in a classroom and got caught. That is some CEO level ambition. What are you talking about?” [laughs]
At this point my friend is just looking at me like, "Shut up, Joe, shut up." His son is looking at me like a smile, "Oh, wow, I didn't know. I should have visited my godfather more often." I was just saying, “There’s clearly ambition, it's just that you want him to be ambitious in one way, but he's ambitious in another. Let's look at how he's ambitious.”
I started talking to him. "What is it that you want to do?" He wants to play this particular sport that requires some money and you got to get these guns or whatever. It's like a laser tag type thing, the next version of a laser tag. He's telling me about it and I'm getting into it with him.
Then I’m like, “How are you going to afford this?” He's like, “Maybe I have to get a job.” “What kind of job do you want to get? This kind? You don't make a lot of money.” Then, “How are you going to get there?” We just went through this whole thing and he was clearly eager to do all this stuff, so that he could do the thing that he wanted to do. I was like, “How can your dad help?” He is telling his father what his father can do, to help him be ambitious and get things done. That's the difference between, “You should improve”, to “What is the authentic expression?”
The thing is, that we do that internally as well as externally, meaning we're usually like the father in that story, rather than the godfather in that story to ourselves. We're telling ourselves what we have to improve, what we need to do, blah, blah, blah, blah, instead of just paying attention to what the natural thing is. If we follow that thread far enough down, it has far better results and moves much quicker.
Brett: It's fascinating. By that measure, I was extremely ambitious and barely passing any of my high school.
Joe: Exactly. It's because it couldn't hook on to your authentic-- most schooling doesn't hook on to a child's authentic desire to learn.
Brett: In my case, that presented a lot of different tracks and opportunities all of which just didn't quite hook.
Joe: It's really hard to hook, when you're grading people and say you need to improve. That's not hook-worthy.
Brett: It's like a culture of constant improvement.
Joe: We don't listen to songs that tell us that we need to improve. "Wow, a triple platinum song by Jay-Z called, “Boy, You Better Workout More." It just doesn't happen.
Brett: Let's talk a little bit more about how this works in companies and in a more general sense, in cultures of self-improvement or just not even self improvement, just cultures of everybody needs to improve to get better.
Joe: The constant improvement culture. It's not assuming that people want to improve by nature is what happens here. A great example of this is in that book, Reinventing Organizations, there's a nursing company in there called Herzog. Basically what happened, it was in Holland, what happened is, there's these community nurses and they got privatized. It just became all about efficiency. It all became: improve, improve, improve, improve and it was like, "This is how long it should take you to get there, this is how long it should take you to administer the shot. This is how long it should take you to get back. That's how much time you have. That's how much payment you're going to get."
Everybody was going for the improved nursing efficiency. This company came along and it did a lot of really cool things. One of the things it did is it said, "You know what, our job isn’t to be as quick as possible. Our job is not to improve our process in that way. It's to make it, so that we help people become self-reliant." Through figuring out how to get to that home and make the person self-reliant, instead of administering the shot, they became 60% more efficient than their competition or something like that. Maybe it's 40%. I don't remember the numbers exactly, but it was a tremendous amount more efficient.
One had that natural hook, because we naturally want to help people. That is part of our nature. All mammals, that are community-based mammals, have altruism as part of us. They hooked on to that natural thing and then that led to natural improvement, but they weren't trying to improve in some unnatural way. The interesting thing is, as soon as I say, it's our nature to be altruistic, somebody will say something like, "It's our nature to be self-interested." I say, "I agree, it is." It's our nature to be altruistic and it's our nature to be self-interested and it's our nature to want to be rewarded and it's our nature to want our team to win and it's in our nature for us to win.
Companies that are really becoming the most efficient companies, are hooking on to all of that. If you think about that nursing company, their team won and they had individual reward for the performance. As it turned out, people got to decide their own reward. Also, they got to help. They're hooking onto all of these natural things in us.
If you look at the great products of our day and the great nonprofits of our day, they hook into a natural, authentic desire in people. Sometimes it's drug-like, like Facebook or coffee and sometimes it is not drug-like. Sometimes it is just our nature to want to communicate. That's what it means. Not only does your product-- but your culture needs to--if you want to be highly efficient, it needs to hook into that nature of people, our authenticity.
Brett: Another one of our ESF group was recently telling me about a company that they're applying for. It's a debt collections agency that operates on transparency. Instead of trying to be as efficient as they can, milking the most money from people as possible and buying the debt for the cheapest possible whatever, they're optimizing for really being in connection with people. They purchase debt and then they're transparent. They're like, "Hey, we bought your debt for this much. We have this much of it. We expect to get a certain percentage of it paid back from various places. What can we do to get this paid off?"
With that transparency and working closer to their customers, their debtors, they actually get across this sense of actually caring. They're able to come up with much more creative solutions which actually results in-- this is a new company, but it seems like it's resulting in getting much better results for them. Also they're getting just swathes of testimonials from customers that are like, "Wow, I wish all of my debt had been bought by this company. This is amazing. They're actually people and they talk to me like a human."
Joe: You can see this in sales processes are more effective, when there's a real relationship, real connection going on and that authenticity is there. People think they have to compartmentalize themselves to do business and that compartmentalization, that inauthenticity, it absolutely makes you less efficient. It might make things easier to do in the short-term, but absolutely harder to do in the long-term. It makes you less efficient, because you're basically asking anybody you interact with to compartmentalize themselves that same way. A debt collector compartmentalizes their heart and they go in hard. Then their customer compartmentalizes their heart and they respond hard, or they respond like a victim or whatever it is, but they're going to match that more on average.
Brett: If we focus on finding the authentic movement, then--
Joe: How do I collect debt in a way that feels good in my system? How do I nurse in a way that feels good in my system? How do I produce a social media app that feels good in my system? All of those will be a more efficient product.
Brett: Then with that continual asking, "What am I?" Like, "What am I? Am I an efficient debt collector or am I a human?"
Joe: That's right. "If I am them and they are me, then how do I want to behave here? If I feel my natural authenticity and my desire to learn and my desire to be of service to people, how do I collect debt in a way that's of service to people?" It feels horrible to not pay your debt. To help people feel that they are standing on their own two feet and have achieved paying off debt, that can be a real deep service for humans.
Brett: I wonder how many other industries can be rethought that way.
Joe: Every one of them. It's endless. It's just like there's always more money to be made. There's always a way to become more authentic and each one is an efficiency.
Brett: It sounds like there's a lot of faith in this process because with each layer of authenticity you find, you really have to let go of what you valued or what you thought was important, entirely to find what's beneath it.
Joe: Yes, that's true. It feels like faith, until you get used to reading the river in some way. It's the same faith that maybe a basketball player would have that's going into a game. It's like you can't plan out the whole game. You can't plan out everything. You're basically choosing, “I am going to plan out my entire basketball game”, or “I'm going to learn how to read a river” and “Learn how to read the field, learn how to read my opponents and so that I am competent in every situation where I'm in that basketball game.” Then you start having faith in your capacity to handle situations.
You become excited, but you can't handle them, because it means you're getting to learn something and it makes you more capable next time. It's the same thing. It's like if you've learned to read a river to go down that river and get to the mouth of the river, it's not an act of faith anymore. It's just what you do. You're watching other people build canals and that makes them feel secure. Like, "I will just take a canal the whole way, but I have to build the whole canal." It's a lot more effort. It's very much like that.
Once you start realizing, that your authenticity naturally brings you to the next level over and over again and that improving yourself is like building a canal. It's like this idea of safety, that it takes a tremendous amount of effort and is really not that safe, because lots of people die building canals. That's how it works. It feels constantly, like you're taking faith, that you're taking the risk. Then at some point, you're like, "Oh, no. It's more risky to do the other thing. It's more risky to be 60 years old and all my dreams have come true and I'm miserable," which is where that typically leads.
Brett: I think we often over-index on the cost, the perceived cost of stopping doing things the way that we're doing them, but forget about the opportunity cost of continuing to do the same thing.
Joe: What's interesting is, that's also part of our nature. It's also part of our nature to stay with something that feels safe.
Brett: Predictable is safe.
Joe: Yes, that's right. That's exactly right. Luckily, as authenticity matures us, as we evolve being authentic, we become more and more sensitive. That stuff becomes more and more painful, where we're naturally kicked out of those cycles because we just can't handle them anymore, because they're just too painful.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.com
Resources:
Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations, https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/
If you look at all the bad habits that you’ve been trying to stop for a decade they all have one thing in common: They are all things you’re telling yourself you SHOULD stop doing. What if thinking you “should” is what keeps you stuck? And what if getting in touch with your wants, in a deep way, is the quickest way to get you unstuck?
"The want is that very simple impulse that is moving us, that moves us to have a closer relationship with our loved ones. It is a constant pull that leads us all the way down the developmental line. If we allow it, it will take us all the way to freedom."
If you look at all of the bad habits you have been trying to stop for a decade, you will find they all have one thing in common. They are all things you are telling yourself you should stop doing. The same is likely true for the things you tell yourself you should be doing more of, finishing a project, going to the gym, calling your mom.
What if thinking you should is what keeps you stuck? What if getting in touch with your wants in a deep way is the quickest way to get unstuck? Let's get to the bottom of this.
Brett: Joe, I would think this is pretty obvious, but you usually have a unique definition of things. What exactly do you mean by should?
Joe: Should is really a mechanism of shame. It is. There's a saying that says that shame is the locks that keep the chains of bad habits in place. Should is like a really bad management technique. Energetically, it's oppressive. Intellectually, it's control-based. Emotionally, it's rigidity and neurologically, it's a threat. If you say to somebody, "You should really do that," there is a threat in that.
What's interesting is, that same energy really doesn't happen in certain cultures. When you see, particularly, more indigenous cultures that I've been a part of and seeing that whole should telling people thing just doesn't happen, at least energetically, it doesn't happen. When I mean energetically, I don't mean energetically in a spiritual new age way. I just literally mean the energy in which you are talking to the person.
That's what I think it is. You're right. They are the things that keep your bad habits in place. Shoulds are just really ineffective. I'll tell you the story where I learned this. I was like 26 years old and I decided I was going to be brutally honest with myself. I wrote down a list of everything about myself that I didn't want to admit to myself. Then I folded it away and I put it away and I found it like six months, maybe a year later. I went through the list and I was like, "How many of these things have changed?" Remarkably, most of them had. I was like, "Wow, that's amazing. I did nothing and they just changed," just the recognition of them changed, awareness changed them.
Then I looked through all the ones that hadn't changed and to a tee, each single one of them had a very heavy should attached to it. That's when I started to realize that this way of managing ourselves by telling ourselves we should do things is just really ineffective.
Brett: To keep it simple around the definition of should, we're talking about the moment that we tell ourselves that we should do something.
Joe: Well-- the voice in the head will tell you that you should do something and that's the most obvious thing, but there's also an energetic should that happens. It's almost a muscular response or a neurological response to something and it doesn't always have to have the verbal, "You should do this." You could just reach for the double flourless chocolate cake and you'll just feel that "er" inside of you and that is just a nonverbal should. I think it's really important to see it as both.
Brett: What's wrong with controlling ourselves in this way? If these shoulds are pointing us towards the things that we want or don't want to be doing, what's causing that to get in the way?
Joe: It's because you've put an extra layer on it. If you're just in the wants, it's an amazing fluid thing. Then when it gets into the shoulds, it creates the threat, like I said and a rigidity. As an example, if I try to control a two-year-old and I have that energy of like "rah", “You will do this, you should do this”. There's one of two responses that happen in any human. If I did it to you right now, "Hey, you should speak differently on this podcast." It immediately creates one of two things in you. Let's do it for the audience here. "You should be listening to this podcast better. You are not paying close enough attention."
If I'm treating you like that, there's one of two responses. One of those responses is going to be rebellion. There's just something innate that's like "er". No response. That's not a really effective way to create anything. It's just creating no’s. The other thing that it does is you're like, "Oh, you're right, I should." It's this submission. It's not surrender. It's submission. It's like, "I am weak and I will just do what you say." Then you've got a whole bunch of disempowered people and that doesn't really help much either. Especially if you're in a company, you want a company full of empowered people or you want a community full of empowered people, or you want yourself to feel empowered.
Every time you're using the should, what's happening is that you are either creating your own internal rebellion, which is why you haven't done the things you've been telling yourself you should do for decades, because you're rebelling against it. Or you're creating a disempowered situation inside yourself. You're creating more of a victim mentality to this voice in your head that's being abusive.
Brett: Interesting. What I notice about myself is, that when I think about not telling myself what I should do or shouldn't do anymore, there becomes this fear that I'll just become lazy or some couch potato and I just won't do the things that I should do as I use that word.
Joe: [chuckles] Totally, exactly.
Brett: What's your response to that? What happens if we stop doing the should, if we stop setting out a path for what we want from ourselves from a perspective of being conscious of the risks and the threats?
Joe: Great questions. This is that inherent goodness thing that we've spoken about before, which is basically-- the idea is that you are a lazy slob, piece of shit, just going to pick your ass and live off of other people unless you tell yourself you should do something. You know what I mean? Could you imagine if you thought about somebody else that way? Unless I tell Joe that he should do a podcast, he's just never going to fricking do it. I got to tell him he should do it. It's a nonsensical thing to really think like, "Here I am doing this podcast. Nobody told me I should do it. I wanted to do it."
If you think about kids from zero to eight years old, there's no internal should. They're doing all sorts, they're developing crazy amounts compared to any other time in life. They're learning all sorts of things. It's all just because they're following their wants. On one level, that's a really important thing to note. On the other hand, you actually may become a couch potato for a while, which sounds a little weird. The thing is, if you have been under threat for an extended period of time, there's going to be a need to relax. There's going to be a need to recover. If you're going cold turkey on your shoulds, you might actually just need to slow down for a bit. It's not going to be a couch potato.
The couch potato thing happens when you burn out and then you tell yourself you shouldn't be burning out. You should stop playing video games. You should stop laying on the couch. You should stop. You should stop. You should stop. Then you really will go into full couch potato mode. If the natural burnout happens with the should, then it looks like depression. There might be a time where you need some more rest, where you need to recover. You see this happen in schools all the time, when there's this thing called unlearning or un-schooling or something like that, where kids are taken out of the school that have burnt out. They take like five or six months and do very little. Then all of a sudden, they learn three or four times as quickly as they were in school. There's lots of studies on this.
You're basically saying, "If I don't put myself under threat of a should, if I don't tell myself that I'm bad if I don't, then I won't." It's just not my experience at all. My experience is that the people who are most generative in their life are people who want to do shit, not who feel like they should do.
Brett: It sounds like it takes time to shift paradigms of thinking. This reminds me a little bit of a thought experiment--
Joe: Hold on a second. That may be true. That may not be true. Don't assume that one though, at least for people listening. For me, turning off the shoulds in the voice in my head was very quick. It didn't take a tremendous amount of time. Once I really just understood, "Oh, this shit doesn't work." If you know that you have a screw gun and every time you use the screw gun it strips screws, you're pretty much not going to use that screw gun. It's not going to take a lot of time to figure that out. If you start telling yourself you should stop using shoulds, it could take years.
Brett: That makes sense. This reminds me of the thought experiment of having the voice in your head be a roommate. If you were to go to talk to somebody like a roommate or a friend and they were the person that's just going to tell you what you should do, versus the kind of person that helps you find what you want, then you might either stop going to that person, because it doesn't feel like you're really getting helped, or you might become dependent on them telling what you should do.
Joe: Most humans would just move out. Some of us are engineered or programmed to give up our own empowerment for a person like that. That's right. Most of us who had a boss who spoke to us like that should voice in our head, we would quit or we would be miserable. If that “should voice” in your head is really strong and really loud, there is a strong case that you're miserable, whether you see it or not.
Brett: As we release ourselves from the oppression of these shoulds and we start listening to what we want and trusting that our wants are inherently good and healthy for us-- let's get into the wants side of this then. How would you define wants?
Joe: The want is just that impulse that moves through you, that animates your actions. That is what the want is. The should is just this egoic layer on top of it that slows the whole thing down. Let me explain. You're sitting and you think to yourself, "I should exercise." What's actually happening is there's an impulse and a want to exercise and it shows up. Instead of just like, "Oh, cool," and doing 10 jumping jacks, you say to yourself, "I should go to the gym." Then that just destroys your chances of actually working out or at least very much lowers your chances of working out.
The want is just that very simple impulse that's moving us, that moves that eight-year-old, that five-year-old, that three-year-old. It moves the toddler to walk better. It moves the crawler to toddle. It moves us to speak. It moves us to have a closer relationship with our loved ones. It is a constant pull that leads us all the way down the developmental line. If we allow it, it'll take us all the way to awakenings and freedom.
Brett: What if I'm listening to my want and my want is to have a big piece of chocolate cake?
Joe: That's a really good question. There's one other piece that I think is really important to explain. The thing is that wants are somatically expansive. They're intellectually empowering. The want is very different, if you attach to it or if you don't attach to it. If you attach to, let’s say, having that girlfriend Jennifer, then you're in craving, which is different than want. The want is just that impulse. It's just that empowering expansive impulse. If you look at the cake and you're in that empowering expansive place, that's very different, than the way most people want a cake, what they think is wanting a cake, which either this struggle, "I want it, but I don't want it. I want it. I don't want it. I want it. I don't want it." That's not a clean want.
There's still some refinement that needs to go there or there's just that unconscious shoving the cake in their mouth and calling it a want. The want is something that feels very expansive. If you look at something like a chocolate cake and it feels very expansive to sit and eat that thing, then yes, follow the want. Because the thing about the wants in general is that you have to follow them to deepen into them. What that means is you want to follow the chocolate cake because you want to have this sense of pleasure. Great, have the sense of pleasure. Then you start finding out what the deeper sense pleasures are.
You follow that want home and you find out it has seven more beautiful siblings. If the want is clean, it doesn't matter if it's a short-term or a long-term-- healthy in your mind and your superego, it's far more about allowing that movement, so you can find the next step. You can't want to run unless you've wanted to learn how to walk. You have to actually get to the walking point to have an effective next level of want. That's how it works is that the wants move us. A toddler, they just want to walk and walk well. Maybe as a toddler, you want to run, but then you can want to play baseball and then you can want to play basketball and then you can want to play basketball really, really well.
It's the same thing with our wants. When we start really getting in touch with our wants, then they really transform. For example, the want is, “I want a million dollars” and there's some shame with that and so it's not a clear impulse. Then we're like, "What is that clear impulse?" It's like, "Oh, I want to be empowered."
Brett: That sounds very relevant to a career path as well. I heard a story recently from a friend who's a lawyer. Halfway through their first semester, they were like, "Okay, I'm not going to do this. I don't want to be a lawyer. This sucks." The experience was they were like, "These are all the things that I have to do to get to where this path is supposed to put me and it doesn't look fun at all." This person described that they simply stopped caring about what they were supposed to be doing and they started paying attention to what they actually wanted. They were like, "Actually, there's all things that I want to be doing that I could do if I was enabled with this law degree."
They started just making it theirs. They took all the classes they wanted, that nobody else was taking and ended up on some trends that they were ahead of their game on or ahead of the trend on as a result of following the way they wanted to be a lawyer and they ended up really loving their career.
Joe: That's exactly right. If you're doing your shoulds and you're basically following rigidity, you're following a tightness and you're going to have that kind of tight life. You're going to have a very rigid life. If you're following your wants, your life becomes much more expansive.
Brett: I liked what you had been saying about craving as well. It sounds like craving is distinct from wants. Craving is a want that you don't want. It feels like a want, but you really don't want it.
Joe: [laughs] Yes, there's a thing about the want. If you just take the want viscerally and you don't try to get there, you don't try to get to the end, if you just take the want viscerally, you can feel it. Let's do this for a second. If you close your eyes and you feel a really deep want inside of you, you have a deep one, not a superficial one, but a very deep one, maybe a want for a deeper form of intimacy or a want for a more expansive consciousness, or a want for more love in your life. You feel that want and you take it in and you don't worry about whether you can get it or not. You don't even think about how to get it. You just feel what it is to want.
Wanting is just a feeling like anger or sadness. Just allow that feeling in your system without trying to get to the goal. That experience is really pleasant. It's really quite lovely. To me, the way it works in my system is, it is one of the closest feelings to love, to allow a desire deeply inside of you. I think it's why so many of the the Sufi poets, they talk about desire in this way that they just love desire. This longing-- because that longing is so close to love. It's so close to that expansive acceptance of everything. That's what wanting is. “Now I got to get it. How do I get it? Why can't I get it?” That's craving and that's painful as shit.
Brett: This reminds me of a lot of different spiritual traditions that tell us, that craving is a hindrance to freedom. For example, Buddhism's principle of non-attachment or Christianity's warnings about the desires of the flesh. Is that what they mean?
Joe: There's those spiritual traditions and then there's the tantric spiritual traditions. People think that they're at odds, but they're really not at odds at all. What's happening there is that people have been beaten out of their wants and so they start turning cravings into an excuse not to want to not allow themselves to want anymore. If you're really deeply closely looking into your own personal experience, the craving is the thing that they're talking about and the wanting, the desire that the Sufis are talking about, the tantric people are talking about, is, there are two different things that are happening inside of your system.
Brett: It's interesting. The exercise that we just did about the wanting-- for myself, I was thinking about having a healthy body and being fit and having strength. In feeling the wanting, I was imagining moving my body and having range of motion, flexibility and strength. The moment I started trying to figure out how I was going to get there, then all of a sudden it turned into "Oh, but I'd have to work out." Suddenly, the working out feels like a chore. The actual wanting of being healthy, the way that I was imagining that was actually working out, was the equivalent of moving and using my body.
Joe: Exactly. If you just stick with that as a daily practice, how do I want to be in my body right now? Thirty minutes of how do I want to be in my body right now would get you exactly where you want to be in your body. How much more appealing is that? I have to work out today or, “How do I want to be in my body for 30 minutes?” It seems like it's almost no different and it's like worlds and worlds apart.
Brett: Let's get this into the context of business and achievement. A tremendous amount of successful executives are deeply attached to winning and succeeding and it seems to be working well for them in many regards. How would you factor that into this?
Joe: There's people who tell themselves they should do stuff. Apparently they're pretty successful at it or they're deeply attached. They have a deep craving and they're successful at getting their cravings met. For me, it's pretty simple. There is the intention which is critical. I'm not suggesting to drop all intention in life. We have our intention, we have that want, we have the impulse and that's a really, really important thing. It gives us a north star. It gives us a heading that we move down. To hold that intention is absolutely completely important to getting stuff done in the world of accomplishing stuff in the world.
Being attached to succeeding is absolutely a fine way to succeed. It's not the most efficient way to succeed. It is not the most enjoyable way to succeed, but it is absolutely a fine way to succeed. You can really, really get attached to something. You can work at it and you can get there. In fact, it's really important to have some of that if you're going to get anywhere in life and that's the intention. You can have that intention without that craving, without that deep attachment. If you don't have it, you're lucky to get anywhere. That intention is really quite important.
If you're going to put attachment on top of that intention, on top of that want, then you are dragging. Then you are like throwing an anchor out and sailing across the ocean with your anchor out. It is not going to be the most effective. The real thing is that intention, like, "What is the context of it? What's the way that you make it most enjoyable?
Let me give you an example. If I look at every single CEO that I know who has been very, very successful, their intention wasn't to make money. They weren't attached to making money. What they were attached to was being the best or beating their competition, or reducing carbon in the world, or being the best at customer service. They had some intention, that was past this intention of just succeeding. Their attachment was beyond succeeding.
Because if you're just attached to the succeeding part, it's a lot more difficult. If succeeding is something that you have to do to get to the part that you're attached to, then it's easier. The attachment isn't the most efficient way to get to where you want to go, to have that strong attachment. It's definitely not the most enjoyable way to get to where you want to go, but the intention, absolutely critical. Does that make sense?
Brett: Yes, totally. It seems like having the intention versus having the attachment to success, the intention makes it easier to pivot. If your intention is to build a company or build a product that reduces carbon in the world, there are many ways to do that. You could start out with one idea of doing it and discover that there's different ways of doing it. One of them just isn't working in the market.
It seems like it would be easier to get out of the local optimum or maybe you just have to let go of what you are doing and start something new, which is just really common in any any business endeavor, this idea of pivoting and flowing with reality. If you're really attached to the particular success, then you might be more resistant to make changes, that seem in the short-term to lead away from your goal of success.
Joe: That's right. You have your intention out there. That's where you know which way you're going. We'll call that like the goal or the want. That intention is what's moving you in the direction. Then you can have different attitudes towards that goal, towards that want. The attitude could become a should, the attitude could be, "I'm scared of getting to the goal. I'm angry that I don't haven't gotten to the goal. I have absolute faith that I will be there." All of those ways are different attitudes towards having that goal.
You're not going to get there without the goal. The most efficient attitude to get to the goal is to be in the want of it, not the should of it. It is to be in the enjoyment of it, not the rigidity of it. That's the more efficient way to get there and to be beyond the goal itself. It's that the goal of succeeding is really just a necessary step to get to your deeper goal.
Brett: Give me some more examples of holding an intention without the should.
Joe: You're running a company and you have a revenue goal of $100 million. You can hold that as, "I should get to $100 million". You can hold that goal as, "I want to get to $100 million." You can hold that goal as, "I will get to $100 million." You can hold that goal as, "I can't wait until I get to $100 million." The way you hold that goal is going to affect how much energy you have. It's going to affect how rigid you are in it. It's going to affect your ability to be flexible.
Then the second level of it is choosing that goal as far as whether you're going to make that the easy goal or the long-term goal. Are you saying, "I want to get a $100 million, just to get a $100 million?" Are you saying, "I want to get a $100 million, so that I can build a spaceship to get to Mars"? Are you saying, "I want to get a $100 million, so I can beat the competition"? All of those things are important. It's not the intention or the goal. It is how you approach the goal, how you attach to the goal, the relationship you have with the goal. That's the important piece for efficiency and enjoyment.
Brett: Feeling like you should be doing this prescriptive path towards the goal is controlling yourself with threat, essentially.
Joe: Correct, that's right. It could work short-term, but it's definitely not going to work long-term.
Brett: What makes it that we don't see the inefficiency of our shoulds when we're in them? If it is the case that everything that we don't do in life that we want to do and everything that we do do that we want to stop doing is all locked in place by these shoulds, what makes it so opaque to us?
Joe: It's a shame situation. The way that you can look at it is even if you take it up a level for a second, what's the important thing about having the intention? What's the important thing about having the goal? It tells you what questions to ask. If I say to you, "You need to start a company and that company needs to sell widgets to 10 people," then you're going to ask questions to get to that goal. But if I say, "You need to sell widgets to a hundred million people, you're going to ask different questions." You're going to say, "Maybe I have to think about venture capital. Maybe I have to think about private equity. Maybe I have to think about distribution at that scale," that you're not going to have to think about it if you're selling 10 widgets.
The goal is important, because it very, very much helps us determine what questions to ask. That's why goals are so important, but what most people do is they put some shame into those goals, tell them they should reach the goals, not that they want to, not that they can, but that they should reach the goals and then all of a sudden those goals become a burden. They become like, "Oh, if I don't do that, I'm bad." That's what makes it hard for us to see the shoulds is, that it makes us think that we're bad. The should makes us think that we're bad and if we think that we're bad, it's very hard to see what actually motivates us.
It's the same thing like in wars. If two countries are warring with each other and that whole war has to depend on people thinking the other side is bad. If people look up and say, "You know what, they're just people. We're just people. We're just both trying to get along," the war's going to stop. To have that internal war of should means that you have to think you're bad and that's what makes it so hard to see through the should, to see through the war.
What's really strange about it is, that you can see it from a manager 10 miles away. You're sitting there and you see a manager like "You should, you should, you should." You're like, "Oh my God, that's not going to work." That's horribly ineffective. There's been hundreds of management books saying, "Don't do that because it doesn't fricking work," and psychological studies, but we'll do it to ourselves all fricking day long. We will recognize it outside, but we won't recognize it inside.
Brett: It's as if the moment we say we should be doing something, the structure of that should is to flatten all of our wants to go do that one thing, because we've prioritized it. If we are routinely doing that thing where we're suppressing our wants to do the thing we should do, then we can't hear or feel our wants anymore.
Joe: That's right. The wants, for many of us, are very scary. It's a very scary thing to have a want, because we were taught at a young age not to have wants. We don't have that want because mom won't be happy. You don't have that want because you won't be codependent with that. You don't have that want because blah, blah, blah. A lot of people are told to disassociate from their wants. They're not taught that their wants are amazingly beautiful things, that can guide them in their entire life.
Brett: Let's talk more about that. What makes wanting so vilified in our society?
Joe: My experience is, that there's a pain that we feel from being rejected in our wants. It's like a deep level of rejection. We're all kind of school kids that got deeply rejected when we asked someone out on a date and so we're hesitant to do it again. Because our wants are this deeply intimate thing, this very vulnerable thing. They are at the core of us. If they've been rejected, we don't want to feel that rejection again. I think that's the internal process.
Externally, if you have a whole bunch of people who are codependent or a whole bunch of people, who were told that they were selfish as kids, which really, if you're told that you were selfish as a kid, that really just means that you weren't doing what your mom and dad wanted you to do. If you were told that, then having somebody own their wants is very uncomfortable for you.
There's this external world that is uncomfortable with people owning their wants. There's also this external world of people who just can't wait for that person to be owning their wants some more. It's like rock and roll. Back in the day, rock and roll was there. There's these people who shut up and they're like, "I'm going to get whatever I want. I want to do this and do that." There was this group of people were like, "Yes." There was a group of people like, "Devil." That's how it works when you're really owning your wants, especially the earlier wants. The later wants start to refine and start to become more and more beautiful. Then it's a little bit less likely to happen.
We all start with the early wants and to own them gets a certain level of rejection, because other people would have to feel their own wants. The thing about wants in general is that it's our human nature to want. You can play this game with friends and after every sentence, just say what it is that you wanted to get out of that sentence. You will find a want in every single sentence that you speak. Right now, I want to have you guys understand what I'm saying. Right now, I want you to taste the deep pleasure of wanting. There's always this conscious want behind almost every sentence we have, it’s such a part of our human nature. We cannot get away from it. All we can do is own it or we can sublimate it. Should is just a way of sublimating it, which is why it doesn't work as effectively.
Brett: I'm going to say something right now because I want to participate in this podcast and feel relevant.
Joe: [laughs] I want to respond so that you know that I love you and I care for you.
Brett: I want to end the pregnant pause. [both laugh] A lot of what you were saying about the societal aspect is that it's uncomfortable for people to feel their wants. Part of what it is, is people have a problem seeing other people want what they want, because that makes them feel the pain of their own wants. The pain of our own wants seems to be linked to something we've discussed on some other episodes, the consequences of wanting, the potential consequence. If I want something, I might not get it, I might have to feel disappointment. I might be judged. I might break this cozy structure of this job that I'm in or this relationship that I'm in, because my wants feel incongruent with that.
Joe: The interesting thing about that in general is, that not getting our wants met is not actually as scary as we want or pop psychology would say that it is, because we all have a dozen wants that we haven't had met. It doesn't devastate us all the time. How many people listening to this podcast want to have $10 million more in the bank? it hasn't happened. Didn't devastate any of us. I think it's the exposure, the vulnerability of showing your want and having it rejected. That's the deeper scare.
Brett: Admitting that you want $10 million in the bank and people judging you for that, greedy.
Joe: Exactly. The amazing thing is when you totally own a want, oftentimes the want goes away almost immediately. I really want $10 million in the bank. If you fully feel that all the way and you're just like, "Oh, yes, $10 million," just feel that want. Oftentimes, it just starts shifting. It's just like, "Oh, what I want is security." Then it's like, "Oh, what I really want is to feel empowered in every situation." If you don't allow yourself to have the want, it can't move through you. It's just like, if you don't allow yourself to get angry, it can't move through you. If you don't allow yourself to get sad, it can't move through you. It's just another emotion that needs to move through you and is so pleasant when it does.
Brett: It sounds like on one level, you're saying that it is an impulse and on another level, you're saying it's an emotion. Can you get into that distinction a little bit more?
Joe: That's a great question. Let me feel inside for a moment and really see what the distinction is there. It seems like there's this impulse that moves. The way it's working in my system is, there's this impulse to move, to say these words, to be in front of my computer right now, to answer your question. There's this natural impulse. If that impulse meets any friction, then this emotional experience of wanting starts to occur. As this emotional experience of wanting starts to occur, that becomes the feeling. That's the feeling that's there.
If I fully feel the feeling, the friction starts to fade. There's the impulse side of the wanting and then there's also the emotional side of the wanting. It's what distinguishes, “I'm just going to walk to the bathroom right now” and there's no experience of wanting in that process, because there's no friction met. As soon as that impulse meets any level of friction, then there's this experience of wanting. If you fully feel that experience, it turns deeply into a loving expansive experience and then that friction starts to go away.
Brett: I want to hear one more story from you, a personal story relevant to how you arrived at all of this.
Joe: I'd be happy to share a story, Brett. It's a story of shoulds and wants. When I was earlier in my venture capital career, I had this idea that I really should be making money. It was foreign to me because it wasn't something that was really ever important to me before. It was a combination of a feeling of indebtedness to the investors and also doing a good job and being valuable, but the shoulds started appearing in my life at that point.
Then I was sitting in a hammock and I read this news at some point. I remember the time specifically. I read this news, that this company that was formed with almost no money sold for multi billions of dollars and it felt like just an absolute kick in my stomach, just like a whack in my stomach. I stopped and I went, "Oh, where did I feel that for the first time?" I traced it back, not intellectually, but like my entire body traced back that feeling to the first time I felt it. The first time I felt it was trying to please my father as a kid and it was like, "Oh," and it was not pleasable at that time. To please him, at least from my point of view, wasn't possible.
I saw that this whole money making activity had nothing to do with actually making money and the should behind it had nothing to do with it. It was this very early should that I had of I should be pleasing my father. That was a very ingrained should. It was at that moment that I was like, "Okay, hold on a second. This doesn't have anything to do with money and it's a should. What do I want? What I really want to do here?"
What I realized is, I just wanted to create great cultures for people. I want it to be a part of creating great cultures for people to work in. That changed everything. It changed my approach. It changed my ability to be effective. It just changed everything as soon as I just moved from the should that was driven by an early feeling to a want, which was very present and it was just very immediate. All of a sudden, everything started to open up and flourish in my life in a new way.
Brett: Wow, thank you. How do you want to end this?
Joe: I want to express a deep gratitude for everybody who's listening, who's dedicated to understanding themselves, who honors me by choosing to be here as part of this experience. My deepest want is a very deep bow to everybody who's listening and to say that I wouldn't be here without people who were bowing to me. I am grateful to be bowing to you. My deep hope is, that you will bow to the people who appear before you.
Brett: Joe, thank you for taking the time to help all of us build our culture internally and in our companies.
Joe: Thanks for doing the work, man.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.com
We often try to figure out solutions to our problems intellectually. But modern neuroscience tells us that, if you removed the emotional centers of your brain, you would be unable to make even the simplest decision regardless of how much intellect you had. What if there were emotional practices you could do to clarify every decision? What if emotions were the key to finding whole new kinds of solutions?
"The reason that somebody gets angry at somebody else is because they haven't gotten angry by themselves. It takes a while to build that kind of anger, so go release your anger and then talk to the person. Go get really, really scared and then talk to your boss about the raise that you want. You have the emotional experience and then go and take the action."
Brett: Joe, many of us are taught to manage our feelings and to be logical, especially when it comes to important or complex matters. What makes feelings so important?
Joe: That is a great question. I think it was a 2012 book called Descartes' Error, a neuroscientists talks about what happens to people if they lose the emotional center of their brain. It's a little more complex than this, but just to simplify it, if I took the emotional center of your brain out, you would cease to make decisions. It would take you half an hour to decide what color pen to use. It would take you four hours to decide where to have lunch.
Your IQ would maintain the same. In fact, in the book, there's somebody whose IQ remains the same, very high level IQ, so incredibly intelligent, but their business falls apart. Their marriage falls apart. Everything falls apart because they can't make decisions. What it indicates to us is that we are thinking we're making rational decisions, but there's really no such thing. There's only emotional decisions.
You can think about this in terms of your own life. Really simply, just think about how many decisions of your life were made because you didn't want to feel like a failure or how many decisions were made so that you could feel loved. How many decisions were made so that you could feel like you were seen by your friends and how many decisions were made so that you wouldn't be rejected?
It's like tremendous amounts, huge swaths of our decision making, you can immediately see, are very emotional. The intellect is really good at trying to figure out how to get to an end, but the end that you're trying to get to is always an emotional end. Clarity doesn't come from being logical, because it doesn't work. You can't do it in your decision making. It comes from being okay with whatever emotional state arises.
If you all of a sudden are completely excited to deal with sadness and you're completely excited to deal with joy and you're completely excited to deal with anger. It's not even deal with it, it's like you get to live that, then all of a sudden, you have incredibly clear decision making. That's why it's important. If you're in those thoughts that are recursive and they're just coming in over and over and over and over again, guaranteed there's an emotional reality, that if you felt it, it would clear up.
Brett: Can you give me an example of what you're talking about?
Joe: Yes, absolutely. For instance, I work with a lot of married couples and what happens in a lot of marriages is that people stop being true to themselves because they're scared of some result that'll happen if they do and eventually the marriage becomes not palatable because they're not themselves in the marriage. What I tell people in that situation is, hey, go mourn the heck out of your marriage. Your marriage is over. Just assume it and go more in the heck out of it, like feel all the grief of being left, feel all the grief of 20 years down the tubes, feel all the grief that your kids are going to not have two parents, like go through all of that stuff.
At the end of that, then let's find out what you need to do. What they do is they're basically living through the result that they don't want to feel so that they can act with clarity. It's that feeling of loss that they don't want to deal with and since they don't want to deal with it, they're not speaking their truth and therefore, they're not in a marriage that accepts their truth. Eighty percent of the time, they then speak their truth and the other person is like, great. Or they're like, what the hell and then three months later, they're like, great. Twenty percent of the time their partners, like, no, that's not what I want.
They leave and they break up, but it's definitely a much higher chance of success, if somebody has already felt the thing they're trying to avoid because then their actions don't come from trying to avoid the feeling, their actions come from what they want. This is something that you learn in even like The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, the samurai did this, I think it was the Sufis who did this-- many traditions have done this thing, where they basically visualize their own death to get over the fear of death. They've lived that fear so many times that they no longer fear death. It's confronting the emotional reality that you don't want to handle, that you don't want to feel and then immediately your decision making can clear up.
Brett: Recognizing that there is life on the other side of that emotion.
Joe: Yes, exactly, or that emotion is a deep friend. There's no emotion I've run into that hasn't been a benefit to me.
Brett: What do you mean by feeling these emotions? If something hasn't happened yet, for example, how do you actually feel the emotion associated with it to mourn the loss?
Joe: The first thing you need to do is just recognize that there's always an emotional movement in your body, it is constant. There's no moment of consciousness where there isn't an emotional reality happening. We might not want to admit it. We might've been taught at a young age not to feel it, but it's constantly occurring and it's very muscular in nature. You can really feel it through constriction of muscles.
If somebody has been told never to get angry, their body contorts. I can literally look at somebody and recognize if there's repressed anger. You can recognize and I'm not the only one there's tons of people who can. You can recognize who had the critical parent, who was beaten, who's holding back their authenticity all based on muscular structure. The muscles and the emotions are tightly, tightly correlated. That's the most important thing to know that it's constantly happening and that there's a muscular component to it.
How do you feel these emotions? You're feeling them. The question isn't how do you, the question is how do you bring your awareness into it? Oftentimes what happens is we're feeling the emotion, but we're spending a lot of energy compressing that emotion. It's making it a different version of itself.
The way I think about this is like, there's this emotionless called the emotion of anger and it's flowing like a garden hose. If you kink it one way, the anger looks like this, “No, I'm not angry.” If you kink another way, it looks like this, “That's fine”. If you're going to be a prick and if you kink another way, it sounds like this, “You son of blah, blah, blah, you goddamn blah, blah, blah.”
All of those are kinks in the garden hose. When there's no kinks in that garden house, when it's fully allowed, there's no reason to resist the anger. It sounds like the anger of a Gandhi or Martin Luther King. It's clear. It's determined. We will not put up with this. We will be equal. That's also anger, but that's anger unresisted. The trick isn't to feel it in the way that it's like, you have to go and conjure it because it's there. It's really to stop restricting it. It's really to stop holding it down.
Brett: It sounds like one of the things you were saying is that the first thing that people might feel is actually the resistance to the anger. This body tension, for example, might be the first thing you notice and be like, oh, I'm feeling a lot of tension in my body right now. Then maybe the secondary thing you might feel is like, I'm holding back this emotion.
Joe: Right. It's the resistance that's actually painful. When people are like, “I don't want to feel sadness.” There's this way in which people talk about each of the emotions and there's this common fear of each of them to let them fully ride. If I allow my anger, I will destroy people. I will hurt myself. I will hurt others. If I allow my sadness, it will go on forever and I will be enveloped in sadness for the rest of my life. If I allow fear, I will be frozen and I won't be able to act.
These are the traditional thought processes that people have about why these emotions aren't safe. The reason that they feel that way is because that's how the resistance is, when you're resisting anger, you do destroy shit. When you are resisting sadness, it does last forever. It looks like depression. When you're resisting fear, then you're anxious all the time and you are frozen. You're not doing stuff. People have confused the resistance with the emotion.
Brett: Or with the feeling of being overtaken by the feelings.
Joe: Exactly. You never are overtaken by the feelings, you're overtaken by the resistance to the feelings. If you're scared of an emotion, you are currently being overtaken by the resistance of the feeling.
Brett: Right. Because the resistance is itself a feeling. It's like a secondary feeling that loops back and then fights the first feeling, which is just a massive waste of energy.
Joe: Correct. It's really important to recognize that it is a waste of energy. It's also really important to recognize that in itself, it also isn't bad and it is there to be loved. I have a saying that says, “If you can't love the emotion, love the resistance to the emotion.” If you make the resistance the next evil thing that you have to overcome, that's another form of resistance. You are just adding a triple layer of resistance on it.
Brett: Well, what about the danger of, if you have, for example, you have anger and it's deeply resisted and you remove the first layer of resistance and you start to let the anger through, but there's still enough resistance around it, that it comes out as an attack. It can be dangerous to be overtaken by-- to let ourselves be partially overtaken by a feeling and still have it constricted in that way, right?
Joe: Yes, it absolutely can. You're playing a short game and a long game here. The short game is how do I start getting in touch with these emotions in a way that isn't destructive. Then there's a long game, which is, “If I don't do it now, then what am I going to do? Continue to constrict it for the rest of my life?” Like there's a risk involved. You have to risk a little destruction now to get to a place where the anger is clear and moves easily and is fluid and enjoyable.
There's some tricks to it. The first trick is don't believe the emotion. Don't not believe it either. It's like when you're having the emotion, the important thing is to see yourself as an actor playing the part of you having an emotional experience. An actor always knows it's not their emotion. Even if they get caught up in it for a while, they know there's some part of their consciousness that knows that the story is a story. It's not true.
It's about keeping that aspect of your awareness awake, so that you just know like, oh, this emotion is just moving through me. It's not personal. But it's also allowing that emotional experience in and that requires letting the emotion be garbly. Intellect speaks like this. It's like A plus B equals C and B equals D, therefore, A plus D equals C. That's how logic talks. The way anger talks is “ [makes sounds]...Oh, right. That's it. I got it.” That's how anger speaks.
If you believe all the garbly gobbly glue of anger, like, “That person's an asshole and that person did this to me, blah, blah, blah, blah”, then you're never going to get to that clarity. If you don't allow all that garbly glue, you also won't get to the clarity. It's this interesting thing of listening to emotions in a different way than you listen to logic. If you start repressing it and say, “Well, I know it's really not them. It's really me. I know that they're trying their best”, or blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff doesn't allow the full expression of the emotion so you don't get to the clarity.
The trick is, not to listen to the story, to see it as non-personal, to see yourself as an actor, just having it move through. It's like going to the bathroom. It's not a personal thing. It's just happening. Then the last part is to just not do it at anybody. This is the most critical thing is, don't do it at people. Most people think of anger like, don't get angry at the person. I'm speaking to that, but I'm also speaking to sadness. People get sad at people all the time, to try to create manipulation or guilt or whatever it is. I'm going to get sad at you, to make it so that you change your thing. You're never using your emotions to try to get someone else to change.
Brett: Or afraid at people.
Joe: Yes, exactly.
Brett: This isn't safe.
Joe: That's exactly it.
Brett: You were speaking to feeling these emotions coming up within us and then viewing it as we are an actor, acting out the emotion that's coming up within us. It sounded like that could apply also interpersonally. Or if our partner is coming at us with a lot of anger, recognizing like, oh, they are playing the part of their anger right now and I don't need to take everything they say personally. I could actually hold space for this to occur so that they can find their clarity behind it.
Joe: Absolutely. That's a lot easier if you are good with your anger. If you're like, “I love my anger. I can't wait for my anger to arise because every time it does, I find out some boundary that I haven't been drawing. I find out some way I haven't been being clear. I love my anger.” Then you see somebody else get angry. You're like, “Oh, I love that too.”
When somebody sees you love their anger, man, that anger changes, they're like-- it happens with me and people are like, “Goddamnit, Joe, you da, da, da”, I'm like, “Oh yes, you're angry, come on. Tell me about it.” I want to hear this. I see that you feel alone and I see that you feel rejected and I don't want that. Let me hear what's going on with you. That changes their anger. It just changes it.
Brett: You were speaking to the short and the long game that's being played. I think a lot of fear of letting our emotions fly is that we'll become worthless or unproductive or just the last straw will happen if we're deep in a relationship. We're just like, “Oh, man, one more outburst, then they're just done with me. I've got to suppress this.” What happens if we just let our emotions fly all the time?
Joe: Again, just not at people, to put your emotion at somebody, to try to get them to change with your emotions subconsciously or consciously, it's emotional abuse. It's not healthy for them. If it's happening to you, draw a boundary and say, “I don't want that. I'm happy to listen to your emotions if I give you permission, but otherwise, I don't want the emotion at me.”
I just say, don't do that without permission. If you are getting your emotions out by yourself or with a close friend and you're doing it, then they're not going to leak. The reason that somebody gets angry at somebody else's because they haven't gotten angry by themselves. It takes them a while to build that anger. There's lots of time before that, so you can release it. Go release your anger and then talk to the person. Go mourn and then talk to your wife about what you need from the relationship. Go get really, really scared and then talk to your boss about the raise that you want. Do the thing that you have the emotional experience and then go take the action.
Brett: Just feel it. How do you recognize, in the moment, when you're in this like a spin cycle and you're like, “Oh God, this da, da, da,...This person did this or whatever? What should I do here? I don't know what to do!” How do you recognize that? What's the hook to get you out of that loop to remember this and to get into the emotions.
Joe: Exactly what you said. If you are doing one of three things, you mentioned two of them. If you notice that you keep on looping on the same thought, it means there's an emotion that you're not feeling. If you are not clear about a decision you need to make, then there's emotion you're not feeling. If you are judgmental towards another person, there's an emotion you're not feeling.
Brett: Can you dig into that one a little bit more?
Joe: If I judge you for being angry, I don't want to feel out of control. Or if I judge you for being angry, it's because I don't want to feel the potential that I have to lose you, so loss. If I judge you for being uptight, it's because I don't want to feel controlled, or I don't want to feel rigid. Every time we have a judgement, it's just a way to suppress an emotion, which is what makes our decision making really screwed up because if you're judging, very different than discernment.
Discernment is just a knowing of distinction. If it's judgment, then you're not clear. You're not looking at the data clearly. You have preconceived notions of the data and then you can't make great decisions.
Brett: Or preconceived notions of intent on behalf of the other.
Joe: Correct. That's right. Then the last one, another cool trick is, whenever you see your mind in binary thinking, "I either have to buy the car or not buy the car." Instead of, "I could buy that car. I could buy that car from 10 different people. I could buy that car with different packages. I can buy that car in different colors. I could buy that car in six months." Whenever you're in that binary black or white thinking, then you know that there's some fear there that's not being felt.
Brett: Let's get into a little bit deeper. We've been talking a lot about the feeling side of this, what do you mean by figuring it out? What are some other ways that that can happen and that we can get caught in that loop?
Joe: Figuring it out at its most essential is just your intellect. It's to strategize. It's to try to solve the puzzle. It's like, "This is the outcome that I want, how do I get there?" That is the intellect and it is really good at that. That's what it means when you're figuring, when you're intellectualizing. Some people say it's in your head. Some people call it being tactical and there's some really great uses for that. It's not a bad thing. It's just a lot better when you're not avoiding an emotion using it.
Brett: It sounds like the purpose of the intellect here is to take a very narrowly framed context of assumptions and goals and then figure out the path from A to B, but then the emotions are what is creating those assumptions to begin with and the goals.
Joe: Correct and the risk profile.
Brett: Elaborate on that.
Joe: If you really, really, really don't want to lose your girlfriend, then your risk tolerance is really low. If you're like, "I could do it under certain circumstances." Then you're more likely to be yourself, right? How madly you don't want to feel the emotion really affects your risk profile.
Brett: Yes, that makes sense. We should figure some things out. Wouldn't it be silly to just shut that part of us off and never use that part of our intelligence?
Joe: Absolutely. I wouldn't want to build a bridge without the intellect. I wouldn't want to have this conversation without the intellect. I would assume that would be horrible to listen to. Intellect is a beautiful, amazing thing. It's just recognizing its incompleteness. There's Girdle's theory of mathematical incompleteness, which is basically a logical proof that all sets of logic are either incomplete or they are based on a postulate. Basically it proves logic can't be logical.
Brett: My favorite part of that is that he proved it with logic. He actually used logic to prove the incompleteness of logic and it couldn't have been done without logic.
Joe: Right. Aristotle did it earlier in a different thing, but he didn't do it with the same logic without the math. It's a beautiful thing and our postulates are emotions. That's what our postulates are in our logical way of thinking. That's why people can logically justify absolute opposite things. It's not because their rationale is good or bad. It's because they have different postulates behind the rationale.
Figuring stuff out is great and the intellect is beautiful. Even in the spiritual journey or the transformative journey, the intellect is beautiful. It's great for deconstructing itself, very good at hanging out in a way that allows you to describe what's happened. Usually after you've gone through it, right? What I notice is that it's not like, "Here's the description of it and now I go through it."
It's more like "Here's a description of it that can give me some framework that I can rest on that I don't completely understand." Then I go through it. Then maybe like a month later, I can describe it. The intellect is really good for that as well. I love the intellect. I love watching great minds at work.
Brett: At the same time, it can become the trap again too. You can have this major emotional movement or transformative experience or whatnot and then your intellect will step in and be like, "Okay, so what actually happened? Let me make sense of that." Like, "This was the childhood thing that happened to me and then that was what I felt in this meeting and then all that interacts and then this way." Then like, "Cool, now I have a model for understanding myself." Then once again, you've created this limited system that may be more useful than the previous one but then eventually will reach its limits of understanding and prediction.
Joe: That's right. My words for that are every epiphany is the innocent beginning of a rut. Every epiphany-- it’s so important to have these epiphanies, but what's really important about them is that it blows everything up. Then we reconstruct it and then a new constraint is found and we need to have that new epiphany to deconstruct or to destroy the old epiphany and the old rut.
That's how transformation works. That's how evolution works. It's a beautiful thing and yes, there comes a point in this development where you can see that every single thought that you have is both true and not true. There comes a point in development where you can't believe any one of your thoughts.
If you have emotional clarity when that development point hits, you become incredibly clear. If you don't have emotional clarity, you can use that same beauty of seeing both sides of every coin as a way to become indecisive, as a way to beat yourself up, as a way to limit yourself, as a way to continue to constrict emotions. Logic is a beautiful thing. It's just really important to know what it's good at and what it's not good at.
Brett: Right. Now, what we've been talking about has been very much about the personal development journey, but I think we could actually apply this very easily to business, for example, product iterations. Every epiphany from your product research or your market research to come up with a new direction could easily become the new rut that you find yourself spending six months in $1 million investing in.
Joe: Right. Or a government that had a great epiphany about a police force and then now that police force epiphany is a rut, that needs to be recreated and a new epiphany for is an example, right? There's a thousand examples of how the solution of yesterday is the rut of today. We villainize it and we make it bad, instead of just being like, "We need a new iteration. That's it."
Brett: Okay, maybe we don't need one president with a lot of power.
Joe: Right. Or maybe we need a financial democracy instead of a voting democracy. Thousands of new epiphanies.
Brett: Somebody argued we already have that and it's a bad thing.
Joe: Right, exactly. That's another one, right? It's like every one of our epiphanies, everything that locks us down was an epiphany at one point, was somebody's realization at one point.
The CEO of Netflix, in his first business, he claims that he made everything idiot proof and then only idiots would come and work for him. In Netflix, he keeps a certain amount of chaos, a certain amount of creativity, a certain amount of risk involved, so that people who want smart challenges, people who want to be cutting edge, who want to have more freedom, show up and work for him. That's more important than having things idiot proof for him. It's that same thought process of, what's more important is, that we're constantly iterating that we are seeing through the logic that we used and relied on.
Brett: That's a great example of how a leader's personal journey can then show up in their company, because for a CEO to get to the point where they can just say, “Hey, you know what? Let's just let some chaos happen.” They have to learn to feel that loss of control and welcome it.
Joe: This is everything, right? Let me give a really sharp example. Almost every high powered CEO I know has an issue of, A, feeling alone and B, having this deep feeling of self-reliance that they need to rely on themselves. At the bottom of that emotional slide is this deep sense of helplessness that they didn't want to feel. You don't learn to be self-reliant unless there was a point when you had this deep sense of helplessness that you didn't want to feel.
Maybe it was an alcoholic dad or maybe it was getting really poor, or whatever it was. That sense of helplessness and saying, I am not going to feel that again is what propels them into this incredible place in their life. It's also the thing that needs to be destroyed if they're going to be great leaders. They need to feel that helplessness, they need to go into that complete helplessness. I don't think it's any mistake that the CEO of Netflix had to go through the helplessness of losing a company to get to the place of allowing that feeling of helplessness all the time, because somewhere in that journey, he found out that that helplessness was just a feeling and it had an incredible intelligence behind it. It was trying to tell him something and it no longer needed to be avoided. It needed to be looked for and to be excited when it shows up.
Brett: What's an example of that happening in your life?
Joe: [laughs] I have children. Having children is like getting a deep tissue massage. If you resist, you are screwed, right? You have to constantly feel your own helplessness in your children. As an example of that, you have to feel that helplessness.
For me, I think the first journey of it was abandonment. It was feeling emotionally abandoned. I was recreating that experience over and over again until I felt it, which is a really important part of this emotional journey. I'll use that as an example, I felt, for whatever reason in my childhood, emotionally abandoned and I didn't want to feel it. I created a whole world to not feel that, but in the way I created that whole world, like everybody, I reintroduced it over and over and over again.
This is why we all have that friend who's been dating the same person six times in a row. It's not the same person as in-- it's like the same person in a different body with a different background, but wow. You just picked seven different men who all cheated on you. How did you ever do that? Right? I recreated people who would emotionally abandon me over and over again until I fell in love with the abandonment.
Once I fell in love with it, my system didn't need to recreate it. I had found homeostasis. If there's an emotion that I wasn't allowed to feel, I recreate that feeling over and over again, until I fully allow that feeling and then I don't need to recreate it. The other way to say this is the things that we are most scared of are the things that we're subtly inviting into our life. If we're most scared of feeling helpless, we will invite helplessness unconsciously into our life so that we have that opportunity too.
Brett: I've got a great example for that, growing up, I always felt I was being tightly controlled by school and society. That control made me feel helpless and I just didn't want to feel helpless anymore. I developed exactly what you described, that self-reliance complex and that self-reliance complex then made me feel like I had to be in control of everything that I was doing and made it difficult sometimes to cooperate or collaborate on something that I wasn't going to have the full reins over, which wouldn't often lead me to feel alone and helpless.
Joe: That's right. That's exactly, beautiful. That's exactly how it works. Then once we're cool helplessness, then all of a sudden, we don't recreate the conditions, because our body has just found that homeostasis. It's like, okay, I'm back to balance.
Brett: I think addiction has a lot to do with that as well, that feeling of avoiding helplessness, feeling like you can control something. For example, a gambling addiction, a lot of what I've heard about slot machine addiction is, it's not necessarily that those addicted think that they're going to be winning any money. They know they're not. They know the math. They're not stupid, but the feeling of just hitting the buttons and experiencing the spin occur, they're just in a very tight loop system, where the rules are almost like they're designed to look like they're almost figure outable, but they're not.
Joe: I think there's definitely a lot of emotional avoidance in addiction. Oftentimes it's shame. I've heard a saying that says shame is the locks of the chains of bad habits. Shame seems to be a big part of an addiction cycle and there's others as well, but definitely, there's a big emotional component to addiction cycles. There's also some physical and neurological components as well, but emotional avoidance is a huge part of it. If you could just lift the shame out of people, then most of the addictions would fall away.
Brett: As we move through our lives and start feeling more and more of these emotions that we've been repressing, what does that development look like?
Joe: Emotional development looks pretty clearly the same way for different people, but the starting points are different. The earliest starting point that you can get to is just recognizing the emotions you have. It's just knowing that you are constantly in an emotional state as long as you're conscious. People think, some of them, especially if there's been more emotional abuse or emotional repression in the home, will have a very specific experience of not being able to feel their emotions.
This is similar to somebody who's been physically abused. If you have been physically abused and I put a quarter in your hand or a key in your hand, you won't actually know which one you're holding, because you've learned to cut off your sensations of your body. Emotionally, you might also have learned how to cut off this sensation. The first thing is to feel that sensation and that is just to identify that the emotional experience is happening at every given moment, because the way that we feel right now is slightly different than the way we feel right now, which is slightly different than the way we feel right now.
Identifying those emotions is a really good thing and it's a great epiphany. It will also become a rut later on, but it's a really great first stage. Then the second stage is an expression of that emotion. To really allow those emotions to be expressed through the body, through words, in a way that is not at anybody. It's just having that full expression of emotion.
Then that moves into an emotional inquiry, which is how does it feel in your body? What color is it and where is it in my body and how dense is it? It's a literal-- what is the physicality of my emotions? Having a deep inquiry into that and then also having a deep inquiry of when I relate to my emotions differently, how do they work? When I'm angry at my emotions, what does that do? When I'm in love with my emotions, what does that do? When I am trying to get rid of my emotions, what does that do? When I am tickling my emotions, what does that do?
You're literally playing with different relationships you can have with your emotions. Then there comes this place where you're just deeply in love with your emotions and then emotions become very fluid. It becomes just like this beautiful flow of life. It's so exciting and so pleasurable to feel your emotional fluidity. It allows for just very crisp decision-making and it allows for very decisive action to have that emotional flow.
To give you a great example of this epiphany rut thing, I did not have a lot of emotional awareness when I started this work at all in my 20's and I got into this point where I realized, “Oh, I'm having emotions.” One day, I don't know, a decade later, or something I was saying to somebody, I'm like, “I'm feeling angry right now”. They said, “No, you're not.” I said, “Excuse me?” The person replied, “You're naming an emotion, so you don't have to feel it.” They were so right. I was like, son of a gun. Shit, I've named it so I don't have to feel it.
The thing that was once freeing, to be able to see it and name it, had become the new constraint. Then I realized, oh, the feeling of it is a completely different thing. When you feel the emotion, it's all about letting the body just move. It's like dancing without being self-conscious. It's just your emotions know how to move your body. Your emotions know what to do. If they don't fake it and they'll figure it out.
Don't judge them. Don't tell them how they're supposed to look. That's not crying. That's not fear. So many people who aren't good at crying when I see them cry for the first time, they think they're like that can't be real tears because it doesn't feel like that one time I cried, but there's 20 different ways of crying. You can cry of joy, you can cry of sadness, you can cry of grief, you can cry in a way like when you're yawning. There's so many different ways that sadness expresses and it's not your job to judge them. It's your job to just watch it like you would watch the Grand Canyon.
Brett: Right. It seems each stage here is a meta awareness, a new level of meta awareness around our emotions. The first level being, just recognizing that there is emotions here and that we are not just a logical machine figuring things out and that there is always an emotional context that exists for us. Then we get deeper into that and we start to be in the emotional context, not just recognizing that one's there, but we flow in it and with it.
Then another level seems to be the meta awareness around the emotion being wow, okay, as I'm letting this anger move through me, I'm actually clarifying my boundary. Or as I'm letting the sadness move through me, I'm grieving the loss of something tangible, or even just an idea. That this whole process of letting these emotions move through us is actually changing the assumptions, goals and the context and the risk profile of all of our future logical thoughts.
Joe: Exactly. We are limited. Everybody talks about limited thoughts but in reality, the limited thoughts have a deep correlation with the way we limit our emotional reality.
Brett: It's almost as though the thoughts are just the tip of the emotional iceberg. They are actually a part of the emotions. They are emotions that are most finally, the part of the emotion that is working in the finest detail.
Joe: It depends on the perspective, which is the tip of the iceberg and which is the underside of the iceberg. What I do know is that they are in an intricate dance and when one side isn't working, the other side definitely helps.
Brett: It sounds like what you've been saying all along is that the intellect is very useful and we do want to use it to figure stuff out, but first we want to get our emotional context right and allow our emotions to shift us into the place that is most aligned with our reality in our moment. Then in that space, figure stuff out.
Joe: I wouldn't use the word right, but generally, directionally, that feels very right. [laughs] I would say it's when your emotions are blocked or when you're trying to deeply avoid an emotion, then your decision making can't be clear. It's just as simple as that. Feel the emotion whenever you can. That allows for clarity and it doesn't need to be any more complicated than that and see it as a process that maybe at the beginning, when you realize that you're not clear on something and there's emotion involved, it's going to take a while to get through it.
Pretty soon as you get older in the journey, then the emotions flow so quickly. The recognition of it can just make the whole thing really, really clear, really quick. It's common for me on a daily basis to have a cry or shake or get angry. It's relieving of stress. It changes my neurochemistry. It clarifies my decision. It doesn't take but five minutes and it's just moves.
Brett: It's almost like you could do a daily, emotional yoga.
Joe: Indeed. I did for years. Indeed. I don't think I ever did it daily, but maybe like five times a week, I would take 20 to 30 minutes to do literally emotional yoga, where I would feel everything that I was not feeling and teach my body how to feel it and how to accept it and how to unlock. Because as the emotions start to be felt, then the musculature unlocks and then you can feel it deeper.
Brett: Your cortisol levels will shift and your metabolism will update and start releasing an amount of energy into your body that is appropriate for the moment.
Joe: That's right. The other thing to know is that each of these emotional streams that I talked about, like anger-- so there's anger that's constricted is constricted in a lot of ways and the unrestricted anger is that clarity and determination. The unrestricted sadness is a deep joy and the unconstricted fear is excitement, right? There's a saying that says, excitement is fear with the breath, or fear is excitement without the breath. It's from an acting school. Each of these things, when they're not resisted, become something very, very different.
Brett: Right. Grief is a celebration of what you've had.
Joe: Absolutely. Grief is this anger, sadness, fear altogether wrapped up in one. The feelings of these things coming through you when they're unresisted change deeply. You don't even-- can't even recognize them and they start blending all into one emotional state. It's like one stream that's happening.
Brett: This all seems to really tie into something that we were working on a lot in your courses, which is this phenomenon where we can understand something intellectually, something about our story or about our traumas, or somebody could be listening to this podcast and understand it intellectually. We can still not get it all the way until we've had the emotional movement to consolidate it.
Joe: This is really something that happens in coaching all the time. You get somebody who intellectually understands that, yes, okay. My boss is managing me and I'm angry, but I intellectually really, really understand that they're trying to get me to do my best work, but I'm feeling it as criticism. Intellectually, they understand that their boss wants the best for them, but emotionally it's just criticism. It's just what dad was doing, when the person I'm coaching was 13 or whatever it is.
Then once they get it emotionally, when they grok it in their whole body, then all of a sudden it's like, thanks so much for the feedback. I appreciate it. I really appreciate you wanting me to do my best work here. It's on so many levels. It's even grokking complex ideas in your body completely, which has an emotional component to it.
If somebody sees, here's this really complex marketing thought process and they don't fully understand it. They can intellectually get it, but it's not second nature. It's not just what they do. It means that there's some emotional component of that marketing. Some thing like, “Oh my God, I'm going to be asking people for stuff.” Or, “Oh my God, marketing is bad and dirty.” There's some emotional component of it that when that emotional component is fully felt, then it's understood. It might not be used. It might be used, but it can't even be fully understood until that emotional component has been felt.
Brett: Until your emotions align with it. It reminds me of Einstein where for him, the theory of relativity was a spiritual experience to be working in. Many scientists, prominent scientists have said similar things. Simon, for example.
Joe: Absolutely. You cannot have certain ideas without certain emotional clarity. You cannot have certain ideas or certain epiphanies without an experiential understanding of what's going on. You can't do the theory of relativity until you see through your own limited perception of time that society has taught you.
Brett: Right. Or even your senses, your physical body has taught you.
Joe: That's right.
Brett: Right. How do we then stop resisting these emotions? What are some takeaways from all of this, that are some concrete practices?
Joe: First of all, if you are resisting emotions and you try to stop, that's more resistance as we've already talked about. Love the resistance, that's the most important thing. Fake it till you make it. My personal story was I looked in a photo album when I was, I don't know what I was, like 20 something years old. I saw a picture of me crying and I realized that my parents were uncomfortable with the emotions I was having, because they were taught to be uncomfortable with their own emotions.
One of the ways to make sure that I didn't make everybody uncomfortable was to tease me around my emotions. At one point, they took a picture of me and then they put it in the photo album. I found this picture. It was a picture of me crying. This picture you could see me crying and you could see me dumbfounded that I was having a picture taken of me. I was like, it's probably why I haven't cried in 14 years. I put a picture of it on my desk and I was okay, I'm going to learn how to cry but a year later, I hadn't cried. Then I was okay, I'm determined. I need to go and really give this thing a go and cry. I went out into the woods. I went to a faraway trail. Then I went off trail for three miles so that nobody could see me cry. I had that much shame around it. Then I would just fake crying. I did that for three months. I would just fake it. Then all of a sudden, it just happened. It started happening for real.
When it happened, it was such a relief that I'd let it happen for four days. I could have stopped it, but I was crying when I was brushing my teeth. It's like my body was just like years of tension just evaporating in days. Then all of a sudden, I had a deeper access to my tears and then that led to deeper and deeper access to my tears. Then that led to, oh, every single heartbreak of mine increases my capacity to love. I cannot wait for more heartbreak. Even just saying that, just that in itself makes me want to cry, how blessed I am for loving heartbreak and for seeing how much freedom to love that gives me.
Brett: That's beautiful. This has been a great episode. Thank you very much, Joe. We'll catch you again next week.
Joe: Yes, man. What a pleasure to be with you.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.com
Resources:
Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/297609/descartes-error-by-antonio-damasio/
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, https://sogyalrinpoche.org/about-sogyal-rinpoche/tibetan-book-of-living-and-dying
The problem with getting good at managing your life is that you end up with a life that has to be managed. What would happen if you found out that focusing on enjoying your life could make you more productive and happier than managing your life? We know most of the greats enjoyed what they did. What if enjoyment is an essential part of what makes us great?
"Imagine that you are on a boat and you are going down a river. Management is when you are fighting against the river, but when you are in that effortless flow of the river, there's an enjoyment to it. What you have to do is, you have to be listening to that river deeply. You have to be listening to that impulse."
We're told all of our lives that if we want results, we have to manage ourselves and the world around us in order to get what we want. What if that isn't true? What if intention and determination are critical, but managing life gets in the way? What if the way to get the life we want is to focus on enjoying our life, not only by doing what we enjoy, but also by learning to enjoy whatever is happening? This is what Joe and I will be getting into today.
Brett: Joe, what makes this an important topic for you?
Joe: There's a personal story behind it. When I was really young in my career, I did international stock lending for a while. I was still sorting through so much of my personal issues at the time. I decided in my head what I really wanted was to have a creative career. That was something that I decided, which was far out there that I had to attain, instead of realizing that it was really available, if I had the right perspective.
I quit this great job as far as money goes and as far as career path goes. I went for seven years trying to have a creative career. There was this place where I had basically reached it. I was working on this TV show and I had written something. I was being brought in to train, to direct the show. I did this two-week stint on the show and I realized it was the same thing that international stock lending was, meaning that everything that I had run away from in international stock lending, I was running to in this creative career.
One person had all the power. Everybody was working long, hard hours. They were unhappy. I remember the actor of the TV show saying to me, "Every time I come into work, it's like having a piece of my soul ripped out." Everybody wanted to be doing something else and not the thing that they were doing. They had some dream of the next level of their career. Most people weren't leaving because of the money.
I said, wow, that's exactly the thing I was running away from and running to. I had spent all these years of my life trying to manage this outcome. I had finally achieved it, but I didn't have any idea that it wasn't the thing that I wanted. At that moment, the revelation came on me and I said, "Wow, you know what I'm going to do instead, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to say yes to whatever shows up. If I enjoy it, I'll keep on saying yes. If I don't enjoy it, I'll say no."
Then all of a sudden, there was more and more stuff to say yes to and so I got to keep on picking the things that were more enjoyable. As that happened, everything took off; my money, my happiness, my career, everything in ways that I couldn't even have expected. It was like I had surrendered and I allowed that surrender into my own enjoyment to lead my life. All of a sudden, I was surrounded by a life that I enjoyed.
I neither enjoyed stock lending, nor did I enjoy trying to become an artist nor did I enjoy being the artist, but I ended up enjoying my life, not by managing it, but by focusing on the enjoyment. That's why it's important to me. I think why it's important to talk about in general is, because it's the biggest misconception that a lot of people have is they think that if they're going to manage their life, they're going to end up with a life that makes them happy. In actuality, if you learn to manage your life, you end up with a life that you need to manage and that is not happiness.
Brett: What does it mean to manage your life in the way that you're describing?
Joe: One way to think about it is, intellectually, you're trying to assure an outcome. When I was directing films, one of the things that I really realized in that process was that, if I had a very specific outcome in mind of how the actors were going to do their thing, it was horrible. The result was horrible. Everything was horrible. The process was horrible. If instead, I gave the actor's direction and then I just waited until it felt right and I just allowed that impulse to carry us and go, "That's it. That's going to work," without the idea specifically of how it was going to be, the results were far better.
That's one way to think about the difference between management and non-management is that you're not holding really specific future outcomes. You're holding the intention of the scene is going to be great and it's going to be emotional. You're holding the intention. The actors are holding the intention of whatever it is for them, getting the person to say they love them and getting out of the room, whatever their intentions are. Everybody's holding their intentions, but the outcome is something that you are recognizing when it's right. It's not something that you're being specific and controlling about.
There's this implicit feeling of trying that happens when you are doing management and trying is very different than doing. Doing is just the action. It's like in mental waves, you think about doing as alpha. There's this flow state that happens and it's just everything's happening and there's not a lot of tension in it. Managing life is when you feel like you have to bring tension into the process to get it your way.
Another great example of this, I think, that's really palpable is I see this with clients all the time is they're thinking about a big conversation they have to have. Maybe it's with their husband, maybe it's with their boss, maybe it's with a good friend. They're trying to figure out how they're going to say it in such a way that they're going to get the outcome that they want, instead of thinking about, what's the authentic way for them to say, what's their deepest truth that they're trying to share and let the chips fall where they may. If they're in the first, then they're in management and if they're in the second, then they are not in management.
Brett: I think that film example is actually a great one, because in filmmaking, in production, you often have an art department that's trying to make exactly the igloo that's in the treatment for the director, when maybe they could make any number of igloos that fit the theme and that would work great in the scene. Many other parts of the scene are likely to drift through the course of production from the treatment. There are ways to flow with that and there are ways to try to manage every single detail, which you just ended up having the entire crew fighting reality for a while.
Joe: It's something that I've realized. When I'm running businesses and I want something a specific way where it's creative or someone's doing something creative, like copy editing or some visual aspect or building slides, I've realized that if I just give them three adjectives, just I want it to be reliable, grounded and empowering, then the results are far better than if I start thinking I know how to design something. I'm like, well, it should be a little more blue and turn this a little bit this way. That broad stroke thing.
We know that people in general, in the management of people, respond a lot better and are a lot more motivated, if they feel like they have autonomy. That doesn't mean that they don't want direction. It means they don't want management in the way that I'm talking about management.
Brett: Right. I see that a lot in design as well. Micromanagement of design is a great way to get terrible work from a good artist.
Joe: Exactly. That's everything. There's a way of looking at every person's role as an artistry. You're going to get bad work out of everybody's artistry in that. The other way to look at it is to imagine that you're on a boat and you are going down a river. Management is when you're fighting against the river. When you are in the flow of the river, even if your paddle's in the water every once in a while and you're doing that stuff, but when you're in that effortless flow of the river, there's an enjoyment to it and there's a non-management. When you're fighting against the river, then you're in the management.
For that to happen, you have to not be managing a river, which obviously never really works. What you have to do is, you have to be listening to that river deeply. You have to be listening to that impulse. When people are in management mode, they usually are not listening to their internal impulse, or the impulse of the people around them.
Brett: It sounds like a distinction to be made here is, management is to try to fight reality to conform to your results and enjoyment in this concept is more combining your intention with the randomness of reality and seeing what happens.
Joe: Yes, that's right. I work with a lot of executives and this is one of the hardest things for the executives to really catch on to because they have all made a living in being able to have this determination and drive to get the results. Many of them have used management to get there. That determination and drive, that utter unacceptance of a result that's different than the one that you want, is really critical, but you need to be very general about the result that you want. It can be general like I want a company that's super successful. I want a product that sells better than all the competition. That's great.
When you start managing that process and want it to be this specific way. You want it to have this kind of sales technique. You want to have, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then that's when it goes south. You have to keep all that determination. You have to keep all that fortitude. You have to keep all that utter unacceptance of a reality that you don't envision and there is also reading the river and letting the river flow and paying attention to that river and following it to get there.
Brett: A lot of this seems to happen by buying in the moment like, "Oh, no, this has to happen because if this doesn't happen this particular way, then the entire plan is ruined." Without this 30,000-foot view that we're discussing right now, how would you know in the moment, if you are managing rather than following your intention? What are some ways to mindfully recognize this in the process?
Joe: One of the things that I see managers do, since we're on management, specifically, one of the things that I see managers do is they don't ask this question. They don't say, "What speaks against that?" Let's say I come into a room and I say I want to sell in question-based selling and then we're talking to the sales team. I'm like, "Let's do question-based selling." I might try to convince everybody and push everybody into it, motivate everybody and give a good speech. Everybody's like, "Yes, let's do question-based selling."
What is usually far more effective and that tells you that you're not in the management of that experience is to say, "Let me give a good case for question-based selling. Here it is. Now, tell me what speaks against it?" People will tell you, "Here are the things that we don't think will work about it." That tells you the things that you have to address. Then you address them and then you're in the flow of the situation. Then you're like, "Okay." Most likely, you're going to get a much better solution because the things that they want you to address are important to address.
If you can't address them, then you don't have real buy-in. Without real buy-in, they're not going to do as good of work. Without real buy-in, it probably means that there's a better solution out there. That's one of the ways to know is, if you're trying to push people into a result instead of being eager to find out what speaks against it. When you're listening to what speaks against it, your results are going to be far better. That's one way to know it.
Brett: There's a delicious irony there, the idea of trying to sell a sales team on a sales process about question-based selling without asking any questions.
Joe: I hadn't thought of that in my example. Yes, exactly. That would be incredibly ironic. Yes, exactly. It's why question-based selling works is, because you're not managing the customer. You're actually empathizing with, following the customer. You're following the river instead of trying to manage the river. That's one way to know it.
Other ways are, when you're more listening to the outcome than you are to the impulse. Right now if you listen for the impulse, as to what to say next, that's a very particular somatic experience. You can still have determination in this experience. You can still be feeling like, "Oh, we're going to get to a resolution and I can be listening," and waiting for the impulse to speak. That's all a very possible situation. But when I want your next sentence to be something or I want my sentence to do something to you, to get to a particular place, then I'm in management.
Brett: That adds another filter in the process of what you're going to say when you have to think about how you think it's going to be received.
Joe: Exactly.
Brett: Which then builds in all of your projections into the conversation.
Joe: Yes, totally. It also builds a tremendous amount of inefficiency. When you're managing stuff, what you are always doing is not looking at the root cause. As an example, which is a more enjoyable car to own? Is it an MG or is it a Lexus? Most people who don't like fixing cars would say a Lexus is a far more enjoyable car to own than an MG, because you know with an MG, every 500 miles, you have the thing up on blocks and you have to do something.
When you are in management, you're just constantly trying to figure out how to fix the MG with the least amount of money and as quickly as possible. When you're in enjoyment, you're looking at the core issue. If you are looking at the core issue, everything becomes far more efficient. You're not trying to patch the boat as it's sinking. Instead, you're thinking, "What's the right boat to build?"
Brett: Getting out of context to the bigger question.
Joe: Exactly.
Brett: We have learned to manage things for a reason, many would propose. Don't you have to manage some level of things for anything to get done? If so, where is that line?
Joe: It's not where you think it is, that's for sure. What I mean to say is, if you ask the people at Hyatt, "Hey, man, do you have to manage your properties?" They'd say, absolutely. If you ask the people at Airbnb, "Do you have to manage your properties?" They'd say no. If you ask SK Telecom and all those telecom companies that tried apps before Apple, "Did you have to manage your apps, the building of the apps?" They'd say, "Yes, absolutely. We need to manage it," but Apple said, "No, we don't. As long as they hit a minimum requirement, they can be on the App Store." If you think about all your great employees, how much management do they actually require? It's the people that you're managing that are not usually your great employees.
Brett: Maybe because you're managing them so hard.
Joe: Indeed. Do you have to manage and what's the boundary? The answer is that the better your system is in place, the better you have the mechanism working, the less management is necessary. Every place that you are managing is basically a way to look at an inefficiency that you have. If you build a really good machine, say like an iPhone, you don't have to manage the iPhone. You and I have never said the word, "Well, I really had to manage my iPhone yesterday." It's because it works.
Brett: We might have to manage our iPhone use and that arises from inefficiencies in our attention.
Joe: Exactly. That's right. Even that, that's the self-management part, which is you can say, "I need to manage my cell phone use," or you can turn off all your notifications. You can turn your phone into black and white and don't allow for color usage on your phone. Or you can turn on the sleep mode. There's all things that you can do, so that you don't actually even have to manage your cell phone usage, so that it's all done systematically.
Brett: Or I can find out what it is in my emotions that makes me want to go to Instagram and start scrolling.
Joe: Yes, exactly. All different levels of it. Even managing your own state is ineffective. In fact, that's the thing about meditation generally, is that most people call sitting still and trying to manage your state of mind meditation. It's not meditation. It's torture. Enjoyment of sitting there is meditation.
Yes, management is going to happen. This isn't something that you get upset about. Is it something that you're going to never have to do in your whole life? No, but every time you're managing something, you can absolutely see it as a chance to become more efficient and the way that you find that efficiency is through enjoyment.
Brett: That's great.
Joe: The other thing that happens here, oftentimes when people are talking about they're like, "Yes, but I got to manage my company. I got to tell people what to do." Then you look at other companies. There's this company called Valve. There's this Valve Handbook, which is just amazing. The way they manage what they do, is they figured out how to choose really good people. They have a whole thing about that and then when you get to Valve, you have a desk that's on wheels. Where you push your desk is what projects they do. There's not even somebody saying, "Okay, these are the projects we're going to do. Here's our big initiatives." They literally just have people roll their desks to what they want to do and those are the initiatives that get done in the company.
If you look at our entire economy. We have four tools to manage our economy and we don't do it very well. There's just interest rates and how constraining the laws are for businesses, et cetera. Our whole economy doesn't have a manager and yet, we're the biggest economy in the world. So far, we have been the most resilient economy in the world.
Is there really a need for management? Is there really a need for that level of centralization? There may be in certain circumstances but guaranteed there is a more efficient system out there and when somebody finds it, they will be the winner of that business and their life will be more enjoyable.
Brett: It sounds like, if somebody wants to start experimenting with loosening management and finding more enjoyment, there seems to be a requirement for a certain amount of slack in the system. If you're running a company that's just barely making payroll month after month after month and you imagine that if you just stopped managing people in the way that you're currently managing them and you even have one or two hiccups then everything is all over. Or imagine in a life, where somebody's like, "Well, I'm working three jobs right now to make ends meet. If I just started focusing on enjoyments, then if I left one of those jobs, then I'm not going to feed my family."
How would you respond to there being a feeling for a need for slack or people's fear that they don't have enough slack to try an experiment in this way?
Joe: I would say that they're looking at enjoyment in a backwards way, meaning there's one way to look at enjoyment, which is, "Here are the things that my head says that I will enjoy when I do it, like me having a creative career." Your head doesn't really know what you're going to enjoy. You can try to organize a life where everything you do is enjoyable, meaning that you've chosen things to do that you enjoy, that you think you enjoy, or you can learn to enjoy the things that you're doing.
I'll give you an example of this. When I was 27 years old or something like that, I did this experiment where I said, "I'm not going to do anything I don't enjoy for a month and see how that goes." After the first three or four days, it was everything that I enjoyed. I took a nap when I wanted to take a nap, I did everything I wanted, then the trash started smelling. I was like, "Well, I'm not enjoying living with no trash and I don't enjoy taking out the trash. What the hell am I going to do?" I learned, "Wow, how do I take out the trash and enjoy myself? How do I write emails and enjoy myself? How do I pay bills and enjoy myself." I don't enjoy not having bills unpaid or having a bad credit rating. That's not enjoyable for me.
The only way to really get to a life that you enjoy is to not avoid the intensity. It's not to run away from difficult things. It's finding the pleasure in whatever you're doing. It has to be a major part of the equation. If you have three jobs and you need the three jobs to get by, then learn to enjoy the jobs that you have. Learn how to do them with more enjoyment and watch, when you do your job with more enjoyment, your job changes pretty darn quickly. People want to be around people who are enjoying themselves. People want to work with people who are enjoying themselves and people will be attracted to you, people will give you more opportunities.
It's the same thing in your business. Maybe you don't have the ability to reinvent your organization, where the management is so low that people are deciding their own payroll and people on the bottom line of a company like the manufacturing line of a company are deciding what $3 million pieces of equipment to buy. Those are companies that are run like that and maybe you can't get there tomorrow. Maybe it's not even smart for your company to get there, but the question that you can always ask is, "What's making this so unenjoyable and how do I enjoy this process?" That is going to build efficiency in your company.
The thing is that there's somebody in mind right now when they're listening to me and they're saying, "This isn't necessary. I can be successful without enjoying myself." That is so true. You can be successful financially. You can accumulate a lot of power. You can have a good looking mate on your side. You can have all the toys that you want and not enjoy yourself. That's absolutely 100% the case. They're not actually being correlated-- that success and enjoyment. There's a lot of people that are successful who don't enjoy themselves and there's a lot of people that are successful who do enjoy themselves. What I am saying is that you can have both. If you are having both, you're finding efficiencies.
Brett: Yes. Let's define enjoyment then. A lot of people think of enjoyment as there is a sense of control. People have the freedom to do what they want to do, but a lot of what it seems like you're describing with enjoyment is that it doesn't really require freedom. For example, you could be working three jobs and be micromanaged and potentially find enjoyment in what you're doing. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Joe: Yes, absolutely I can. There are people in jail right now enjoying themselves. There are people on this earth right now, who are sitting in three by three cells who haven't lied down in two years, two months and a day who are doing it to learn how to enjoy themselves. That's part of the Lama tradition. The enjoyment is available to you right now. Right now I can say to everybody who's listening to this, "Hey, enjoy yourself just a little bit more right now. Just a little. Just allow a little more enjoyment in this moment."
Brett: My entire body just relaxed a little bit.
Joe: Right. Exactly. What did that take? Your conditions did not change at all. You're in the same space. You have the same bank account. You have the same girlfriend. Nothing has changed and you just enjoyed yourself a little bit more. Enjoyment doesn't cost anything. Enjoyment is just a perspective. It's just an allowing. It's just a receiving. It's visceral. It requires us to be a little more present. That's it. It requires us, maybe to be a little bit more in our body, but it's not something that is ever inaccessible to us.
Brett: It sounds like this is definitely an internal thing as well. We've been talking a lot about enjoyment in our environment, in our circumstances, in our businesses, in our organizations. How does this management and enjoyment dynamic work internally in the way that we just experienced?
Joe: Yes, it's a bit of a mystery exactly how it works. What I've seen is that, internally, there is a capacity to feel pleasure that is almost like a muscle. It's a nervous system thing, but it feels like it's a muscle in the fact that you can build it. You can build the capacity for this feeling of enjoyment in your life and this feeling of pleasure. There's a certain amount of overwhelm that happens when you feel too much of it. Your level of too much is going to be different than my level of too much, which is going to be different than person C's level of too much.
Brett: What makes it be too much?
Joe: I'll tell you what I think it is. If you put your hands together, put your hands like your thumb and your fingers all together and then intertwine your fingers. Now, intertwine your fingers in the opposite way so that your hand looks the same but your pinkies have switched positions. You'll notice that one of those ways is comfortable. The first way is comfortable and the second way is uncomfortable.
Brett: Yes, interesting.
Joe: Pleasure being too much is very much like that. It's just what you're used to. It's very much a level of comfort based on what you're used to and based on what your nervous system feels safe handling. If your nervous system had to be on high alert to feel safe as a child, then there's a low level of pleasure that you are going to allow yourself an enjoyment that you're going to allow yourself because you're going to feel unsafe. If you were deeply nurtured as a child, then that level of pleasure and enjoyment is going to be much higher. We can train our nervous systems to start accepting higher and higher levels of pleasure.
Brett: It seems like there's an inverse relationship between enjoyment and letting our guard down. The more enjoyment we're experiencing, the more down our guard must be and there's some baseline level of guard that we must viscerally believe is required to be safe. Does that make sense?
Joe: Yes, that's right. That's exactly right. What you're basically saying there is, that you have to believe that a certain level of defense is necessary, to be able to protect yourself, which also means that you don't believe that you can respond in the moment, that you have to be prepared. That is one of the main things that creates us not listening to our impulse, not watching the river, is that idea that we have to be prepared so we're not in the present moment handling the thing that's in front of us. Or that we're in the future in a way that's very hard. We're not in the future in a soft way.
You can be in the future and be like, "I'm dreaming the future and have intentions in the future," but most of the time when we're in the future, we're trying to control the future. That's like the perfect example of management. We do this internally all the time. We're literally having conversations in our heads to control the future. Have you noticed that the conversations that you've had about how you want the future to go, they have never worked out specifically as you planned? You think about how you're going to have the conversation 10 different ways and it never happens that way. It always happens differently.
We're thinking about our thoughts. We're trying to manage our future. It never works out and it's definitely not enjoyable. That's called spin. We're just spinning. Now, I imagine that you're in that conversation with that person and you're just listening to the impulse and focused on enjoying the conversation.
Brett: Which results in a lot more listening to what they're saying as well.
Joe: Exactly and it helps them feel connected with you. You feel more heard and they feel more heard. The conversation goes better. It's the same thing internally. Internally, we're trying to manage ourselves all the time. "Hey, lose weight. Hey, get more in shape. Hey, you should listen more. Hey, you should stop managing." Whatever it is that your brain is constantly telling yourself you should manage and it doesn't work very well. It's not the most efficient way by any stretch.
We do this in meditation and we do this in yoga. Now, what is it like to meditate and focus on enjoyment? Not just doing something that you enjoy, but also enjoying what you're doing. Now, what is it like to do yoga and focus on enjoyment or crossfit for that matter? What's the internal thing that you do when you're managing and how effective is it compared to enjoyment?
The amazing thing is, I could say to somebody, "Hey, look, whatever internal exercise you do, just focus on enjoyment. Just enjoy that exercise. That's your number one thing to do." Most people won't, because they're like, "Enjoyment is scary," subconsciously, but if they do it, what they notice is that they do it a lot more, because it's more enjoyable. If meditation isn't enjoyable, you don't keep on meditating. If working out isn't enjoyable, you don't keep on working out.
The enjoyment propels the practice. Telling yourself you should do it and you really have to do it and you have to do better and stronger da-da-da, it's not very enjoyable and so you stop doing it. The other thing that's important here to say is, that the reason you think you have to manage yourself is, because you don't see that you're inherently good. You don't believe in your inherent goodness. You believe that you're like some lazy gluttonous asshole, if you were left to your own devices and that you need to be whipped into shape.
If you believe that about yourself, then that's who you're going to end up being. If you believe that you are inherently good, you want what's best for you and for the people around you and that you want to have an active, enjoyable, fulfilling life, then why on earth would you need to be managed for? If you want that stuff, what would make it, that you wouldn't just naturally do it?
Brett: It seems that that would also show up in the way that you manage or treat your employees or expect to be managed or treated by a boss.
Joe: Yes. Any boss you've ever had who is a micromanager, I guarantee you they micromanage themselves horribly. If they're not depressed now, they will be. If they don't have major anger issues, they will have. Any boss that you have, that is constantly in fear of how you are behaving is constantly in fear about how they're behaving. It's just the nature of it. The self-development-work works so well in companies, is because you are projecting your internal relationship externally.
Brett: Yes, let's dig into more about how this management enjoyment dynamic shows up in relationships.
Joe: Yes. Here's the story that I think freaks everybody out and it's very apropos. I have two girls. I don't think there's any time I punish them and I don't think my wife ever punished them. We got angry from time to time. That absolutely happened. I'm sure they felt ashamed from time to time, though we did our very best not to ever shame them. The thought process then is that, well, your kids must be spoiled and that your kids must not do what they're told and your kids must not behave well.
If you get into my home, what you find out is that my kids are amazing kids. It's so palpable that when people come they're like, "Wow, you have amazing children. How did you raise them?" That question gets asked all the time. Even after they see our kids, most people are dumbfounded that that's how we did it.
We trusted that they wanted to be connected with us. We trusted that they wanted to be connected with themselves. When they were connected with themselves, they would show up thoughtfully and lovingly and with care. That's what they did. That's how it worked out. We never said to them, "Hey you're a bad person. Hey, you're naughty and we need to control that naughtiness." That never happened. They never believed that they were naughty. They just saw that we saw them as good and they ended up as good.
Obviously, some adults, that would take years and years and years of treating them that way for them to act that way. I'm not suggesting that you go around and go into a maximum security prison and treat all of them like they're amazing people who are inherently good, because unless they believe that, there's going to be friction to get to that point. In general, that's the way that you walk around in a relationship. The way you walk around is that you find out what's motivating them, find out what's moving them, find out what they want to do and follow that flow instead of saying, "This is what I want you to do and do that."
You see this happen all the time. One person convinces another person to join a project. If I'm hiring somebody for a project, I basically say, "What's your dream job?" If they're not really close to the job that I have in mind, it's not a good fit. I'd rather have somebody whose dream job it is, to do the job that I have in mind than to convince someone to do something because, eventually, I'm going to have to manage them.
It's something that I learned in making investments. What I realized was that the amount of management that it took to make a deal happen was the same amount of management that I would have to consistently provide to make the deal work. Then that's really inefficient investing. I've learned that if I had to manage to get a deal done, I just would not do the deal. It was the deals that happened with a certain amount of flow and ease that then continued with that same amount of flow and ease. Obviously, there's ups and downs with everything, but generally, that flow and ease was far more likely.
Brett: There's also that disempowering factor of managing. If you invest in somebody's company and then you manage them, you're really saying that you don't trust their idea, unless it's done the way you think it should be done.
Joe: Yes, that's right.
Brett: That brings me back to that prison example, as well. You could go to a maximum-security prison and yes, on one hand, you can't just relax all the restrictions and behave as though everybody knows their inherent goodness, but we could actually stop doing a lot of the things that we do that reinforce the, "I am bad belief." There's a lot of talk about how the system reinforces itself.
Joe: Absolutely. You can go in and treat every single person in a maximum-security prison like they are good people. That absolutely will help them. There's a great video documentary called Being Human. If you look it up online, Leonard, Being Human, you will see an example of somebody who has killed a woman and her child. The grandmother of that woman and the child showed him a certain amount of love that changed his life and you can see it. It's absolutely doable and that's how it works in relationships.
The other thing is when you're trying to be managing a relationship, you don't want to be in the damn relationship. There's some part of you, whether it is you are getting sold a car and the person is trying to manage you into buying the car, you don't want to be in the relationship. That salesperson isn't as successful. They know that the best car salesmen are the ones who focus on having a good relationship and that don't try to sell the car and they outperform the ones trying to sell the car, usually, four or five to one.
It's the same thing we see in our love life; our husbands, our wives, our girlfriends/boyfriends, that when we are trying to manage the other person's mood, there is less love. When we are trying to manage the other person's reaction, there is less love, there's less enjoyment in the relationship. If you are enjoying the person, there's a lot less management. If you're enjoying the moment, there's a lot less management.
Brett: In the prison example, you can have boundaries.
Joe: You can have boundaries without having to manage anything. A boundary is following an impulse. That's a great point. Having a boundary is basically the deepest act of non management on some level. The reason it is is because what you're saying is, "Here's what I'm going to do," and then you allow the other person to do what they are going to do, which is like, "Hey, what I know is that interacting in this kind of relationship isn't working for me. If I'm going to continue to act in this relationship, then what I want is to not have a lot of yelling and I want it to be respectful and kind."
Now, that person can leave and they might leave you. It's really non management. It's just saying, "This is what I'm game for, this is what I'm willing to do in this world." That's what non management is to a large degree. That's what creates an enjoyable life even if it's scary to get there.
Brett: It sounds like what you've been saying would be also if a partner is going to leave you and then you're going to have a lot of uncomfortable feelings, because of that and sadness, then that is also something to be enjoyed.
Joe: Absolutely.
Brett: Or we're going to be trapped by it.
Joe: Right, that's another way. Most of what we are trying to manage in our life is an emotional reality. We're trying to manage emotions, trying to not feel heartbreak when our lover leaves us, trying to not feel like a failure if our boss gets angry at us. The non management of those emotional states and when I say non management, I don't mean that now you're like a puddle on the floor throwing temper tantrums and throwing tennis rackets around your house.
I'm not saying non management in that way. I'm saying allowing yourself to feel the emotions fully, not act out on them, but allowing the non management of emotions so that you can actually feel them fully and you're not trying to push them down and repress them and hold your muscles to not feel them or judge other people not to feel them. That is a far more productive way of changing patterns in your life, than all the management of telling yourself you should do this or do that.
You even mentioned it at the beginning of the podcast. You talked about, “...or I could just look at emotionally what's happening when I scroll on Instagram and what I'm trying to avoid.”
Brett: How can we cultivate the enjoyment of those feelings that we are trying to avoid by managing?
Joe: Well, stop resisting them. Half of the lack of enjoyment is the management itself. Stop trying to manage them and they'll all of a sudden become a lot more enjoyable. Stop resisting them.
A lot of the things about emotional states that we find out is that it is the resistance to them that's painful, not the actual emotion itself. It's the fear of them that's painful, not the actual emotion itself. All of it is a physical sensation in your body. It has different intensities, but once it's unresisted they change rapidly, the sensation of them changes rapidly. No one's ever really been killed by an emotion or maimed by an emotion internally. Maybe an angry person maimed somebody else, but if you internally are feeling your emotions, you're not going to be wounded.
Brett: Through the process of managing and suppressing our emotions, we can slowly kill ourselves with stress. That's true and depression.
Joe: Yes, that's exactly it. Generally, that's the thing about management, we think we need it. What it actually is, is just a constant signal that we can find a more efficient way and a more enjoyable way. Just dropping the management itself can be enjoyment. Just to say, it's just about taking your hand of control away from it slowly.
Some people, after listening to this, are like, "Okay, I'm just not going to manage any of my employees ever again." Then everything goes to shit and then they'll be like, "Yes that's right. I needed to manage it and I've proven that. I do need to manage it." What I'm saying is, see what the next level of enjoyment is, see what the next level is, because you have to find the new ways of being without management.
An example that's really critical is, you're sitting with a bunch of employees or people that you work with and you need a job done. Let's say you need the car cleaned. One way to do it is to say, "I need the car cleaned." That would be maybe the least amount of management. The least amount of management is to see if anybody cleans the car, which may happen. If they have the right to defined roles and everything like that, reinventing organization style, somebody might just come and clean the car because they see it needs to get done.
There's, "Hey, I need the car cleaned". Then there's like, "I need to get the car cleaned in this way, this way, this way and then make sure you detail this and do this and dah, dah, dah." Then there's car cleans just like, "Hey, I need the car cleaned and I need it to look like it looks when you get off of a new car lot. I need it to be done for less than $150 and I need you to enjoy yourself doing it." Where you give people the parameters of what a good job is but you don't tell them how to do it. You just tell them how to win.
You don't see a lot of people doing it that way. You don't see that interim step, the interim step of letting people discover how to do it in a way that lets them win. Most people want to know how to win. If you keep determination and you keep intention and you keep boundaries and you keep maintaining and mandating the results that you want, then how necessary is management? The management is just the fear, that you're not going to get there. The management is just the fear, that people are going to hurt you, that people aren't going to show up.
Brett: What you have been saying then in this entire episode is that in order to stop managing, we need to be willing to feel and enjoy feeling these emotions that we're trying to avoid like fear. That sounds like a really interesting topic to get into on another episode.
Joe: Yes, indeed. That is a great way to think about that which is, we often try to figure stuff out before we actually allow the feeling of stuff. If we really let that feeling happen and learn how to enjoy that feeling, then most of what we're trying to figure out doesn't need to be figured out anymore.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.com
Resources:
Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations, https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/
Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Human, http://www.human-themovie.org/
We are taught from a very young age that doing things perfectly will get us where we want to go in life. But what if doing things in connection is far more effective? What if being in connection with your customers gets better results than trying to make a perfect product? Or being in connection with your spouse makes a better marriage than trying to make it perfect?
"If you close your ideas and you think of the things that you feel are most perfect in the world, those are also things that are deeply connected. We think of a flower. We think of a scene. We think of God. We think of an amazing product. What the human population sees as perfection, they are all deep expressions of connection."
What is perfectionism? If having clear goals can be so helpful in life, how could it be that the simple act of measuring ourselves up to them so often holds us back? Today we are going to explore why our quest for perfection never seems to satisfy us and often only slows or impedes productivity, while seeking connection tends to result in better output, better products and a better life.
Brett: Joe, what makes this such an important topic?
Joe: Oh man. That's a great question. There's so many reasons why it's important to me. The one that comes to mind right away is an experiment they did. It's the dried spaghetti experiment. It's basically you give a group of people 25 or so hard pieces of spaghetti and a marshmallow and some masking tape and you say, "Build the highest structure you can build."
It turns out that kindergartners, a group of five kindergartners, will beat a group of five CEOs on a regular basis. The reason that the people who are doing the experiment say that that's the case is, because the young kids are iterating. They're just trying stuff out, trying stuff out, trying stuff out.
Then when the time's up, they've tried like three or four models and they've got something. Whereas the CEO's are trying to make it absolutely perfect. Then they'll put that marshmallow on at the last minute, the whole thing will collapse. They didn't iterate. They didn't try. They tried to make it perfect and so it didn't work.
One of the things about this experiment, which is so cool, is that if you get those same five CEOs and you add an administrative assistant, they will outperform the kindergarteners. Just somebody who can connect them together will immediately change it. On that level, that's a great example of how just connection, connecting with the tools that you have experimenting, iterating, that's a form of connection. Connecting with each other, like with the admin, all of that produces better results.
That's one of the main reasons why it's so much more important. The other more important thing is that our neurochemicals do not propel us to be perfect. They propel us to connect. It's in our nature. Connection is in our nature. When you're working with humanity, prioritizing connection makes it better for you and everybody you're working with. That's part of the reason you get better results is that people don't want you to be perfect. The idea of you being perfect is going to be different from person to person. What they want is to feel connected with you. What you want is to feel connected to them.
That's what we are genetically programmed to do, is to have this sense of connection. You get a deeper level of results and you get deeper satisfaction in your life. This is everywhere, even in the places where you don't expect it. For example, sales. There's one way of selling, which is the way most people sell. They try to write the perfect pitch and then present the perfect pitch in a perfect way. That just doesn't work as well as asking a whole bunch of questions, whether that's question-based selling or whether that's challenger-based selling.
It's just asking a whole bunch of questions and talking to the person and finding out what's important to them. There's a great book on this called Ready, Fire, Aim. Is it Fire, Ready, Aim? Aim, Ready, Fire. It's basically saying that the job isn't to get a perfect product and put it out there. The job is to sell the thing before you build it so that you know what people will buy, which means that you're more connected with your customer.
Brett: Then you're building what people will buy rather than what you planned or what you thought they would buy.
Joe: That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that you're prioritizing connection. You are saying, "I am going to connect with my customer and see what they really want, to see what it is that I can really serve them by providing," instead of, "I have this cool idea. What will make you buy it?"
Brett: Let's define our terms here to discriminate between what is perfection and connection. Let's start by defining what is perfection.
Joe: The critical parent's voice in your head is what it is for most people. We have this exercise in one of the workshops that I do, which is a triggering exercise, where people are to trigger one another and people hesitate to do it. We don't do it because we want to see people triggered. We do it, because we want people to figure out how to handle it when they are triggered. There's a group of people I can just walk up to and I can trigger people really easily because I can read what will trigger them pretty quickly. One of the things I can do is--
Brett: Yes, you are great at that.
Joe: [chuckles] One of the ways that I'll do it, I can just like, see who the perfectionist in the room is and I'll say, "You're a perfectionist." It'll trigger them because they're immediately in this headlock with themselves, because part of being perfect is to not be a perfectionist. It just messes with them all ways.
The way I pick those people out is because I can see which ones of them had supercritical parents and you can see it in everything that they do. At some level, perfectionism is just trying to make the critical parent pleased. Since the critical parent could never really be pleased, it wasn't about you. It could be the critical teacher or the critical grandparent or whatever.
Brett: How does that perfectionism show up? What do you see in people in their lives or the way they carry themselves, or even just briefly in a workshop when you've just met them?
Joe: How do you see that? It's the amount of rigidity in the musculature, the amount of precision that they operate with, how much they're second-guessing themselves, how stunted their tones are, the way that they speak. Basically, all it really results to, is rigidity and hesitation inside the person when they're trying to be perfect.
Brett: That hesitation part is really interesting. Because for me, I've always had identified or been diagnosed as ADD or ADHD. If I really pay attention to it, the moments where I get Teflon brain and it skips off of my task. If I really look at what happens often, it arises from a perfectionist pessimism.
I sit down to write an email and I'm like, "Oh, I'm just never going to get this right. I'm not going to get it right. At least not right now, so why even bother?" Maybe some other time the conditions will be perfect and I'll know what to do. Let's go see what's in the fridge right now.
Joe: They call it attention deficit disorder. The idea in the label is that your capacity to pay attention. If you reverse it a little bit, it's like how much attention was paid to you. It's the attention deficit disorder. Does that mean that you can't pay attention or does that mean that there was a limited amount of connection that you got? That's what actually creates it.
I've noticed that. That's on the other side is that connection feeling, that the idea that you can do it perfectly is also just simply inane in the fact that what I think is perfect is different, than what you think is perfect. There's always someone thinking that you're not doing it perfectly, including you, always.
The other thing you said, what is perfection? It's something that doesn't exist. It's just the point of view. If you are being absolutely perfect, somebody is seeing you as being rigid or imperfect or hesitant or whatever it is. That's how I describe it. If there's no such thing as that, the only way to describe it is trying to satisfy some critical voice in your head that is never and can never be satisfied.
Brett: Having goals and vision and striving for perfection is good, right? It allows us to structure ourselves and structure our minds so that we can achieve something. How does that interact with this idea of perfectionism?
Joe: Having goals and intentions, those are fantastic. Obviously, it allows us to focus. It allows us to decide which way we're going to walk. We have thousands of decisions to make a day. If we make them based on a goal, then we are far more coherent and unified, especially if that goal is coherent and unified.
I don't know if that has anything to do with perfection. I don't see that as being perfect. None of our goals are perfect even. As long as you don't believe that there is some perfection you can get to, then the goals are really useful. As soon as you think there is a perfection that you can live up to, then the goals become less useful.
To be specific about that, that doesn't mean that you're not 100% confident you're going to get to the goal. It's just the belief that there's some level of perfection at the end of the rainbow. That just doesn't happen. The other thing is that the best way to get to what we think is perfection-- I'd even say, if you close your eyes and you think of the things that you feel are most perfect in the world, those are also things that are deeply connected. We think of a flower. We think of a scene. We think of God. We think of an amazing product. We think of a person who inspires us. Then an ecosystem.
Brett: An ecosystem, a metabolism.
Joe: It's all also far more an expression of connection than it is a perfection. Even what the human population sees as perfection, they are all deep expressions of connection.
Brett: It seems related to the idea of utopia being a dangerous idea. The idea of iterating towards better than what we have now is just the natural state.
Joe: Which is the coolest thing too, because iteration is far more connected than perfection. If I'm just iterating and I'm learning and growing, that is a connected experience. That's what life does. It evolves. It doesn't evolve to a perfect end. If you see yourself as trying to evolve to a perfect end, then you're no longer in the flow of life. You're not using all the natural energy, all the natural ways of being that we were designed with to be productive.
Brett: This is all reminding me of the book Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. Have you--?
Joe: I haven't. What is it?
Brett: It's a fascinating and quite short read actually. It's quite poetic. It just describes this one very broad concept across a bunch of different domains and short prose about how there are games that are finite, where you achieve something and you get the title. You get the diploma. You get the trophy. You get the money. Then there are games that they're not meant to be won. The goal is not to win and end the game, but the goal is just to keep playing.
Joe: Yes, which is right. I think that's a beautiful way to describe why connection and perfection work the way they work in our systems is that life is the game that you just keep on playing. Therefore, connection is what works. When you have a game that has a finite end or you've created an imagined finite end to it, then perfection is there.
That's the other thing about it, is that fear creates a finite end in people. The idea of perfection is really a fear-based idea. The idea that you have to be perfect, that you have a right answer, that there's the right way to do it, that's all fear-based. Fear does not make great decisions.
Brett: That's interesting. A lot of ideals of perfection are this belief that we can get rid of everything bad and that we can reduce all error. There's a fear of like, "Oh my God, what if this happened? What if this still exists in the world? What if there's still imperfection? What if I still have to feel whatever this is that I don't want to feel? What if I could just cut all that out? That would be perfect."
Joe: The CEO of Netflix has a great example of this where he talks about his first company. He basically made it idiot-proof so it couldn't be broken and then he only had idiots working for him as he describes it. Then they couldn't really adjust their company to the new times. In his company now--
Brett: Rigidity.
Joe: Exactly. He has a system that's in place to create a certain amount of chaos so that he can create an environment where smart people love to be and where it's far more flexible.
Brett: Where flexible people like to be.
Joe: Exactly. That's where connection happens. In one, he prioritized getting it right and perfecting. The other one he prioritized being connected with these people.
Brett: Then let's get into the definition of connection then. How specifically would you define that as relative to this idea of perfection?
Joe: It's a measure of capacity for you or for anybody, anything to meet and accept things as they are in the moment. If I'm connecting with you, I'm not asking you to be any different right now. The more I ask you to be different, the less connected we're going to feel. If I'm looking at a landscape and trying to adjust it, telling myself this is the good part and this is the bad part and comparing it to other landscapes, I am in less connection than if I am in just full acceptance of what the landscape is at this moment.
Connection basically is like the surface area of our awareness. We take away surface area, when we start looking for things that can be better or things that are different or any way in which we're calculating creates distances to that connection. If you are a CEO and you want your customer to be different, you are not in connection. If you are a product manager trying to get a different answer from your customer, then you're not in connection. If you are a husband wanting your wife to not nag as much, or a wife wanting your husband to not nag as much, then you are not in connection. Connection is the acceptance of people and things as they are. That's what it is.
Neurochemically, it is oxytocin and serotonin. Mostly it's oxytocin, which is the drug that is felt when we're in deep connection, mothers feel when they're breastfeeding and we feel it when we're hugging and we feel it during sex. That's oxytocin. Serotonin is more of a pride, proud of each other drug and something that you would feel like if you were watching a friend have a great moment. You had a lot of pride in what they just accomplished. Those are our connection neurochemicals. That's the other way to say what connection is.
Brett: One thing just pried, it seems serotonin is also involved in meaning and satiety.
Joe: Yes. That's right. Exactly. The way to think about our ability to have connection, it's really our ability to love ourselves and accept ourselves as we are. The more I can love every aspect of myself, the more I can love every person I come across as they are. You can hear there's somebody's mind out there listening to this right now and they're like, "If I accept myself as I am, I will be horrible. I will drink beer on the couch, or I'll just say the same as I am right now."
What's interesting is, that doesn't actually happen. If you look at any system that is deeply connected and change is inherent, it's natural. Evolution is part of it. It's when people get rigid, when people try to do it perfectly, that change stops happening. It's just that you don't get to control the change. It's just that you have to trust the deeper intelligence in yourself, your deeper intelligence, your nonintellectual intelligence to drive the change.
Brett: It seems like this comes up pretty frequently in so many other aspects of the work that you do, or that we've been doing. For example, the victim story that people have around client relationships. It's like, "Oh, man, all these clients, there's so much wrong with them. If only they would see things the way we see it, we'd be able to do great work."
Joe: Yes, or fathers or mothers or girlfriends. Exactly. That's right. The way to think about it too, is just like think about the people who really make it so that you feel seen, that really make it so that you feel understood. Feel that. That is connection. Those people are seeing you for what you are. They're not trying to fix you or manage you. If you think about what's so important about connection, what makes it important is, think of what you would do for those people. Think of the people who make you feel most seen and most understood in this world. What would you do for them? What would you do for yourself, if you really saw and understood yourself deeply? If you really felt understood by yourself.
There's people listening to this who haven't quit eating sugar or haven't quit smoking. What would you do? There's a way in which you're disconnected with yourself. If you felt deeply connected with yourself and you weren't trying to change yourself, the things that you would do for yourself are far more outstanding than things you're actually doing for yourself right now. You tell yourself you should do them, but you're not doing them.
Brett: Yes. That brings me back to that ADD example I described earlier. It's like the difference between sitting down to write an email and being like, "Oh God, I'm just so procrastinating today. I'm just never going to get this done. Oh, I suck." That's telling myself how I should be. Then the connection version would be like, "Oh, wow. I really want to get this right because this is important to me. Oh, man. Whatever I do it's never going to be. There's always going to be something I could have done better. Wow. Okay."
Joe: Yes. How about just be authentic, do it the way that I want to do it and then look at it and see if that works? Exactly. That connection is staying. I talk about what it means and I say that it's like accepting how things are in the moment. The moment changes. So you just keep on accepting, because it keeps on moving. It keeps on changing.
Brett: Yes, because the moment you accept something, you can also then turn that acceptance into a new model of perfection.
Joe: [laughs] Yes. I'm going to connect to you perfectly. It's so amazing. It's like, "Hey, I want to connect with you." You can just feel that in your system. "Hey, I want to connect with you. Hey, I want to connect with you perfectly." It just immediately takes the connection out.
Brett: I've experienced that in relationships so many times, where suddenly I'll have a new idea of like, "Oh, wow, this is connection. I wasn't doing connection before. Now I know what connection is." Then suddenly that can become a new perfectionism, where I'm like, "Oh, man, I could call my brother and reach out and talk right now, but I haven't talked in so long and that's been-- Oh." Then just find ways to make it not okay somehow and then procrastinate it.
Joe: Exactly. That's the amazing thing too, is that we have all these impulses inside of us that are just popping up like, "Oh, I want to work out or I want to exercise or I want to move my body." Then that impulse, which is the deep connection, immediately gets turned into a perfection of, "I should work out." Then it's completely unmotivating.
Brett: Then here's my workout plan that I'm going to hold myself to and shame myself and judge myself when I miss a day.
Joe: Exactly. You watch the little kids and they just follow that impulse and there's no idea of perfection. As they get older, the bigger the perfection, the more they're stilted, the more they're stunted. If you look at the people who have the deepest level of depression that feel most stagnant in life, their brain is telling them that they're not perfect and they need to be perfect all the time.
Brett: Yes. They're just experiencing that delta between them and their model of what they want to be.
Joe: Yes. I'll give you a little trick that I do with people. The most recent is with my guy who cuts my hair, a great guy. He's an artist and I love his art. It's good work. He was just having a hard time getting people to buy and represent him and everything that. I'm "Hey man, I've got a job for you. If you do it, if you do this job successfully, I'll give you whatever 1,000 bucks," or whatever it was. He's like, "Okay, well, what's the job?"
And I said, "I need you to get 30 rejections. I need you to go out there and get 30 people to turn you down. If you can prove to me you've got 30 people to turn you down in a year, I'll give you 1,000 bucks." I came back two months later, I don't get my haircut that often, or I had one and we didn't talk about it. Then I was like, "How's it going? He's like, "I've got three representations and I've sold 12 pieces." It was the difference between trying to get sold and trying to get rejected because his mindset moved from perfection to connection.
Brett: Speaking of moving that mindset, how can we consciously shift from a mindset of measuring ourselves up to some perfect ideal and rather focus on cultivating connection? What is the practice here?
Joe: That question in itself implies perfectionism. It's like how do I perfect myself in this way? Even that question becomes a little bit less effective than another question. The other thing to say is that there's also no such thing as perfect connection. It's asymptotic, meaning that you get closer and closer, but you can never actually arrive.
There's no place to get to, that you're going to ever get to. There's just proximity and feeling more and more and more and more and more, more connected. I think it's important to say that if you choose that, if you say, "Hey, what I'm after in life--" Every company has a bottom line. For most of them, it's the financial bottom line, but there's other kinds of bottom lines that people have.
What I've noticed is when people change their life to having a bottom line of connection, they have incredibly happy and productive lives. If they can measure their level of connection on a daily basis and their job is just to feel more and more connected every day, that visceral sense of connection, it has a very, very deep effect on people. I just think it's really important to say that, but the trick is not to try to get there because trying to get there is a form of disconnection.
Brett: There's no there to get. It's an iteration.
Joe: Right. It's really more of an allowing. Connection is more of an allowing. If I'm not trying to change anything, if the definition of connection is not trying to change anything, not wanting-- It's not quite that. It's not wanting things to be different. You might want to change stuff. That's fine. It's important to change stuff, obviously. It's more about accepting it for what it is even if you are trying to change it.
Brett: Which is in a sense allowing imperfection? Allowing the error signal, allowing the pain of things not being as good as you could imagine them being, which breaks through denial. Because what is denial other than just having this vision of how things are and no, it has to be perfect, so this information that is inconvenient?
Joe: Yes. Also, it's your imagination. It's imaginary. Perfection is again. Yes, exactly. That's beautifully said. How do you have deeper levels of connection in your life and how do you, I would say, allow deeper levels of connection in your life? It's interesting. One of the things that's a really important principle behind it is, to go into difficulty is one of the ways that you get into-- when I say difficulty, I mean discomfort or vulnerability.
That really creates a sense of connection in folks. If you've ever seen people who fought together in a war, it doesn't matter if they haven't seen each other in 20 years, their bond is ridiculous. It's such a strong level of connection and they've just gone through the shit together. I build my courses so that there's difficult moments so that people can start feeling bonded to one another.
There's something about going through difficult things together that creates a bond. Same with yourself. If I have my little kids and I have them do tasks that are hard for them and challenging for them, they feel more connected with themselves and more connected with me. They talk about how to build self-esteem. One of the ways you build self-esteem is by giving hard things to do. Then that's how they build self-esteem. It's not to take that away from them or to try to make it so they're successful. It's the same thing internally and externally.
Then the other main way that I talk about this is VIEW. I talk about something that I termed as VIEW, which is how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to other people. That's very operational, so that if you practice this state of mind, it just leads to deeper and deeper levels of connection internally and externally.
Brett: Can you explain VIEW?
Joe: Yes. The most important thing is, it is a state of mind. It's almost even beyond a state of mind. I think it is a state that's beneath all states of mind is another way to think about it.
Brett: Metastate.
Joe: Yes. It's a metastate. A stateless state, I've heard people call it. It's good for internal and external practices. It's basically V stands for vulnerability, I stands for impartiality, E stands for empathy and W stands for wonder. It's walking around the world willing and feeling vulnerable, impartial, empathetic and full of wonder.
This is not just like how I interact with you. As you know, we have these conversations that are in VIEW and we do a lot of work in here. It's also meditative, like if you're sitting and being with yourself quietly, how can you be more vulnerable with yourself in that moment? How can you be more impartial with yourself? How can you have more empathy? How can you have more wonder?
We're constantly telling ourselves, "I should lose weight," but we're never really going, "What is making it so that I've been saying that to myself for 20 years and nothing's happened?" We're constantly telling ourselves how we should feel or how we should not feel or how to avoid them, but we're not really actually just being empathetic with ourselves and being with the feeling.
We're constantly telling ourselves how to do shit, what to do. We're editing ourselves all the time, but we're very rarely just ever being impartial with ourselves like, "What's actually happening? Let's just look at this thing with a watcher's eye, an observer's eye instead of a manager's eye."
Impartiality is amazing because people often say, "If I don't manage it, it's not going to turn out right," which is clearly not true when you just think about most of the major decisions that have changed your life are not things that you decided. Like did you really decide to meet your wife on a Tuesday at a bar or did you really decide to even take that job or apply for that job or did you just apply for 20 jobs?
The decisions that actually make our lives are often ones that we don't have any control over anyway. More importantly, it's like the best change agent for things is awareness. It's not management. Just being aware of stuff can change things dramatically. We put a whole bunch of management on it, thinking that that's necessary, but it usually slows down the progress.
Brett: Relationships are a really great example, because you certainly can't connect the dots in advance how you're going to meet a person or a client, or you can try to arrange your life so that that thing happens with higher frequency. Really, there's a state of mind of being open to it, of allowing it, of allowing those synchronicities.
Joe: The more that you recognize them and allow them, the more that they happen. I'm not in any way speaking out against, "Hey." Sometimes it's important to say, "We're going to get to this goal." I think goals are fantastic. I love them. The question is, can you hold that with an impartiality as well as a determination? It's incredibly easy to do when you look at nature, like an oak tree that grows to be 5 feet wide and 40 feet tall. That's determination and it's also very impartial. It's just in the flow of things.
Impartiality is the hardest one for business people, particularly to really grok and understand. One of the metaphors I use for impartiality is you're on a boat going down a river. It's important to row the boat, but it is more important to read the river. If you are partial and reading the river, you're not reading the river. That's the impartiality part. Then vulnerability, obviously, is doing the things that are just a little bit scary, to let the little parts of yourself that you judge out into the world to find out that nobody else is judging them. They're just you.
Brett: Or to find that they might be judged and that's okay.
Joe: Yes and to find that they might be judged and that's okay, right. The thing is we don't really care what people are judging us. All the things that you're proud of about yourself, all those things that you think are just fricking awesome about yourself, I guarantee you there's people judging you for them. I guarantee you and you don't care. The things you care about are the things that you're judging yourself for. Exactly.
Brett: We've got vulnerability, impartiality, empathy and wonder. We've talked about impartiality quite a bit. We've talked about vulnerability. Let's talk a little bit more about wonder.
Joe: Wonder is curiosity without looking for a solution. Wonder is curiosity with awe. It has a certain level of awe to it. It has a certain amount of amazement to it and it is in the question. We think that being in the answer is more productive than being in the question. Being in the question is incredibly important. Just as an example, you can have three different questions arise. One question is, how do I have the perfect relationship? The second question could be, how do I have the most connected relationship? The third question could be, how do I have a relationship that lasts 40 years?
Brett: Then ends exactly at 41.
[both chuckle]
Joe: Probably. Those are going to lead to three different relationships. What the question is, is far more important than what the answer is. Living in the question is an amazing experience, to be in the question without needing that resolution, to just be in the wonder of life. It just provides answer after answer after answer, but to be in the knowing, you only get one answer. I'd much rather have many answers than one.
Brett: It's like seeing an animal be like, "Whoa, that's a giraffe. Cool, giraffe," or being like, "Whoa, look at the spots on that thing. How tall it is? The little eyelashes, Oh."
Joe: What? It has the same amount of neck vertebrae as I do? What? What? How on earth? Exactly. It's that feeling of just question after question. Answer after answer.
One thing about vulnerability that I'm not sure if I hit is, that everybody's vulnerability is different. It's like, I see people often say like, "Oh, that guy's not vulnerable." You have no idea if that person is being vulnerable or not because vulnerable for you and vulnerable for me is different. I could tell you all about my childhood and all the mishaps and drama and you'd be like, "Wow, man that was super vulnerable. Your dad did what? Your mom did huh?" I would be like, "Yes, that's not vulnerable."
To me, I've said it 1000 times. I've been in rooms and Al-Anon meetings and groups for years of hashing through that stuff. There's nothing vulnerable about it for me. That's the path of vulnerability, is that you're constantly showing up with that thing, that's a little scary and all of a sudden, it's not scary anymore. Then you show up with the next thing and you show up with the next thing. Then it ends up leading you into authenticity, because all those vulnerabilities are really just ways that you're judging yourself and preventing yourself from being what you actually are.
Brett: Vulnerability could even depend on role as well, like an overbearing manager screaming is like that's somebody not being vulnerable. An employee showing their anger to a manager that they've been hiding for so long and just resenting, there's something really vulnerable in that.
Joe: I would say something vulnerable in both actually. Basically, the manager who's yelling and is basically saying, "I feel out of control. I feel alone. I feel out of control. I'm going to go and beat myself up for yelling in a couple minutes. I feel ashamed and I don't know what to do to actually fix this situation. I'm yelling, because I hope that it'll make me feel like I'm in control for 20 minutes."
Brett: To a third party observer, as you were saying, like our idea of what is vulnerable is different. A third party observer might observe the manager as being invulnerable and their anger in the employees as being vulnerable. I see this in movies, for example. There's so many examples where finally that person stood up for themselves. That was such a vulnerable thing to do.
Joe: The important part is, are you being consciously vulnerable? Yes, if you're getting angry all the time and yelling at people, obviously that level of vulnerability, though it's vulnerable for you, you probably don't recognize it. Other people don't recognize it. It's not really going to have the same effect as being vulnerable in a way of like, "Oh, I'm going to go stretch myself here." What is very useful is when somebody is yelling like that to see it as a vulnerability.
Brett: Or, "I'm sorry. I keep yelling at you and I don't want to be yelling at you. I apologize."
Joe: Yes. That's the vulnerability that the person yelling it's going to really benefit them. To see them as vulnerable when they're yelling just to be able to look at them and say, "Hey, you're not alone in this. This whole team wants to be successful with you." It will immediately change the yell. It just will, because if you can see it as vulnerability, that's great. For that person to have the benefit and this modality of VIEW, the important thing is that you're choosing vulnerability. You're choosing the thing that's vulnerable to you.
I think that the one piece that we haven't quite talked about is empathy and I think it's an important thing. Empathy is just allowing yourself to feel the other person. It doesn't mean losing yourself in the other person. It doesn't mean going into the other person. It doesn't mean confusing your emotional state with their emotional state. It just means allowing yourself to be with the person while they are feeling stuff, to be there with them in it. That's just an important piece on the empathy.
Brett: Again, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, wonder, VIEW. How does one practice VIEW or cultivate this state of mind or meta state?
Joe: You can do it internally and you can do it externally. If you're a meditator, if you just contemplate quietly, just do some experiments. See what it's like to be vulnerable with yourself and then see what it's like to be non vulnerable with yourself. See what it's like to be partial with yourself. Have a really strong agenda for yourself and see what it's like to be impartial with yourself.
Brett: What about an agenda creeping into meditation? Like I'm going to meditate into this particular state of mind that I want to be in and that would be perfect.
Joe: Exactly. That would be very partial and so would be saying I want to be impartial right now. This is the thing about true meditation is having no agenda, having no management. It's more like sitting on the beach and enjoying the wind across your face. Oftentimes, when I'm talking to people about how to meditate, I talk about, it's just non-management.
The level of management is also asymptotic. It gets finer and finer and finer and finer. Maybe you start with just a simple agenda, which is to be agendaless. Maybe you start with a really simple agenda of being aware of your body. The idea is that eventually, the agenda goes away and you become the passenger. You are being taken for a ride. You're not driving.
Brett: How do you bring that into your life when you're in a meeting or an argument or working on a podcast?
Joe: That's actually a little bit easier for VIEW. Wonder means you're asking open-ended questions. If you're really curious, you're asking questions that are going to give you lots of data. How, what, where, when questions. Not can do, is questions and why questions are usually judgmental. Wonder is just asking questions. Empathy is not trying to fix people's emotional states, not trying to change their emotional state and to let them know that you're with them.
Brett: That sounds like impartiality.
Joe: It is and it's on the emotional level. They all are the same thing. When you start really getting into them, they're all the same thing. Impartiality, I use that more on the logical level and the empathy is more on the emotional level. It's to call it out because I think that most people don't recognize or it takes them a long time to recognize, that they are constantly wanting their emotional state to be different, that they're constantly trying to get to some state or trying to get away from another state.
Brett: We've all been taught in some way or another that happy is good. Some parents are like, "Oh, I will love you if you're successful." Other parents are like, "I will love you if you're happy," and that's almost as just as bad in some cases.
Joe: Yes. It's not loving them for what they are. It's not loving your kid for what they are. The crazy thing is, is this idea is like, "Hey, if I love you for throwing temper tantrums," and you're going to just keep on throwing temper tantrums, that's just not true. It's like once you love that part of yourself, it changes.
Just like if you put awareness into something that changes. There's this principle in business, it says how do you fix a problem? The thing you do is you put attention towards it. Just the simple act of putting attention towards a change is the situation and creates a solution. It's the same thing that awareness just changes things and so does love.
Love just changes. If you can love every emotional state that you have, they change. The friction of most emotional states is your resistance to them, not the state themselves. If you're resistant to bliss, which oddly most people are. Bliss is very overwhelming. There's this great quote that says fear is excitement without the breath.
It's just saying that excitement, if you forget to breathe because you're resisting it, is fear. That's what empathy is all about. We're using different parts of the brain and empathy and impartiality too. One is mirror neurons and one is opening our heart. The feeling of opening a heart and the other one, impartiality is dropping the strategies, dropping the agenda.
Brett: Another thing about fear and excitement, in base jumping through the phrase similar to this was just excitement is the other side of fear. Getting into it more subtly, fear is when you feel something is off and inauthentic and excitement is when you feel like you're ready for it. Whatever cliff you're about to jump off of, if you feel like your equipment is in line and your mindset is in the right place and the conditions are right, then it comes through as excitement.
If there's a part of you that knows something's wrong, you know that you feel peer-pressured into this to be cool, or you know that the conditions are off but you're just avoiding hiking down because that would be annoying, then there's a constriction there that turns into fear. Listening to what kind of fear you're feeling can be a really good indicator.
Joe: Yes. Absolutely, that's a beautiful thing. I think what it all requires, fear, excitement, breath, no breath, is to feel it. It's to actually feel which is what empathy is saying. It's to actually allow the emotional state to move through you and to flow without resistance, because you're never going to get the intelligence of the emotion while trying to control it. You're not going to get the intelligence of your people in a business if you're trying to control it.
Brett: It seems like a form of being receptive to information rather than just drawing a conclusion.
Joe: That's exactly right. That's the whole thing. That's the VIEW. If you're practicing it out in the world, it's like wonder is asking questions. Empathy is being with people's emotions. Impartiality is not trying to drive them to a place.
We had this great experience, where we did these workshops, where it was these two day practicing VIEW. That's all we did. Just practice VIEW for two days. This is like deep stuff. People will call me two or three years later. I remember one guy and it's more than one guy. There's multiple people where this happened, where they basically at some point in the two days looked at me and said, "Wow, I've never asked an impartial question in my whole life." All my questions, everything I'm saying is trying to get somebody to do something.
The people who are going to have that recognition the most are the people who are most disconnected, are the people who feel most lonely, who feel most disconnected is because they have this incredibly strong agenda for themselves or for others.
Brett: Perfectionism.
Joe: Yes, exactly. Vulnerability is just saying things that are vulnerable or asking vulnerable questions or asking the question that might get you fired or asking the question that might make your boss angry at you, but it's your truth. That's the thing about vulnerability.
Vulnerability is you don't do the scary thing because it's scary, you do the scary thing because it's your truth. You ask the question because it's your truth or you say the thing. Even the work that I do, when people see me do one-on-one work, they're like, "Holy shit, how did you ask those questions?" It happens to me too. I'll feel it. I'll be like, "Oh my god, I'm going to ask that question. Oh shit." You've seen it happen. Those are usually the most powerful, most impactful questions are the ones that are really scary.
Brett: That's when my sphincter is clenching hearing you start to ask the question.
Joe: Exactly. Mine, too. It's like, "Whoo." That's when life just becomes really alive and opens up. That's where the most important stuff comes. Maybe some people are going to join you. Maybe some people aren't. That vulnerability really makes it so that you get the life that you want to live, because you're showing up as yourself in your truth, no matter the consequences, no matter what someone thinks.
That just drives the people who want you for you into your life and drives the people who don't want you for you out of your life. It's a lot easier. Then we have this whole technique of asking questions and having how to have you VIEW question and answers and all that stuff will be explicit in other materials.
There's all sorts of ways of using this to do sales and you're doing this to do management of people, or doing VIEW to do product development or doing VIEW to talk to your father who you haven't spoken to in 20 years. When you hear people have these conversations, it's amazing to see. We'd give these homework assignments and VIEW. They would in the VIEW course and they would go out and talk to their dad and then parents, siblings haven't spoken, getting back together. Husbands and wives realizing, that they have the same thing. All beautiful things happen. Bosses and employees changing the way that they work together. Co-workers changing the way they work together from 15-minute conversations, because you do this with executives.
I do this with executives and typically the executive is like, "Wait. I need to be partial. That's how I've made my living and I can't be vulnerable." I'm like, "It's just an experiment. Let's do this for 15 minutes." Then at the end of the 15 minutes, I always say the same thing. I'm always like, "Hey, so have you ever had a more productive 15-minute conversation?" The answer is almost always no, because when you're that way, it's an incredible form of productivity, because you get to see and learn and grow so much. CEOs start to learn like, "Oh, I could--"
There's this great in the book that I love Reinventing Organizations. There's this example of a CEO going to his people and say, "Hey, we just lost the biggest contract. We do not have enough money. Tell me what we should do." The whole organization said, "You know what, we're all going to take a pay cut and we're going to try to get another customer." The people who are trying to get the other customer, obviously, we're completely motivated because they saw everybody do this pay cut. They themselves had a pay cut and the CEO didn't dictate a pay cut, but people decided this is what we're going to do.
That's an expression of vulnerability in a business and there's thousands of those expressions. There's a Harvard Business Review case of a woman who basically had no money. She had a company and she had no money to keep on going and her employees stayed with her. It was all about her vulnerability with the employees.
It's so incredibly apparent when you get out of the mindset that people do things for money. Some people do things for money, for sure. We all do some things for money for sure, but most of what we do in life is not for money.
Brett: Getting beyond carrots and sticks.
Joe: Yes. Getting beyond carrots and sticks and having some faith that most people and the people that you should have hired and the people hopefully that you're married to, are people who want what's best for them. They want to contribute. They want to be a part of things. They're motivated. If there's no money, people wouldn't just all sit around and go, "Okay. I'm done. No more money. I'm finished." If everybody had food and shelter, then everyone's like, "I'm finished. I'm done."
Brett: This example of the CEO reminds me of something that you've said before where the position of the CEO often feels like the most lonely position in the company.
Joe: Yes, for sure.
Brett: What would you have to say just to wrap this episode up neatly into a perfect conclusion, cherry on top? What would you have to say to that CEO that feels that distance and wants that connection but feels like, "No, no, everything would fall apart"?
Joe: I would say, I know you had to be resourceful and you had to be self-reliant. You were alone as a kid but you're not alone now. If you're looking for evidence, look around at all the people who are trying to make you successful. They might not be able to live up to every one of your expectations, but it's probably impossible to find anybody who's not trying to live up to your expectations, who's not trying to make it work for you and for them. Take a look at that and then apologize to them for not recognizing it. That would be the vulnerable act. Then see how much more inspired they are to be there with you and to show up with you because they see your humaneness instead of being scared of you.
Brett: Beautiful. Joe, thank you for a perfectly imperfect episode.
Joe: That it was.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.com
Resources:
Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations, https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games, https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Finite-and-Infinite-Games/James-Carse/9781476731711
Michael Masterson, Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat, https://www.waterstones.com/book/ready-fire-aim/michael-masterson/9781119086857
When we are ready to embark on the journey of self-transformation we want to make the most of our time in an effective and progressive way. For this, as with all journeys, it helps to have a compass and a clear map.
A clear map tells us four things about the journey: the necessary conditions, the best approach, what to expect along the way, and impediments where we might get lost. The compass that keeps us on track—our constant reference along the path—is enjoyment.
"There is no way of getting it right. There is no complete. There is no finish line, no done, there is no “I’m going to get it.” There is just “What’s the next experiment?” “What’s the next adventure?” “What can I learn from what just happened?” There is just play."
Brett: Today we're going to talk about everything you need to know about embarking on a personal transformative journey, conditions for transformation, what happens on the journey, what we can get excited about and what will get on our way. Joe, tell me what does someone need to know about embarking on a transformative journey?
Joe: There's a way to look at it that we can dissect it into all the parts of it and let's do that. Before I even start there, the most important thing that someone should know about in deciding lik, "Hey, I want to do something that transforms my life," is that it's a process to be enjoyed. Not only is it a process to be enjoyed because that's nice, but it's because it's more effective.
The only thing to tweak about that is that enjoying yourself is a little bit different than maybe how you're thinking of it. Most people think or a lot of people think, if someone says, "Hey, go enjoy yourself." They think, "What am I going to do?" For example, I'll go play golf or I'll go and have a conversation with a friend or I'll go get high on heroin, whatever their idea of enjoying themselves is. That's not what I'm speaking to. What I'm speaking to is how do you allow yourself more enjoyment in everything that you're doing. That's what I mean by enjoy yourself.
If it means that you're in a satsang listening to a guru, how do you enjoy yourself in that? If it means that you are listening to this digital recording, even if you notice that you're criticizing yourself, how do you enjoy criticizing yourself? That's the question. The question isn't how do I do the things that I enjoy? The question is how do I enjoy the things that I'm doing. That's the golden mean of the journey, that's where you guide your footsteps by and then everything else is a technicality that revolves around that sun. It's like the gravitation, how do you enjoy yourself?
As far as the details, I think you can clump them into four parts. One part is, what are the conditions that need to be set for transformation? There's an acupuncturist who once taught me this idea of conditions for healing. I was like, "What do you need to do just so that somebody can potentially heal if you're treating them."
It's the conditions that need to be there for transformation to be possible. Then there's a question of approach, how do you approach it because at the end of the day, you're responsible and your approach is going to make a big difference in the alacrity, the enjoyment and the depth of transformation.
Then I think you can also talk about what to expect on the journey, because when you really got to get into it there's certain things that happen over and over again and they can fool you and they can also, when you see them in a slightly different light, they can really propel you. Then I think then you can also talk about what gets in the way? What are the impediments of the journey? That's how I would break it down.
Brett: Let's get started on it. What are the conditions that we would set in place for us to enjoy our transformation?
Joe: The most important thing is you need to feel safe. And safe is misused often in today's world. We've got a lot of times people use safety as a way to control. Like, “I don't feel safe.” It's not actually a lack of safety, it's a way that they can control their environment, but you have to feel safe. Fear reduces your capacity to learn. Here's something that you've never seen before.
You've never seen two people in a yelling match, where one person going, "You son of a pa-pa-pa-pa and you mother, ba-ba-ba-ba." The other person say, "Oh yes, you're right. You've got a point there." It doesn't happen because it's neurologically impossible. Feeling safe is really critical to being able to learn. That's important and it's really important also to understand the difference between whether you feel unsafe or whether you feel defensive.
There's a great trick to doing that. Take a moment, pause this or whatever, but feel in your body what it feels like to feel unsafe. When you really felt like your life was threatened or that you were threatened and then feel what it's like when you were really defensive. Your body has two different signals for that defensiveness and safety and they get confused sometimes. To know the difference is really important.
Brett: What are some examples of what that might feel like in the body? I remember early on going through your courses, a lot of the instruction were like: “How does that feel in your body?” A lot of times it would just be dissociation. I couldn't quite feel, like, "What do you mean in my body? I'm thinking. This is a thought.”
Joe: [laughs] Oftentimes safety is felt more electrically in the body. It can be felt in the shoulders and in the belly often, but it's different for everybody and it's really based on, when you feel unsafe, if you go to fight, flight, or freeze. Your body's literally going to feel one of those ways. Defense is a hardening. It's usually like a more increased rigidity in some way.
Brett: Muscles tightening.
Joe: Tightening, yes. It doesn't always have to be that. It's very different for each person. Those are some of the signals to look for, such as how much electricity is moving through, what feels like electricity or energy is moving through your body. How rigid your body is, what part of your body lights up? These are the ways to know the difference for you between safety and resistance. Great question. Then, another thing that's the condition needs to be set, there needs to be trust. If you don't believe that you are going to transform, you are at a severe disadvantage.
Trusting a teacher if you choose to have one is really important. Trusting yourself is so critical. Trust is a really important thing. The belief that it's possible to really know that that transformation is there-- there's this thing called the placebo effect. The interesting thing is, that it's always seen like it's a glitch of science. We can't really test it, because some people just think that they will get better and so they do. [chuckles] In this work, the placebo effect is a feature. It's not a glitch, it's not a bug. It's really important that you think that it's possible.
I don't mean to do it in a namby-pamby kind of way. [chuckles] I'm talking about doing the research, do what you have to do to find out that it's possible. Talk to people who've been in the course or know that it's possible. The truth is we have a great success rate in our courses. We've had great studies done and we have a consistent shift that's measurable, but the main part is the belief that that's possible.
The other thing to see is that some people don't change. Occasionally, you get someone who goes through who doesn't change. One of the things that you can always know about that person is they never came in with the confidence that they could change. They were resistant right from the start to the whole thing. If you're that, just don't do it. It's a waste of your time and it hurts the other people that you're on the journey with. That's really important.
Another really important thing is seeing beyond your intellect and knowing that your thoughts are only part of the way the transformation happens. Do your research if you need to, to know that there are things like mirror neurons and mirror neurons don't register in the intellect of the brain. They're just some way in which we know that our body has an intelligence that if you move differently, your thoughts will be different.
Research things like Sensory Processing Disorder where we know that kids who do not get to inhabit their body in a full way have a different brain function than kids who have inhabited their body in a full way, who have an understanding of where they are in space, they have appropriate perception issues. We know that the way that we move changes.
Our body has an intelligence, our emotions have an intelligence, our intellect have an intelligence. If you are trying to do all of your change through the intellect, you're going to be screwed. It's going to be slow. You're going to be able to describe everything that's wrong with you, but very little is going to have changed.
Brett: I've experienced that myself.
[laughter]
It took some time to realize that, while I could logically create a framework around everything that I was experiencing, I wasn't able to actually transform until I let the fuzzier logic of emotions and the body make movements that I didn't have to intellectually understand.
Joe: Yes. For me the journey was similar. It was slightly different, I just deconstruct it. I spent almost 10 years deconstructing all my thoughts so that I could be free enough of them to trust the other ways of knowing. It's so apparent, it's just to ask somebody who's a great gymnast, how they did it and they're not going to give you an intellectual explanation. There's knowledge that happens that the intellect can't describe, muscle memories, examples like emotional memory.
Brett: The endocrine system has its own memory.
Joe: Exactly, hormone systems. Right. Exactly. Nervous system. All of that is very hard to describe. Another really important thing is vulnerability. It's really hard to have a transformational journey if you're like, "Yes, I got it. It's cool. I'm good. Yes. It's not that bad. Yes. There's some something that could be done there, but, it's not that big of a deal."
If you're coming at it with that approach, you are not going to have that much transformation. It doesn't mean that you have to think there's something wrong with me either. It doesn't mean that you have to say, "I'm broken. Fix me. I'm broken. I have to fix myself. I need to be healed." You don't have to have that attitude either.
Brett: You could create that entire model of yourself and stay in that for years too. [chuckles]
Joe: Exactly, but if you can't explore the depths of your pain and your constriction and express it to other people, then you're not going to be able to approach it. You're not going to be able to do anything about it. You're not going to be able to understand it better. You know? It's like unless your attention can go to the discomfort, then your system can't do anything about the discomfort.
A lot of people have learned how to just not go to the discomfort. Obviously, it builds up. Other things happen. It's a painful life. That's a really important thing. I'd say finally and I think I've stated it before which is just, if you're not willing to take full responsibility for your journey, if you start blaming the teacher, if you start blaming your wife, if you start blaming your mom and dad, you have to take full responsibility for the journey.
It doesn't mean that you shame yourself, it doesn't mean that you blame yourself, but it just means you don't shame or blame anybody else. You have to just say something like, "I am exactly where I need to be. I am responsible for this." That is incredibly important in the journey, because every time you blame somebody else for where you are, including blaming yourself. Anytime you are blaming anything for where you are, you are slowing the process down tremendously.
Brett: It seems like each of these is, there's a catch-22 because they're both conditions and also the effects. For example, with trust, many people might approach personal development, because starting with a position of that they don't trust themselves, they don't trust their own goodness or they don't trust teachers or they don't trust the process and that's something th at they're working with. What advice would you have for somebody who wants to embark on a personal transformation journey but is worried about being manipulated or controlled by a guru or ending up in some woo-woo backwater?
Joe: I would say maybe two or three things there. The first thing is I get back to the first principle, right? It's enjoying yourself. If you are not trusting somebody, how do you enjoy that movement of non-trust? It's clear that if you feel safe, there's a deeper level of enjoyment. If you feel trust, there's a deeper enjoyment in being vulnerable than there is in being protected.
Brett: Do you have any tips or exercises for anybody who's embarking on this and finding that they're having that difficulty with say, trust or vulnerability? Some way to help them just enjoy feeling what they're feeling rather than trying to change it?
Joe: Yes. Let's say you are with a teacher and you're not trusting them or you know that you want to sign up for the course, but you know you're going to have trust issues; the best thing you can do is just go to the person and say, "I don't trust teachers and I want to. How can we work together so that this isn't a burden for you and this isn't a burden for me." That would be taking responsibility, being vulnerable and trusting.
Even in saying that, you're trusting yourself, which is the more important thing than trusting the teacher. In saying all this to your teacher, you're giving them trust in that moment. If they react in a way that's just like, "Well, if you don't trust me, motherfucker," [laugh] then you pretty much know it's not the right teacher. Or if they go, "This is all about just letting go into my words," then you know you don't have a great teacher there and that maybe that you shouldn't be trusting them.
Brett: It's a good litmus test. A teacher should be able to receive that mistrust. [chuckles]
Joe: Yes, should be able to receive that mistrust, especially if you're taking ownership; and if you're not taking ownership and they point to the ownership, then also a teacher worth trusting. Yes. That's an easy way to look at it. Yes, you're right that to some degree, all of these things are the things you're working on as well as the things that you need to be successful at it, so then it's just an order of operations thing. It's make trust your first thing to work on. Don't make your mommy issues the first thing. Make trust the first thing. It's probably relates to your mom issues or your dad issues, but make trust the first thing and really focus there. Yes.
Brett: Another feature of this is that it creates a positive feedback loop. The safety, trust and vulnerability and seeing beyond the intellect, maybe are the things that are initially holding you back, but then as you work on them more and more, the speed of your development increases.
Joe: Yes, that's exactly right and it becomes more enjoyable, which is the speed, it becomes far less important than the enjoyment. If you enjoy your entire developmental journey deeply, who cares how fast you're going and who cares when you're going to get there, you know?
Brett: Yes. You start to get to that point where you feel that restriction: "Oh, I'm interviewing Joe, I'm feeling restriction now." Then you're like, "Oh good. This is something to work on." Instead of, “No, I want to go away." [chuckles]
Joe: Yes. That's a beautiful pointing. That's a great way to think about all of this stuff is, that there is a point in that path, where everything that's uncomfortable, you trust. That uncomfortable thing approaches and you say, "Oh, I can trust this thing because it's going to teach me something. I just have to be vulnerable in it and take full responsibility." Yes. Beautiful.
Brett: Tell me more about how to approach this?
Joe: How to approach [crosstalk]?
Brett: How to first set those conditions and the spiritual path in general.
Joe: Approaching the spiritual path-- what I mean by that is, what's the best way to be on the path, right? If those are the conditions that are important for you, make sure they are met before you even are packing your bag. That's the tent and the food stores. This is about, how do you walk down the path? When I say, "The approach to a path," that's what I mean. It's like, how do you walk down it? How you walk down the path is-- you know some of this stuff, because of the 18-month course you did, but I have it as to five principles of how to be on the path.
One is loving accountability, which basically means that you're honest with who you are and what you've done without shame. It means that you can apologize to somebody, that you can take an honest inventory of yourself, without shame. That you can look at yourself directly and not feel like you have to be any different. That's loving accountability and it's approaching life in that same way. It's asking those around you to meet you in that place.
An example of that would be to say to the teacher, "I'm having trust issues and I don't want to be having trust issues." It's kind of loving the accountability to say I have trust issues because that might be making them responsible. That full loving accountability is that I have trust issues and I don't want to have them. I want to be able to trust life, I want to be able to trust people. That's full loving accountability. Then embrace intensity is, it's not creating intensity, which I think some people mistake it far often, but it's embracing intensity.
It's a business theory as well. It's like being a great CEO, one of the biggest things about it is just making sure the right amount of attention from the organization is going to the right parts of the organization. Are we being attentive to our problems? Are we being attentive to being proactive? Are we being attentive to our culture? Are we being attentive to our customer? How much attention is going where and the most--
Brett: And where there's intensity, that's generally where that attention needs to go. [chuckles]
Joe: Correct. That's right. Just like in the body, if there's pain, it's that pain is telling you, "Hey, this is where you pay attention." If you want to take care of yourself, pay attention to the pain. It's the same thing. I call it intensity because it's not all pain because it can be pleasure. Often what we avoid more than pain is pleasure. People have a hard time seeing that, until they see it and then they're: "Whoa." I always say it's subtle till you see it. In that moment when you actually notice: "Oh, it's more intense for me to be in deep pleasure than it is for me to be in pain," that's a moment. That's embracing intensity.
The other principle is everything is an iteration. It just means that there's no way of getting it right, there's no complete, there's no finish line, there's no done, there's no I'm going to get it, there's just what's the next experiment? What's the next adventure? How do I learn? What can I learn from what just happened? There's no blame, there's no shame, there's just play.
There's just moments of, "Let's do it this way, okay now let's do it this way." There's just a trust that you're going to keep on iterating and it's going to keep on getting better and you're going to learn and there's no need to think of anything that you've done as right or wrong." I can hear the brains out there already going, "But if you kill somebody that's wrong." I would agree that killing somebody is not how we want to behave.
If there is a person out there, who has killed somebody and they're not going to be caught, my hope for them would be that their mindset is that of iteration. That their mindset is for example, "Okay, well that felt shitty in my body and I feel horrible and I'm still thinking about this thing and my guilt is creeping up on me and my life has gotten worse and it didn't make me any happier and it didn't solve my problems, so let's do a different iteration next time I have a problem with somebody." That's what I would hope that they would do.
Brett: That brings up a great point because a lot of what happens and soldiers that come back from war with PTSD, a lot of the PTSD isn't around what happened to them personally but it's perhaps around the fact that they killed somebody and they did it in anger or rage in the intensity of the moment and that they actually enjoyed it or just something about having done it makes them feel like a monster. They think that that's just some core part of themselves that's unchangeable and makes them bad. Then holding that core belief, just causes so much more suffering and pain in their lives and the lives of those around them.
Joe: Yes, that's right. That's exactly it. We are never finished. There is no moment of perfection; and we are reacting to an environment and we’re iterating-- that same person-- never going to Iraq or Iran or wherever people are fighting these days, that same soldier, if they hadn't hit that environment, what would they be thinking about their core selves? It's a very iterative thing and I think it's really important to have that mindset and that change not only can happen, it's the only thing that you know will happen. Yes, so that's it.
I would think being curious is really important as well, that's the other way of approaching the path that's really important is being curious. This is one of the most enjoyable ones. Let's take that person as an example who feels like, "I'm a bad person because I killed people." What if you're curious about that? What are the questions that actually come up? Instead of knowing that you're a bad person, what would be the most curious questions about it?
Brett: What was I feeling, that led me to take that action?
Joe: Yes. What makes me not want to kill everybody right now? If that's who I am, what's stopping that in me right now? If that's who I am, what's making me keep on beating myself up over it? What's the part of me that's beating myself up over it, if it's essentially who I am? If it's essentially who I am, what makes me not go to the grocery store and kill a whole bunch of people? There's just curiosity and it frees it up because your fear and curiosity can't exist at the same time.
If you imagine yourself running from a tiger. Really, close your eyes for a moment. You're running from a tiger, this tiger is fast and it is hungry and you are running and feel the fear coursing through your system and you're moving as quick as you can and it's catching up on you and you can hear its breath and it's going to get you. You can feel that fear in your system and now wonder how much does the tiger weigh? [Brett chuckles] All the fear goes away. You can't operate from fear if you're curious.
It doesn't just operate in the way that I can be curious if I'm not scared. It's why safety is so important from earlier right, because you can't learn, when you’re scared. You can also just turn on curiosity and it just reduces fear, just like if you turn on fear it reduces curiosity. That's a cool one. Then the last one and I'd say the most important one is connection. That it's really important to stay in connection, in connection with each other, in connection with yourself, in connection with your body.
Brett: What does that mean?
Joe: It means being in contact with. It's being in contact. Like you were saying earlier that before when you're thinking about emotions, you're like, "Well, I don't know how to be in my body, all I have is disassociation." A contact means literally like touching. It's to have that point of contact.
Can I just touch into the emotion? Can I just touch into the pain? Can I just touch into you? Can I just touch into me? Can I touch into that part of me that I don't want to see? Can I touch into that part of me I'm not proud of? Can I touch into that part of me that is proud?
It's connection. It is what allows the tree to evolve, it's what allows us to evolve, is a connection.
Brett: Tell me more about how embracing intensity or being curious about the lion that is about to eat you, how is that enjoying yourself? [chuckles] How does that help you get away from the lion?
Joe: Yes, that's a great question. On the lion part. Obviously, I'm not suggesting that you should wonder how much a lion weighs or a tiger weighs if they're chasing you. Our system isn't curious when we're in fear for a reason. If you are in fear over something else, like what color of car you should buy or if you're going to get fired, yes, being curious is far more enjoyable than that. Being curious about being fired is far more enjoyable than worrying about being fired.
The curiosity is-- you can just feel that in your system. If you just take a moment and you can pause here; and just feel what it's like to know shit and you say "I know, I know what you are, I know what I am," and then to be curious about who you are. You can just feel there's more enjoyment in the body.
Embracing intensity is a little bit more complicated as far as enjoyment goes. It's the embrace part of it that makes it enjoyable. Intensity happens, you can't stop it. The Buddhists talk about it and they say, "Pain occurs, suffering is the choice." It's the embracing of the pain that prevents the suffering. The enjoyment is embracing something that you can't avoid or that if you avoid, it's less enjoyable.
Meaning if you're a heroin addict, you can avoid the detoxes, you can avoid withdrawals, but it's not going to make an enjoyable life. At that moment, you want to embrace the intensity of the withdrawals. Part of it is the embracing of it when it needs to be done or when it's unavoidable or when it's just better to face the intensity than not, which is almost always. Sometimes we create intensity which is not necessary, but if we're not creating it in a conscious way, then embracing it is great. In fact, embracing intensity is one of the great ways to stop intensity from happening in our lives.
Brett: Got it. In a way you let it move through you and change you. Then you learn the lesson in the intensity.
Joe: Exactly. Yes, that's exactly it.
Brett: Tell me more about what happens on this journey? What are some of the pitfalls, or some of the things that might be surprisingly enjoyable?
Joe: Being on the journey, the pitfalls in my mind are slightly different but the being on the journey is there's just some things to know about it. One of the things to know about it is that the way human beings learn is a back and forth nature. It's a pendulation, is the word. I don't even know if it's a word, but it's the word I made up or I'm using depending on whether you can find it in a dictionary. There's a back and forth nature to it.
If you look at a baby and a baby learns to walk, they don't just crawl, then one day stand up and walk and then never crawl again. That's not how we learn. We don't learn all at once. We learn by going back and forth. In fact, what they know is that when that back and forth doesn't happen, particularly in babies crawling, that their brain develops differently and it's not a good thing. If you pull a butterfly out of the cocoon, it won't be able to fly. What we think to be struggle or friction, that pendulation of going back and forth, is really a necessary part of the learning process.
What you'd normally hear people talking about when they're on the journey, they say for example, "Man, it was doing so good and now it's all gone." Or something like, "Man, I was feeling so blissed out and now all that's gone. How do I get it back?" The other way to look at it is to say, "Oh, cool, that's gone. I'm in the learning process. This is how learning goes." There's a way of looking at it that says, "Oh, cool, it's gone away," which means that I am as much in the learning process as when it's there and I am getting closer; because it's gone, I'm getting closer to a life where that's fully understood and fully recognized. That's a really important thing.
Brett: That relates to something else I've seen when somebody starts going through this journey and then all of a sudden they start feeling more emotions that they label as negative and they're like, "Oh, no, I had done all of this work and now all that work is undone and I'm a total mess."
[laughter]
Joe: Right, which is not. That's beautiful. It's not at all the case. One of the things that could be happening is they're just recognizing that they're having the emotions instead of just taking them out on people when they didn't recognize it before. That's common. The other thing is that they're able to handle them now. One of the things that I'll talk about often, is that we'll do a lot of exercises, where people really increase their love and you'll just notice this happiness.
It's like when people can love themselves, then every part of themselves that was unlovable, comes to the surface to be loved, or the next wave of them. It's like shining a light in the water at night to attract cuttlefish. The more work we do, the more attuned we get. If I make an album, which I did in my 20s, I made a Rock 'n' Roll album, I can't listen to songs the same way before and after, I'm so much more sensitive to it, but that allows me to understand and enjoy music in deeper and deeper ways. That's the same thing. There's that sensitivity. That's a beautiful point.
Another thing to understand is that when you have big jumps in development, when these big moments happen, there's a natural step that happens which is, things go from unclear to clear to being able to affect the change. Easy way to look at this is with kids. The first thing infants-- they don't even know it's their hand, it's hitting them, it's scratching them, they don't even know it's theirs, then they recognize it's theirs, but they can't control it and then they can control their hand.
Piaget calls this primary, secondary and tertiary circular reaction I think is the terminology for it. That doesn't happen just for the use of our hands, it happens when people fully access for the first time, let's say, their emotional intelligence or their somatic intelligence or their awareness. If they're finding that moment of seeing that they are their awareness. Oftentimes, they can't even talk. They're say, "What's going on?" They try to reconstruct their life, because they're like, "Everything I believe is gone, what the hell is going on?" That's the way it works.
It's as if they've walked into this new world that they can't control and they can't even identify the parts of. Slowly, you just hang out in the world and everything takes care of itself, just like it does with an infant. If you don't get scared about it, then you're just, "Okay, yes, I don't know anything and I don't have to reconstruct anything." Pretty soon you're talking from that place. That's another thing to know.
Development moves like a corkscrew, that's really important. If you think about a corkscrew or stock market, you're moving up into the right, in human development, just like a stock market, you're moving ahead. It's like a corkscrew. Every time you're at the bottom of that corkscrew, it's like daddy issues and every time you're at the top, it's mommy issues. Then you can have abandonment issues or whatever.
You have these core things going through your life and you're refining them and they're becoming more and more subtle and more and more different as you become more and more sensitive, that you can notice more and more of the pain and agitation that you're feeling. What people often say is, "I thought I dealt with all my dad issues." It's like before awakening dad issues, after awakening to dad issues.
Brett: I was just going to say there's that one meme, where it's like before awakening and there's a child with a boot on his face. Then after awakening, it's the child with the boot on his face, but you can see it's zoomed out and he's holding the boot to his face.
[laughter]
Joe: I haven't seen that. That's funny.
Brett: That's great.
Joe: I would say after awakening, he's loving the fact that he's putting his own boot on his face.
Brett: It's the unclear to clear part saying, "Oh, I'm putting the same boot on my face." Then the corkscrew is like, "Oh, these are all the different ways I put the boot on my face." It's the same way each time around, but I just keep finding more and more subtle ways to heal it.
Joe: Yes, that's exactly--
Brett: That comes back to that pendulation, which is, "Wait, I thought I dealt with all this before. How am I--" Sometimes you're just seeing a new spin, the new turn on the corkscrew.
Joe: Right, a television show isn't enjoyable if it's just everybody's celebrating the whole show. If you can enjoy being in the not clear as well as the clear, if you can enjoy the corkscrew-- there's this great metaphor and truth, it's not a metaphor in a way. They know that if two people are on a roller coaster and they're going down, same exact experience and one of them is like, "Woohoo," and one of them is, "Oh my God, I'm so scared."
You go into their neurochemistry, what they know is that the one, that is scared, is releasing carcinogenic chemicals into their body and the other one is releasing anti-carcinogenic chemicals into their body. The exact same experience can be used to destroy somebody or to heal somebody.
Brett: It's the same as learning neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine.
Joe: Yes, that's right. The cortisol is carcinogenic if I recall correctly. That's what it is. It's, you're going to be on the roller coaster ride. How do you enjoy it? That's the question. How do you allow enjoyment to happen? That's the real question. The last thing to think about on this is, that we have our three brains. We can call them the head, the heart and the gut, or the human, the mammalian and the reptilian, or the nervous system and the emotional and the intellectual. They limit each other.
Even though they're really all one, if you're really developed on your intellectual side and you're not developed on your emotional side, it's like having three pencils attached by rubber bands. One can get only so high if one is so low. The most bang you're going to get for your buck is to move the low one higher because it gives everything else the most flexibility. It's just important to know that, if the path that you're working on has stopped working, you probably neglected one of the sides of yourself, one of the parts of yourself, so that's a really important thing to know.
Brett: Tell me about enjoying those things? Because this process we've just discussed is that there's going to be pendulation, you're just going to go from, "Oh, I'm healed to I'm still a total wreck." Of course, going through the same problems over and over in different ways, spending a lot of time feeling unclear and then playing whack-a-mole with these three [chuckles] parts of our nervous system. How do we enjoy this process?
Joe: A good story from my life was that there's this time when we got kicked out of the house for and at the time I felt like very unjust reasons in retrospect, it wasn't a match. It was a long time ago. Every time I saw the people involved or the house, it just like this knot in my stomach just was so there. It would come and go, as all emotions do, they come in waves. At some point, I'm: "Oh, cool. There's something there that I get to learn from."
It got to the point where I would literally drive by the house to hope that that feeling would come back so I could be with it and I could love it and I could spend time with that, I get to attend to it. That's what I did. I learned how to enjoy the thing that I felt was uncomfortable. That's critical and that's what it is, it is to not buy in--
Even this story is a way to help you enjoy it because if you buy into the pendulation that you've lost it, then it's very hard to enjoy. If you realize it's a learning process, then it's very easy to enjoy. If you are enjoying it, the learning happens quicker. It's like a virtuous loop. The more we enjoy it, the more we want to approach it and the easier the whole situation gets.
Brett: A feedback loop that we were talking about earlier.
Joe: Yes, that feedback there. Exactly. Clear to unclear is another great example of it. It's really easy to enjoy not knowing. [chuckles] It's really easy to enjoy being taken. Get in a car with somebody and ask them to drive you somewhere, but not to tell you where they're driving you and not to tell you how long and just see, that can be just as enjoyable, if not more enjoyable. It's really how do you let the enjoyment in, is the question in all of this stuff. That's really the key to preparing for the spiritual journey.
Brett: That's great, something to be curious about the entire way.
Joe: The entire time, yes.
Brett: Now, before we run out of time, I would like to get back to touching on these impediments and pitfalls. What kind of things can happen that can block this whole process?
Joe: There's so many little ones that I'm thinking about categorizing them in big ones. One of the pitfalls is thinking that you should do anything. That's a pitfall. It's like finding the wants behind your shoulds and letting your wants motivate you instead of your shoulds motivate you. In essence, the journey of self-development is the discovering of the self.
It is self-realization, it is self-awareness and a should in its nature is saying that you need to be controlled, that who you are in general needs to be managed, controlled, modified. Your wants are there is a general trust in who you are. If you think about it in a developmental perspective, an infant from zero years old until seven, they don't have any shoulds, there is no should in their brain. I don't know for sure, but I bet there's a culture where there might not ever be shoulds ever.
In that time period, they develop more than any other time period in life. They just follow their wants. Following your wants is really the most effective way to transform and following your shoulds is the least effective way and to make it a should is really just a doubt of trust of who you are.
The other crazy thing about wants that I think is really important is you take a five-year-old and they want something, they shout, "No. No. Yes. No," and they throw a temper tantrum.
Obviously, when we get older, we don't want to throw temper tantrums, so we say we shouldn't throw a temper tantrum instead of getting in touch with the fact that we don't want to throw-- we have iterated, we have evolved, we now want something different, but we turn that into a should, we change that natural impetus inside us into something that we should do.
Resisting resistance is another big one. People don't embrace the resistance, they don't embrace that intensity of resistance. There's a great phrase that just says, "If you can't love it, love the resistance to not loving it." That's really an important thing, is that don't fight the resistance, that's just more resistance. Another one is--
Brett: How do you not resist that resistance without creating a new resistance around that? [chuckles]
Joe: Yes. Right, exactly. In a war with yourself, who's going to lose? Exactly, yes. There's no way to do it, but to drop it. You just have to just stop. It's the only way. I remember that, I think it was the first time, I was about 24 years old, I went out into the woods to fast. I was looking over this ridgeline and I was noticing that I was fighting myself. Then I was noticing that I was fighting myself to stop fighting myself. Then I was noticing I was fighting myself to stop fighting myself to stop fighting myself. I was just ending up saying, "Yes, this isn't going to work."
[laughter]
Joe: I just stopped. That was the first moment that I realized that it's not a matter of effort, it's a matter of acceptance, it's a matter of not efforting, it's the stopping of the trying, it is the trust. That's important. Another piece that's important is skepticism. There's two forms of skepticism. One is important, one sucks for the spiritual journey.
The important one is, hey, if it's not true for you, you should know it's not true for you and you shouldn't think that it's true for you because some guru said it or because some Bible said it. If there is a truth, then that truth will be apparent in you and it will resonate in you and you will know it. Being skeptical of truth until you understand it and fully feel it, is important.
Being skeptical prevents you from trying, preventing you from experimenting, preventing you from being open enough to see a truth, that level of skepticism, it's getting kneecapped. It's like getting your legs cut off in a race. Then spreading that to other people is violent. That's that. Another important one is just notice when you're future or past living.
One of the biggest impediments is somebody who's either future living by state-seeking like, "Oh, I want to be in that experience of state again. Oh, I want to enjoy again. Oh, I want to be awakened." The opposite of that future living, which is, "This is going to be so hard. Oh, my God, I don't want to have to do this work. Oh, I have to feel my emotions again. This sucks." Like that. Oh, boy, both of those things, it's not enjoyable. [laughs] It is not enjoyable.
Brett: Just having an idea of what you're going to look like, who you're going to be once you've transformed.
Joe: Yes, exactly. Not enjoyable.
Brett: Projecting your current self onto your future self, "Oh, if only I was perfect in all of the ways that I currently think I should be, then I'll be done." [chuckles]
Joe: Yes, exactly. [chuckles] Not enjoyable. It is like the moment is far less enjoyable when you're thinking about how you're going to end up than [laughs] enjoying this moment. If you think about the moments that you've enjoyed yourself most, you probably weren't thinking about your conclusion. [chuckles] Some of the times we enjoy ourselves most is when the proposed conclusion just happened and so there's just nothing to strive for in that moment. Then, you come to the conclusion, "Ah," and then you create something to strive for and then you don't enjoy yourself anymore.
Then there's the future and past living in the past. Comparative mind is a form of this, of who's better and who's worse, it's like that requires future and past living to be able to do that. Anything like that it's also, they're big pitfalls, they're stalls in the journey. Then, the last thing about the journey that I think is really important--
This is the one that gets the most is that there's this natural cycle that happens that people go through and I'm sure you can recognize it. It's, you think to yourself, "Oh, I really want to--" I don't know, we'll pick anything. "I really want to stop smoking." We'll pick an easy one, "I really want to stop smoking." Then, "Okay, I got to do it. I got to really do it. You should do that. You should do that. You should do that. Why aren't you doing it? Why aren't you doing it? Okay, I'm good." Then, you do it.
Then as soon as you do it you're like, "Oh, okay. I hope this lasts. I hope this lasts. I hope this lasts." Then it's, "Oh, it's already going away. I already noticed that I'm wanting cigarettes again. Oh, shit, I had a cigarette. Oh, it's all over, I'm going back into-- Oh, crap, fuck, now I'm smoking again. I got to quit smoking. I got to quit smoking." That's the routine.
All of them rely on each other and you can cut it off at any other point but one of the easiest places to cut it off is when that moment when you actually have quit smoking or you have stopped yelling at your wife or you have stopped being a victim, is to appreciate it, is to actually just appreciate that moment and to keep on appreciating it. Instead of trying to hold on to it.
Brett: Right.
Joe: The idea that it's going to go away, it is the thing that creates it going away. The only thing that's really there to do is just to enjoy this moment. Enjoy that it's gone and the same thing can be said when you're smoking. If you're in the middle of smoking a pack a day, how do you enjoy each cigarette? How do you enjoy the hell out of yelling at your wife if you're going to do it? Because nobody really enjoys yelling at their wife. If you can really enjoy yelling at your wife, I bet the way you yell at your wife will change. It's not going away.
Brett: That circles back to a lot of the goal isn't for things to go away, it's to just watch how they shift and how they change. What is the impulse behind the behavior? Trying to be, rather than what our resistance changes it into. All of these impediments that you've just listed, all seem like different forms of resistance and so to wrap this up, since we're running out of time, I just want to ask you, how can you enjoy resistance? [chuckles]
Joe: You just pointed to something which is really great, which is if you want yourself to change, it slows down the process. Want is the wrong word. If you're getting angry and you are trying to change the fact that you get angry, that is a slower process, than if you love your anger and you invite your anger in and you welcome your anger. That is a far quicker process.
Brett: How can we do that without hurting people?
Joe: Wait. Unless you start doing it to try to make it go away, for example “I'm going to welcome my anger to make it go away”, then it doesn't work anymore. I'm not saying welcome your anger at people, I'm just saying welcome the experience of anger that one feels when they're angry. I'm not suggesting to go and be angry at people, but to welcome your anger, to accept it and to love it. To express it in a way that's safe, it doesn't create more shame.
I just want to point that, what you said was brilliant and then I think your question was, how do you enjoy resistance? That goes back to that statement of, if you can't love the thing, if you can't love the anger, love your resistance to the anger. How do you enjoy resistance? How do you love your resistance? This is the whole question of the spiritual search and the whole way to prepare, is how do you enjoy this process?
Brett: That's great. This has been amazing. I think we're running out of time now.
Joe: What a pleasure.
Brett: Yes, this has been amazing.
Joe: Awesome. Well, I look forward to the next time and it was good talking to you. More to come.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.com
The premise of The Art of Accomplishment is simple: it is our heart’s capacity that determines our success and happiness in life. Emotional intelligence is the bottleneck to the change we want to see in ourselves and the world. Tapping into our heart’s potential opens up the possibility of fulfilling our greatest ambitions without sacrificing our sense of joy and authenticity.
We are taught early on that if we accomplish enough stuff we will have the life of our dreams, only to find it is a life that fails to make us happy and fulfill our hopes. In this 9-part series, you will discover that how you get things done is what makes your life far more fulfilling.
Not only because you will enjoy the process of an authentic life but because enjoyment and self-awareness are critical tools in making what you accomplish more meaningful and effortless.
The Art of Accomplishment podcast series accompanies the online course led by Joe Hudson. More more info, visit artofaccomplishment.com.
"When you’re self aware, it means there is a full expression of you happening. It’s why with the great artists, you see their full expression. And they can only get to that self expression, they can only get to that level of ease, by having more and more self awareness."
Brett: A lot of people have a sense that self-development and accomplishment are mutually exclusive, that in order to be maximumly productive it's necessary to sacrifice parts of who we are, or to back-burner our own personal evolution. We focus on creating systems for setting and achieving goals. We imagine that by doing this, we'll somehow arrive at our fully developed self without examining where these goals came from in the first place. A question I often hear asked is how will self inquiry help me be productive and lead to more accomplishment?
Joe: It's an amazing thing about the human brain, that we really like to create false distinctions. It's something that we do. I think it's because the brain in general its job is to create distinction, it likes to create false distinction. It's very much to me like the way it was in the 1970s when you could either be a businessman or you could be an environmentalist but you couldn't be both, that they were at odds.
Then somewhere in the '90s, they figured out, "No, you can do both, that's possible." It's the same thing with this. In fact, they really drive each other. The personal development focus, that course if you will, gets tested in business and gets tested in projects, gets tested in getting things done. You get to learn a lot from where that rubber meets the road and vice-versa; that as you learn how to understand yourself better and other people better, which is the whole point of personal development.
Then obviously you get better tools in business and you do better at getting things done. It's why I always use the phrase, art of accomplishment. It's speaking about the fact that accomplishing stuff is more about the how, than it is about what you get done. You can accomplish something and your focus could be like, my job is to earn a million dollars but in actuality you're going to be less likely to earn that million dollars, if you're not focused on the how you're going about it.
I'll give you an example of this. My girlfriend in college, her name was Cate and she was a really good tennis player. With her coach, she would serve and try to hit like a basket, one of those baskets that you pick up the balls with. She was good, so she would hit it two or three out of five times. Then one day the coach took the basket off the ground and put a quarter right in the middle where that basket was sitting and said, "Serve and hit the quarter."
She didn't hit the quarter once, but she would have hit the basket every single time if it was still sitting on top of that quarter. It's the thing that we see in business all the time which is focusing through the goal is one of the ways to make sure you accomplish your goals.
Whether it be being the best company in the world, or whether it means beating the competition, or whether it means trying to change the world for the better through environmental solutions, or whether it means great customer service, whatever it is, having a goal that's beyond the goal that you have, makes the goal more likely to be gotten. It makes the goal more likely to be gotten.
Brett: Tell me what makes this an art.
Joe: You think about art. Think about it like this, there's accomplishment and accomplishment basically means that you've achieved something successfully. Successful is the first question that you have to ask. What does successfully mean? To me, it means that the task is done holistically. Is it an accomplishment to make $10? If that's my goal, if I also like sacrificed everything I love for that $10? That doesn't make any sense at all, that doesn't feel like accomplishment. It's a holistic success.
It means that you're firing on all cylinders, that you're getting the whole thing done. Think about it like a building. Success isn't just getting the building erected. It's a quality building. It's a beautiful building. It's a useful building. That's what makes success. You're looking for the holistic thing. Then if you're thinking about it as far as an art form, then you have to move out of the tyranny of a checklist.
Which is like, "I've written something down. Now I have to do it, or I'm going to beat myself up because I haven't done it." It's going to move into how you do it. How is it that I'm going about doing it? That's what makes it an art form. There's very specific things. If you think about art in general, what art does, the artistry of something, it means that you have more ease in doing it. It's a path of self-awareness and you recognize that your consciousness is the product.
Brett: Let's get into those further. Tell me more about the ease. There's a lot of things that we want to do that are accomplishments, that just simply are not going to ever be easy, or so we think.
Joe: Or so we think. There's a couple of ways that go at the ease part of it. One way to go at the ease part of it is to think about it like there's an old story about a prince coming to a butcher. He says to the butcher, "How often do you sharpen your knives?" The butcher says, "I never sharpen my knives." The Prince goes, "That's impossible. The best butchers in the world have to sharpen their knives at least once a month." The Butler says, "No, no, my blade finds the space between the meat and the bone."
It's basically saying how you get things done is with the minimal amount of friction, that the master of a craft is doing it with the least moves. It's not about winning or losing anymore. They're far beyond the winning and losing of something. It's just, how do I do it with the least amount of effort? What's amazing in our society is that we think about effectiveness or efficiency in speed, as humans not as cars. Cars, it's really obvious.
The fastest car doesn't mean it's the most efficient car, but we think that if we've gotten done something quickly, then we're very efficient, but efficiency isn't measured by speed. In the human condition, it's measured by enjoyment. We are efficient when we are enjoying ourselves. It means the least amount of effort is necessary. The least amount of fuel is necessary to make something happen. If you're accomplishing something with that kind of ease, when you're accomplishing something with enjoyment, which is how we measure that ease, then you're in the artistry of it. That's what I mean by ease.
Brett: That makes a lot of sense, because the opposite of ease is that you are actually fighting yourself in some way. There's a part of you that doesn't want to do the thing, another part of you that does want to do the thing. There's dissonance there and a loss of efficiency. It's interesting to think of efficiency as ease or measured by ease.
Joe: Exactly. Which is beautifully put, because what you're saying there is that the friction is mostly caused by the lack of self-awareness. When you understand what you are, when you are aware of how you work, there's a lot less friction. That's why the second part is so important. The artistry brings you closer to yourself.
If you've ever met a great artist and there's a way, at least when they're working, at the very least when they're working, you see this self-awareness, this presence that occurs and that's what it means. That self-awareness, it brings you closer to yourself. It calls you into something deeper. It has to be a full expression of you. It's self-awareness. When you're self-aware, it means that there's a full expression of you happening. It's with the great artists, you see their full expression. They don't feel muted or stilted. They can only get to that self-expression, they can only get to that level of ease by having more and more self-awareness and the self-awareness of how they work.
Brett: That sounds similar to what might happen if somebody's looking at a to-do list of things they want to get done and they think efficiency is efficiently knocking out all the boxes, but what might be actually more efficient is asking themselves why they want to get that list done in the first place. Maybe, if there's one question they could ask themselves that removes half of that list, that is actually an increase in efficiency.
It sounds like this is the personal version of doing that, like, "Why is it that I want to be getting these things done? Why is it that I want to be successful? What does success actually bring to me?"
Joe: That's a beautiful point. That's exactly right. When I look at my list every morning, I always think about what can I do that will make this whole list irrelevant or easier? It's the same thing with the medalist in life. There's a beautiful technique that you can use, which is, "Okay, if I get that done, am I happy then?" Then my mind will usually go, "No, I'll need this," and say, "Okay, well, if I get that done, will I be happy then?" It can just go on and on.
Brett: It's like making the one decision that can eliminate 100 other decisions. Finding, perhaps in many of these cases, the one need within us that resolves 100 other secondary needs that we thought we needed to fill.
Joe: That's exactly it and that's what self-awareness does just by its nature.
Brett: Great. You mentioned that your consciousness is the product that you're working on in that case. Let's dig into that a little bit more.
Joe: That's the last part of what makes it an art form, is that, if you're looking at a piece of art, there's a way in which you can feel like a painting, you can feel how the artist was when they were painting. When the artist acknowledges that, then what the artist can do is really understand that their consciousness is what is being consumed. It doesn't matter if it's Facebook, or Ford, or Van Gogh, we're feeling the consciousness of those people who made it.
We're feeling that experience. If they were anxious and nervous, then we're perpetuating anxiousness and nervousness. If they were worried about not having enough, they're going to make sure that we are worried about not having enough, when we use that product or when we consume their consciousness.
[crosstalk]
Brett: That seems even more true these days, as a lot more consumers are thinking about products that they feel much more personally aligned with rather than just, "Oh, look, it's a jug of milk." It's like, "No, because this is a jug of milk that treats cows in the way that is more agreeable to me." Or, "This is the company that is working on making more fuel-efficient or electric cars and that's something that really speaks to me." What you're saying is that, even a company, even a product, is a piece of art and that the consciousness of its creators should come through in that.
Joe: It does. You just can't help it. There's a great quote that my friend Steve used to say to me, he said, "At the peak of a poet's career, he is a businessman and the peak of a businessman's career, he is a poet," or she is a poet or she is a businessman. It is an absolute truth, that how we get something done affects what the end product of our doing is. It's as simple as if we rush to sweep the porch, or if we enjoy sweeping the porch. We're going to get two different jobs done and it's going to look different at the end of it.
Our consciousness affects it and it's the acknowledgment that that's the case, that the real gift that we're giving to the world is in the product, that's tangible, it's the product of our consciousness that we're delivering. Acknowledging that the consciousness is part of the equation of the product, that it is in part the product that we are producing and that other people are consuming, is what makes it an art form, not just a doing.
Brett: I think another great example of that would be in software development. Any software that's developed by a team that's frenetically running around trying to finish completing their backlog, product and engineering aren't communicating with each other very well. That product is going to end up having that consciousness writ large in its implementation in bugs and missed-- like features that don't make sense, et cetera.
Joe: Exactly. That's right.
Brett: Let's talk a little bit more about our consciousness as the product of this work. A lot of people would see that as odds with business because the focus is moving away from perhaps the business itself towards yourself. What would you say to them?
Joe: Again, it's a lot like the '70s with the environmentalist. You can make money cutting down trees. You can make money planting trees. You can make money making all of your product artistic. You can make money making all of your product as cheap as possible. There's a thousand ways to make money. Just walk down the street of any city and everything you look at has got 7 or 8 or 10 people making money behind it.
There's infinite ways of making money. The idea that how we are when we make the money isn't part of that equation is just silliness. It's something that happens when people don't want to feel their whole experience and they make the excuse that, "Oh, it's just business." Or they make the excuse that I had to do this because it's business. The craziest thing is, you look at incredibly successful businessmen who are just merciless in their desire for winning competition or for quality or for customer service. They will never allow a team to not deliver or allow a team to sacrifice the important things.
Yet, as soon as the idea is like, "Oh, we can all be growing as humans," or that we can all be having full expression here comes up, they're like, "No, I can't do that." We can out-compete. We can build a billion-dollar company. We can out-compete over-resourced competition, but we can't also do it in such a way that we really enjoy ourselves. It's a ridiculous notion and it comes from an inner thought that they have that they can't be their full selves and be successful.
That they had to cut off a part of themselves to be successful. That normally just comes from the fact that they had to cut out a part of themselves to make mom and dad happy. That's where it's really coming from. It's just very limited thinking.
Brett: A belief that productivity and achievement requires sacrifice. If you're feeling sacrificed, that might mean you're on the right track to achievement.
Joe: Let's take a look at that one for a second. Who sacrificed more, the men who created Google or the men who created Benelli Tires? Who worked harder? Who put their family at bigger risk? It's just nonsensical to think who worked harder. It's nonsensical to think that there is that level of sacrifice needed. There's people who make millions of dollars without it, millions of dollars with it. It's what do you enjoy? It's what do you love?
If you love working 80 hours a week and you love that kind of productivity, don't tell everybody it's necessary. Just say it's what you did and you loved it. I listened to Elon Musk talk about this and he said, you have to work all the time and I thought to myself, "You had to work all the time when you had one company. Now you have three companies or four companies, or five companies and you're still working all the time, which really means that you only had to work 25% of the time to do the company that you originally did. You didn't have to work all the time. You're proving it."
Brett: That's a really good point. A lot of people say that they have to get a paycheck and so all this art sounds great, but they're not in that position or maybe they're not running their own company. Maybe they're in some hierarchy in some organization or even if they do have their own company, they're just, "Well, I have to make money. I have to make money now. I have to make money with this particular runway. I just don't have time to make this an art."
Joe: [laughs] I lived in Los Angeles for a while, I live next to this first generation from Central America family, just sweethearts. The son, when he decided it was time to go out to work, he was 18 years old and he worked at a subway. When he was working at the subway, he just did it with pizzazz. He did it with friendliness, he did it with joy. He did it with a bit of like a singing-- he was just one of those characters.
You've had the experience, you've gone into someplace and there's somebody on the other side of the counter who's enjoying themselves and they're maybe singing or they got a little pizzazz, he was one of those people. He worked there I think for three weeks until somebody walked in and was like, "Hey, I have a restaurant and I need someone." Then within another six months, he was the Sous chef. Then he just kept on going.
I don't know where he is now but that was the example to me, that it doesn't matter what you're doing. If you do it with artistry, you're creating the world that you want. The idea that you can't do that in any situation-- I mean, Mandela did it in a prison. How he wanted to be. The artistry that he was delivering to humanity was there when he was in a prison. To think that you can't do it because you're in a bureaucracy, it's just as limited of the thinking as a businessman saying, "We can't be whole humans and do business."
The crazy thing about that that I think people don't recognize is if you think you can't do it because of your situation, then you're owning the position of a victim. It's like somebody whose life is oppressing them. If you have that position, there's only two people who really want to spend time with you, other victims and people who abuse you, because that's the only people who you have that value for.
Other victims will be like, "Great, yes, we're oppressed. Let's all talk about how oppressed we are." The abusers are like, "Cool, you feel like you're oppressed? Great, I will oppress you. That's exactly what I need to get my world cranking." The mentality of that invites it, just like all of our mentalities invite the world that we see, to become real.
Brett: Right. That could be an entire episode of its own and I'm sure it will be. How does a person get to this place then?
Joe: There's three bits on how a person gets to seeing all of their accomplishment as art, to seeing that there's an art of accomplishment. The first is an intention. I don't call it a goal. I don't call it a mandate. It's just holding it in your consciousness that this is where I want to be. It's like looking at a map and saying Los Angeles is where I want to be, or San Francisco is where I want to be. It doesn't require any more weight than that.
Brett: It's like an implementation agnostic goal.
Joe: Yes, exactly. That's right. If you dig into that a little bit-- there's this story about an admiral. I can't remember his name, who it was, taken in the POW camps in Vietnam and he was asked, "Who got out of the camps?" He said, "That's easy. It was the people who knew they would get out." The interviewer asked then, “Who didn't get out of the camps?” He answered, "That's easy. It's the optimists."
The interviewer was confused and said, "Optimist? What do you mean? How is that different than your first answer?" He said, "The optimists were the ones who thought they'd get out by Christmas, or by Easter, or by the rainy season. They were the ones that didn't make it." The intention is just holding that intention out there, knowing that you're going to arrive there. That's the first bit. The second bit is take it all as an iteration. There's no failure. There's no success.
There's just I am learning by iterating and experimenting, iterating and experimenting, iterating and experimenting. I don't have to be hard on myself to learn lessons. I don't have to be hard on myself, because I had a certain timeframe. It's just a very gentle iteration, iteration, iteration, just the way you would think an artist would do after a 20-year career. They kept on playing, kept on trying and new and crazier things came out. Then the last part is to know that it's not really a doing.
You asked, how does a person get there? It's not a doing, it's an undoing. We're just basically learning to undo a whole bunch of training and be in a natural state. I'll give you a great example of it. If you put your two hands together and put it like, let's say that the palms of your hands in front of your face and try as hard as you can to pull your hands apart.
If your hands are apart right now, you're not trying, you're doing, so forget the doing and just go to the trying and try as hard as you can to pull your hands apart. Now without thinking about it, feel the exact opposite thing that you feel when you're trying. That's what it means to undo, you're undoing. That's what you do. To make all of your accomplishment artistry, to make life the art of accomplishment, then you're undoing.
Brett: It's interesting. As I did that, during the trying, there's like a sense of planning going on throughout my entire system. Imagining which muscles I would move and how to move my hands apart. I can do all of that without actually moving at all. It feels like a good metaphor for beating myself up over a to-do list.
Joe: Exactly. That's exactly it. Awesome. That's great.
Brett: Then what are we undoing exactly and what does that help us accomplish, or how does that help us to accomplish things?
Joe: The main thing that you're undoing is this misconception that you aren't inherently good. Basically, what we're undoing is a whole bunch of limiting beliefs. There's probably about seven main limiting beliefs, but they're all resting on one limiting belief. The one limiting belief is that you're not inherently good, that you have to put effort to make yourself good enough, of value, better, that it's not your natural place, that you're not there yet.
If you think about an oak tree, when is an oak tree good enough? Is the oak tree good enough when it's an acorn or when it's 2 years old or when it's 150 years old or when it's collapsing, when it's becoming dirt, when is it good enough? When is it not inherently good? That's the thing that we think about ourselves is that we have someplace to be to get inherently good and or some way of being and what's actually preventing us from acting in an inherently good way is only the idea that we're not, it's only the idea that we've done something wrong--
Brett: Right. I think that's a really good point, because there's a really big pitfall that I've experienced in personal development or trying to become more productive or work on my systems of accomplishment, where we start to see how everybody else is doing things and we're like, "Oh man. I need to get from where I am to where they are by somehow making myself better, because I'm not good enough. If only I had this person's system or that person's motivation and drive or that person's clarity. If I could get there, then I would be able to get things done," which just really does reinforce that, "Oh, I'm just not there yet. I just don't have it in me." Silently.
Joe: Exactly, which just slows down the whole system. A baby doesn't think that they're bad, because they're crawling, they're going to walk. They don't need to think that they're bad, because they're crawling. It's just a natural part of the developmental cycle and there's that form of goodness and there's also the other form of goodness, which is every time you defend something in yourself, there's some way that you're believing that you're not inherently good, that you have to defend something about yourself.
I don't mean defense like someone tries to throw a punch, you block it. I mean defense like someone accuses you of being bad and you think you have to justify something. What would make you need to justify something? If somebody came to you and said the sky is purple at noon, the sky is purple, would you really need to defend the fact that the sky was blue? There's some inherent belief system that there's something, that there's a shame, that there's something wrong with us and that's part of the inherent goodness that once you understand that that is your natural state, there's so much less to be doing, so much less.
I'll give you an example for a second about how it works. Let's say one of the limiting beliefs that I see people do all the time is that perfection is more important than connection. They think that they need to be perfect because they think that they're not good enough or their thing needs to be perfect or their presentation needs to be perfect or their product needs to be perfect or the date needs to go perfect or whatever it is.
They focus on that trying to make it perfect instead of how do I connect. They choose perfection over connection. If they choose connection, they're far more successful and they will choose it naturally if they don't think that they have to be perfect to be good enough or to be good. Specifically, how this works is, you can try to create the perfect product or you can try to create a product that's in connection with your customer and to stay in connection with your customer. The second is going to do much better than the perfect product. If you have a first date and you're trying to be perfect, that's not going to go so well.
Even if they happen to have a second date for you, you've been trying to be perfect so they're not dating you, they're dating some idealized version of yourself and eventually that shit's going to go sideways. Whereas, if you just go for the connection, if you say, "Oh, how do I connect with this person? Let's see if it's a match." Then it's a far more productive stance. The place where it's most articulated is in meditation where people try to have the perfect experience of meditating instead of being in connection with themselves. It's the difference between torture and meditation. Meditation is connection. Managing yourself is torture.
Brett: I spent a long time in meditation doing maybe an hour practice every day just because I was really stressed out about work and beating myself up over to-do list, the usual. I would meditate more and more and find that it would call my mind, but my goal in meditation was to call my mind not to feel what I needed to feel. That really just pulled me away from the emotions that were trying to help me update to my situation.
Joe: I find that if you're trying to manage your experience, it's pulling you away from yourself instead of being with what you are and enjoying it.
Brett: Tell me some more of those limiting beliefs.
Joe: There's a couple others that I can think about. There is improvement instead of being authentic. That's the one that you mentioned earlier in the podcast, where you were talking about wanting to be better at this or better than that, instead of wanting to know what you actually are. I want to be enlightened instead of wanting to know what I am. Wanting to be enlightened path is a far slower path than wanting to know what I am.
I want to work successfully 60 hours a week is far less effective than understanding what your natural rhythm is and what your natural way of being most productive is. It's that constant question of like trying to improve yourself instead of find out what your authenticity is.
Brett: Or I want a hundred million users versus I want this to improve people's lives.
Joe: Right. If it's authentic that you want a hundred million users, if that's really the thing that's going to charge you, then that might be your authenticity, but then the question is, what do you have to do that is authentic to you to get them, instead of how do I make my podcasts so great that they get them, that I get the users?
Brett: What are some others?
Joe: Other ones is shoulds before wants. I find people always are trying to motivate themselves with their shoulds instead of with their wants and wants are far more motivating and far more effective at getting us places. If you think about the first seven years of your life, you couldn't even have shoulds and then all of a sudden, shoulds show up and all your development slows down. You get more development in the first seven years of your life than you do pretty much at any other time of your life.
It's when you stop following your wants and you start following your shoulds that everything gets slowed down. Again, like with both of these, the only way you would think, oh, I need to improve, instead of, I need to be authentic, is if you think that you're not inherently good. The only way you would think I should do that, instead of, I want to do that is because you think that you aren't inherently good.
There's seven of them but the other one that's just coming to mind right now is the one we spoke about, defense versus love. That most of us immediately move to defend ourselves rather than love the person. The quintessential example of this is the boss tells you what you need to do to improve and most people get defensive, instead of saying to themselves, "Oh my goodness, my boss just took a social risk on me. Potentially risked our relationship, because he cared or she cared enough to help me be successful." We don't think, "Oh well, thanks. Thanks for taking the risk of telling me that."
Brett: That's quite a flip on the usual script.
Joe: Right, because we move from defense instead of love. These are all the ways and we only have to do that if we think we're not inherently good. That's what they are.
Brett: How does seeing your inherent goodness tie into the art part of this art of accomplishment?
Joe: If you see that you're inherently good, then obviously things become more enjoyable and more easy because there's less fight that you have with yourself. That's just simple. The more that you focus on your enjoyment, the more you stop having to fight with yourself. There is this quote that, "In a war with yourself, you're always going to lose." That enjoyment comes to a large degree because you're fighting with yourself has ceased or has slowed down. That happens when you see your inherent goodness. That's part of how that works.
Then when you fully realize, that your consciousness is what is coming through whatever product you're creating, then the question is what's the consciousness that you want to give to other folks. If you're coming from a place of understanding your inherent goodness, then that's the product that you're going to be creating. It's one that ties people into their inherent goodness. It's not so limiting as one might think. Meaning, take a look at some of the great artists of our day. I'll use a comedian because it's the--
Brett: For example?
Joe: I'll give us an example because some people might not call him an artist but Jim Carrey. If you listen to his story and this is so much the case, it's like they were going about their career. It wasn't going so well. Then all of a sudden they just were like, "I am going all the way. I am not going to hold back. I am going to take the big risk of my full expression. I'm going to basically trust that if I just go all the way with myself, things are going to work out. I'm going to trust that goodness." All of a sudden, bolder and bolder things come out of the artist. Jim Carrey is an example of this.
When we watch it, we think it's confidence. We're like, "Oh my God, that guy could do all that crazy stuff. How confident must he be?" It's really a confidence in something that's beyond them. It's a confidence in their inherent goodness. When you see that in people, we just naturally want to follow it. We just naturally want to be a part of that. It's why we see so much of that in some of the greatest movers and shakers of our time. People who've accomplished just amazing things in their lives is that full trust. I guess one of the ways to look at it, is to see it as it's like channeling. You can only channel if you trust what's coming through you.
That channeling is what it starts to feel like when you're deeply in the art of accomplishment. A way to look at the art of accomplishment is like in some traditions they would call it channeling. They would call it cleaning out your tube so that you could have greater access to the thing that's moving through all of us. The animator of all life. Neurology would call it alpha waves but it's not flow state. Being in that flow state can only come when you can rely on your inherent goodness. If you're judging yourself, you're questioning yourself and you're in a fight with yourself, you can't be an alpha. You can't be in flow state.
Brett: Another good way to describe that I think is just something, this idea of channeling is acting from something that's coming from outside of your identity of yourself. A lot of artists-- we were talking about artistry here. A lot of musicians have talked about how when they were in the flow and they were writing some of their biggest hits, they felt like it wasn't them doing the writing. It was just the words were coming through them.
Joe: We've all had this experience. We've all had the experience of playing music without having to think about it or just channeling the emails and just knowing exactly what to write. We've all had the experience of being in that flow state and that only comes when we can trust our inherent goodness.
Brett: I think that's the feeling people are trying to get at, when they're knocking out a to-do list, finding themselves in that flow. I think a lot of this is just it's not about the to-do list, it's about what it is that you actually want to be doing.
Joe: It's about allowing the lack of fight to be in your system. Our system by nature doesn't want to fight with itself. To allow that to happen really allows the flow state to occur. The final bit is as I think you already mentioned it, it's the self-awareness, which is the only way that we're ever going to see that we're inherently good is for us to see what we inherently are. It requires us to drop the stories of ourselves and the ideas of ourselves and it requires us to love the ego right into oblivion.
That self-awareness is what allows us to see that we're not just channeling it, we are it. That we thought we were small, but what we really are is part of everything. When we see ourselves as everything, when our identity switches from the little me to the whole, then the inherent goodness is all. Everything is in that inherent goodness. There's just a piece that comes with it. That's why, when you see those artists who have 50 years at the carving table and you see just this piece in them, the piece of artistry, of a deep artistry, that's where it comes from.
Brett: As we start to view accomplishment more as an art, what is going to change about the way that we do things and how do we address that fear that might exist, that getting into this personal development stuff is going to make us even for a period of time, less productive? If we have a 18-hour Workday right now and that's the thing that we're doing and it just feels like the whole house of cards is going to collapse if we just take one day off from that, what's the step forward?
Joe: That's a great question. They did this great study in the US Army. The study was that they took two tests that were the same test, but different reliable and whatnot. They took a group of soldiers in boot camp and they just worked them to death and had them sleep-deprived. Then they put them in front of the test and they did the test and then they let them rest for a couple of days, RNR and then they came back. They weren't sleep-deprived and they did the test.
They asked the soldiers of these two tests, which one did you think you scored better at and which one do you think you did quicker? 80% of the people thought that they had done quicker work and more accurate work on the first test when they were sleep-deprived. In actuality, 100% of them did better when they had rest and they were not being rushed through the whole situation. It tells us that we have a mental illusion that happens, like an optical illusion. We think that when we're busy and we were sleep-deprived and we're running around checking off boxes, we think we're more efficient when in actuality we're not.
Brett: The multitasking studies as well, where they proved that people really do not multitask. They just think they multitask, but their performance actually degrades.
Joe: Exactly. It's exactly the same principle. The first thing is to acknowledge that situation. Then to start to disassociate the idea of ease with productivity. Some people, because they're only productive when they're in friction, they think that productivity is friction. To see, to really find real ways of measuring, "Are you getting the stuff done and not working as hard or enjoying yourself more?" They really find that out.
It's interesting. This culture, it's, "You didn't work 60 hours, why are you lazy?" In other cultures that have been doing particularly Southern Europe, they're like, "You had to work 60 hours to get your job done? Why are you so incompetent?" It's just a completely different way to take a look at it. That's the first thing to know. The second part of your question is how do things change? Well, you get bigger things done. You get things that are more aligned in your system done. You don't sacrifice your well-being from the accomplishment of your career or your money but you don't sacrifice your career and your money, so that you can have better well-being.
The dichotomy starts to go away and you see that your work is a means to an end of your well-being. That the well-being is a means and an end to your work. That they become the same thing. They stop becoming separate in your system. The nervous system starts to relax. You start doing things like, "Oh, I can move this lever here and I just have to wait for a couple of months and everything will fall into place." Or, "I could put two weeks in and I will have it done in one month instead of two."
You start to see these little leverage points. You start to see the world more as a system. The way the artist talk about it is-- like carving artists, they'll talk about, that they see the work in the wood, before they even get started. It's not about, "I have an idea of what I want it to look like and I'm going to carve it into the wood." It's like the wood is telling me what it wants to be carved into. What it wants to be made into.
That's the experience of life in general. Is that you're following. The Daoists talk about it as the way of water. Water doesn't require any effort to get to the ocean. It just follows. It just goes to the lowest point. It is effortless in its way. It is more powerful than any sword. Try to fight water with a sword and you'll know. That's the way that it starts to feel. That life starts to feel.
Brett: So, what you were saying earlier, is that a lot of this work is actually an undoing. An undoing of the limiting misconceptions of self?
Joe: If you look at the martial arts, they really subscribe a lot of the same theory to what I'm talking about. One of the ways is that your whole body is relaxed until the moment of impact. If I was going to tense the whole time and hit you, my punch is a lot less powerful than if I'm relaxed the whole time and then tense right before I hit you. It's conserving your energy and making you stronger at the same time. Making your movement have more impact. We somehow think walking around tense all the time is going to make us more effective. It's just ridiculous.
Brett: Right. Also keep us narrowed and focused too. If we're walking around tense about all the things that we're thinking about getting done, we're not asking the bigger questions, that really help us find that one decision that can eliminate a hundred decisions. A lot of what you're talking about, this idea of breaking down these misconceptions of the self and trusting and leaning back into our inherent goodness. Letting go of the trying and just being in the doing.
A lot of that allows us, our entire nervous system and our minds to relax and see outside of the boxes of any of the shorter-term tasks of thinking that we're doing which, really helps us to really guide our lives out of grander scale and then drive our businesses. Kids spend several months working on go, go, go. Getting one particular project done. Pushing one feature, that part way through the process we could have easily, if we had a big enough view, determined the landscape had changed and that this is becoming a waste of effort.
Joe: It happens on fractal levels. It happens on, "Wow, I've just spent 20 years creating a life that I don't want." It happens on, "I just spent two months doing a project, that my boss really didn't give a shit if I did and I just spent the last two minutes worrying about something that I could have spent creating something."
Brett: I think that's one of the things that makes this so counterintuitive is that often it's just much easier to think, "Oh, I'm almost there. I just need to do this, that and the other things, that are in line with my past 20 years of plan and that would get me there," which is a much easier thing to experience for many, than the recognition that maybe 20 years of my life has been spent further and further away from my authenticity.
Joe: Right and getting me there is the crux. That's the bit, the idea that where you are right now isn't good enough. You see this all the time in business where you see somebody who's been successful talking to somebody who's trying to be successful. The person who's trying to be successful is like, "Well, you're able to be so confident, so being able to say yes or no to things, so nonchalant about opportunities, because you already have success." There's some truth to that. There's no doubt about it, but what I've seen is that the people who hold that position, invite the success, more than they get it.
What I notice in my business is that the more that I became picky, the more that I decided it just wasn't worth it if I didn't do the thing that I wanted to do. I started rejecting clients, or I started rejecting investments, or I started rejecting really good deals, then all of a sudden, more and more good deals, more and more good clients started showing up. That comes when you aren't in that place of fear that you need to prove something. To be good enough, to be loved, it comes when you can trust your inherent goodness.
Brett: I think that speaks a lot to this reciprocal nature of accomplishment versus personal development, where it seems that, many of us think that accomplishment is going to give us the confidence and so if we just go for accomplishment first, then we'll have the confidence. What you're saying is that we can build the confidence. We can build not just a false sense of confidence, but if we are confident in who we actually are, then that will lead to the accomplishment, which then can feedback-- because there is a little bit of feedback loop.
Like you said, once you've been successful doing something, it definitely helps you feel that way. We can actually work on that personal side directly and everything else is downstream of there.
Joe: I wouldn't even call it confidence. It's like the closest word that our society knows to put on it, because confidence feels like-- at least the way it's interpreted is "I'm good enough or da, da, da." It's not really I'm good enough. It's just, I know what I am. I just know what I am. I know what I like. I know what I want and I am committed to being a full expression of that.
That's the key thing and that knowing who you are and really finding out, that's what the real cool part about the whole journey is, right? Because to do that, you have to see that you're inherently good. Then to do that, you have to see what you inherently are and then that requires us to drop these stories and our ideas of ourselves and it requires us to just allow the ego to be loved into oblivion.
Brett: That transforms us into an artist.
Joe: Yes and the artist transforms us into that. To see ourselves as everything, allows us to have that energy when we move in the world instead of to see ourselves as this limited thing.
Brett: Great. Well, thanks again for your time.
Joe: Thank you. A pleasure.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.com
In self-discovery practices, there’s this idea that the path to deeper freedom is to go through our resistance. This often sets us up with an adversarial relationship to our resistance, as if all it does is needlessly hold us back. In this episode, we discuss resistance as we might reconnect with an old friend -- exploring how it shows up in all its forms, the path to developing a healthy relationship with resistance, and all the fun and foibles we can expect along the way.
"My kind of rule of thumb is go for the joy. If I don't want the resistance to change, how can I meet it most joyfully?"
Brett: Today, we are leaning into resistance, how it shows up and all its forms, the path to developing a healthy relationship with resistance, and all of the fun and foibles we can expect along the way. In self-discovery practices, there´s this idea that the path to deeper freedom is to go through our resistance. This often sets us up with an adversarial relationship to our resistance, as if all it does is needlessly hold us back. The other day I read an essay by David Whyte on the word denial. I highly recommend giving the entire essay a read. We´ll link to it in our show notes.
But his closing lines really caught my attention. "To live in denial is to be in very good company. Denial is a crossroads between perception and readiness. To deny denial is to invite powers into our lives we have not readied ourselves to meet." So Joe, David´s treatment of denial rhymes with something you say a lot, which is, “If you can't love the thing, love your resistance to the thing.” If denial is one form of resistance, seeing it in this light seems like a good pointer toward learning to love it. What exactly is resistance?
Joe: It is an interesting thing what David Whyte is saying. It's incredibly profound, and I think it needs to be said, because it’s usually the relationship people don't have with denial. It is typical that people are like, “You are in denial!” They are not like, “Okay, cool, you are in denial.” It is just something you don't hear. From the perspective of a war with yourself you always lose to see the benefit of the side, to not take the other side personally, to see the other perspective really allows you to have less of a war with yourself.
From that perspective, I really appreciate what David Whyte is saying, and I really appreciate that that's needed often. I would even suggest David Whyte would also probably say there is a time to see through your denial as well. I think the main thing resistance is not being at peace with what is. That´s a great way to describe it on an intellectual basis.
On an emotional basis, it usually amounts to not wanting to feel something. That's usually where resistance comes from in the emotional body. In the nervous system body, there is some fear there that resistance usually comes along to, even though it might look like anger or frustration.
But for me, the most important thing to think about when I am thinking about resistance is, it's a natural step in transformation. I get very excited when I am working with somebody and they get resistant, because I am like, “Awesome, this means we are on the right path.” And it´s their path. It's not my path. It's not what I think they should do or where I think they should be.
Impartiality is incredibly important, and the other wisdom of what David Whyte is saying is, it's when they're ready. What's interesting is, we are always ready for a new perspective, epiphany or seeing through something, but maybe it's not that and maybe it's not now or maybe you are seeing through something slightly different. No matter how wise your guru gets or the person you are listening on a podcast gets, they can´t be more wise or have more knowledge about you. No matter how wise you get, you don't get to have more knowledge than the person you are talking to about them or more wisdom. It's really critical to allow them their paths and not want them to be any different.
Brett: It seems like it gets really easy to judge resistance. If we are not feeling something, then we could judge ourselves for not being ready to feel it. Or we could make ourselves ready to feel it when we are not.
Joe: That's resistance. All of that is just resistance in sheep's clothing or in wolves´ clothing. All of that is just compounding. You can’t fight your way out of a war.
Brett: How can we tell when we’re ready? If we are feeling resistance, there must be some part of us that feels like it is not ready to experience or feel this thing we are resisting. How can we know if we indeed are ready?
Joe: I don't look at it that way. I look at it as part of the transformation, meaning if you watch a cell divide, there´s resistance there. If you watch a tree slowly over time the limbs move to find light, there´s resistance in that. If I took all the resistance or all of the tension out of your body, you would die. Evolution requires resistance. It requires tension. To me, it's not something to get in a good relationship or to get out of a relationship with. It's just to be with the relationship you are in with it at that moment.
Brett: What are some other ways that that shows up personally? What kinds of resistance are there? What leads to them?
Joe: Mostly what leads to the different forms of resistance that comes out is just what you have learnt, what you were brought up with. If checking out was the way you resisted feelings you didn't want to feel, then you check out. If fighting is the way to resist it, if being evasive, being defensive, sleeping, there´s infinite ways. Being super cerebral, so there's all sorts of ways that resistance shows up in the work that I do or just in a normal business meeting.
You see it all the time in business meetings, people having resistance. Then you see other people get frustrated with their resistance. Instead of cool, they are resisting something, what do they know? What is it that doesn't say yeah, let's do this in them? Where´s the wisdom in that? Maybe only one percent of it is wisdom, and 99% of it is ignorance, but there's some resistance in the wisdom. There's always some.
It is not so much about knowing when it is good or when it is bad or when you are ready or when you are not ready. It's really how to be with the resistance without resisting that, and then whatever movement happens. Again, what I think is so brilliant about that David Whyte poem is, it is one very clear pointer on how to stop resisting the resistance or what you quoted me saying, it is how to love the resistance. If you can´t love the thing, love the resistance.
Brett: It seems what you have been describing just now is a curiosity or wonder, and that seems to turn things on their head a little bit. If we see somebody else in our lives who is resisting something, often our tendency is to point out their resistance and be like stop resisting, making it bad.
Joe: In other words, change to make me happy. I want you to change right now to make me happy.
Brett: Yeah, we have all done that.
Joe: We have.
Brett: It is interesting to think about it from that different perspective of just being curious. Their resistance isn't bad. If they are experiencing resistance and we want there not to be resistance there, then that is a pointer to our own resistance, and there's a lot there to be curious about.
Joe: Yeah, and there's this beautiful thing is, encourage their resistance or encourage your own resistance. One way through is to get out of the Chinese thumblock and one way is to go into the Chinese thumblock if you know what I mean. Often if I am resisting something and I am in that struggle, I just struggle all the way, just go all the way into it. It can exhaust the resistance, or listen to it completely. Let it fully have its voice.
But there is this weird thing that happens with resistance. At some level, there's a way in which we don't think we have the new tool we need because whatever we are not wanting to change, whatever we are not wanting to feel, there's a way that we have been dealing with it that has worked so far. Maybe not great, but it's been working. So to change that, it is like what´s going to happen and then the other question is what´s going to happen to me.
If you´re not listening to that wisdom, if you´re not listening to, “Okay, so, I stop yelling at my dog every time it shits on my carpet, then am I going to have to live with shit?” Oftentimes if you listen to that resistance, you find out what tool is going to be there, or you can address that this part of you is disappearing, this part of you is wanting to transform. What do we see comes next? Can you invite it back if you decide this part of you wants to be back or wants to stay?
Brett: Bringing some of this back into my experience, a lot of times I will experience some resistance around procrastination. There will be something I want to do.
Joe: Hold up. Is procrastination resistance?
Brett: There´s different kinds of resistance. For me, I mean procrastination can, I think, happen for a lot of different reasons. I think that would be a fascinating episode to get into it, but for me it often shows up as this fear of feeling the failure of not getting it perfect. Then, there´s the resistance to my not doing it, and there's this fear that if I go into that resistance in the way you said, then it will just take over and I will be stuck in it. But what you are saying is it will exhaust, so I can go all the way into the resistance rather than setting up another opposing resistance that balances it and keeps it stuck.
Joe: That can work if it is fully allowed to move. But the question I would ask is on the procrastination is, what is procrastination without any resistance in it. Not any resistance to it, but like if you feel the procrastination in your system and then you feel what procrastination becomes if there´s no resistance in the procrastination, what happens?
Brett: Sometimes it changes into…
Joe: Not sometimes, right now, what happens?
Brett: I am not feeling procrastination right now, because we are recording a podcast actively at the moment.
Joe: Right, but if you did?
Brett: Let me bring that feeling.
Joe: There´s something you are procrastinating right now.
Brett: Yeah, so feeling into a thing I am procrastinating, there just comes a feeling, a sensation in my body of a little bit like anxiety and then the anxiety moves and becomes some kind of energy, the get up and goesies.
Joe: What is that experience if there´s no resistance in it?
Brett: It feels like the impulse to do something.
Joe: That is what makes me ask the question. What is procrastination without resistance in it?
Brett: The experience of procrastination has the impulse to do something. Otherwise, you wouldn't be actively think about procrastinating it.
Joe: Exactly, you could not be doing stuff. I am not doing stuff right now, but it doesn't feel like procrastination. But as soon as I feel like I should be doing it, then there's the feeling of procrastination that comes. I am not launching a thermonuclear missile at this moment, and I don't feel like it is procrastination.
Brett: Me take a nap and then fires the missiles. From the conversation, I am feeling the thing I resist in procrastinating is the fear of whatever consequences of getting it wrong and that fear, if I am not resisting, is actually an excitement about doing something new.
Joe: Now, what´s the wisdom in the resistance? If you love the resistance, what´s the resistance in it?
Brett: It seems like the wisdom in the resistance is, “I am doing something new, and when I am doing something new, I would benefit from being aware that I might take steps that have unintended consequences.” I can just be aware of those things.
Joe: Exactly, so there's some wisdom there, and if you incorporate that wisdom into whatever is happening, that is the next step in the transformational process. There´s a step of resisting. That's part of transformation, and then there's the step of the integration of that resistance. It's also part of the next step.
It's an interesting thing. Earlier, I said you can´t fight your way out of a war, and I am sure somebody in their mind is like yes, you can. You fight a war. You win, and then the war is over. But you have to stop fighting. If you kept on fighting, the war would keep on going. Then this is what we do is we layer procrastination, which is a form of resistance. I am going to resist that. That's another war, and now I am going to tell myself I should stop having a war with myself around procrastinating. I should stop resisting procrastinating. I have now created a third level of fight. That's usually the bind we get into.
Brett: It feels like we can get addicted to or just used to being in that fight.
Joe: That's right. There´s a way to look at all of spiritual development. I wouldn't proselytize this, but there´s an interesting mind and body experiment to do if you could look at all development, is just how much the fight can go away in a day to day, minute to minute, second to second thing. There´s an addiction to that fight.
When I do business with folks, one of the things I read when I am interacting with them is just how much fight is in them. If you see somebody with a lot of fight in them, they always have a couple of people they are at battle with. Achieving goals is a battle. You are like, “If I am doing business with this person, I have to be completely okay with the fact they are going to do battle with me or they are going to create a battle I am going to get involved with.” How much fight is in a person? That's usually based on how much fight they had as a kid, how much being alive or being loved was a battle.
Brett: It seems like there's a preference for embodying some way of being in which we are not fighting ourselves and interacting and collaborating with people who are not fighting themselves. How do you hold that without partiality?
Joe: Beautiful, right? Then immediately my mind comes to the Bhagavad Gita, where it is like where our hero or main character says, “I don't want to fight my brother.” Krishna, I think it is. I am going to surely offend somebody. He comes down and says, “Now you got to fight.” This is– there´s no life without tension. There´s no life without resistance. You don't get to do that. You don't get to transform or grow. If you want no resistance, you get death.
The idea that you want less of it or more of it is just another way to reify it and be in the fight.
Brett: How do we not use this to justify being in a fight?
Joe: Yeah, how do you drop a hot frying pan? How do you describe that to somebody? How do you just not swing the sword?
Brett: A different example than dropping the hot frying pan is how do you let go of a DC current when you are being electrocuted and it is actually making you grab harder.
Joe: That is really more accurate. I like it, because it ruins my nice little answer to the question. The problem with the question, “How we do it?”, is as soon as you think there's a way to do it, then it becomes a should and it becomes part of the battle.
Brett: Or a strategy.
Joe: Yeah, the strategy, and then you are looking for a result and all of that stuff. You´re really looking to do the exact opposite of that. If you put in your body this sense of trying and struggle, and you feel that in your whole body, and then without thinking about it, you immediately feel the exact opposite of that feeling, that's all that's necessary is the exact opposite of that feeling even in, say, your procrastination. It's that. There´s 1,000 ways to get there, except for there's no way to get there. There´s 1,000 ways to realize you are there. There's no way to get there. That´s I think the better pointer.
Whether it´s David Whyte´s beautiful pointing of denial of denial, or whether it´s the pointing of love your resistance or if it is a pointing of just drop the frying pan, they are all just pointers to just stop fighting.
Brett: If you have a relationship where there´s some fight in it, rather than making the fight the problem and trying to fight the fight, just recognizing there´s fight over here. Is this something I can hold? Is this something that is okay? Or do I need to draw a boundary and go something else, work with different people? You could do that without having to change somebody.
Joe: I would say if you are in the question of that, you´re in the resistance.
Brett: Oh, enlighten me.
Joe: There´s moments when somebody acts a certain way and it's really clear to you. You are just like no, that doesn´t work for me. If you want to do that, you´re welcome to but just not at me or near me or I am going to go, whatever it is. You are not changing them, but you just don't allow that in your world. In that case, there's kind of no resistance. You are not in your lesson. You are not in your transformation. It's just like I know this thing for now is this way for me.
But if you´re like should I do this or should I do that, maybe I could do this, typically the one people have is, “Should I just draw the boundary or should I learn to accept it?” Is it more enlightened for me to draw the boundary or more enlightened for me to accept it? If you are in that question, you are in the transformation. Therefore, you are in the resistance. You are trying to solve it. You are trying to fix it. You are trying to make it different than what it is.
Brett: What if it is not from a perspective of being the most enlightened you can be? Just, you are making a business decision, and you are like, “Is it better for the business if I go option A or option B?”
Joe: Same thing. It doesn't really matter what the end goal is. When I say more enlightened this or more enlightened that, I am saying it could be which would make me happier or which would be more profitable or which would be– But in all those places, it is where we are in our growth. We are in our transformation. Think about the problem you have in business six years ago, and how it was like this big, “Oh my God, what am I going to do?” Now you face that same problem in different ways once a month and it's, “Now what am I going to do?” Whatever that transformation is has occurred.
When you are meditating and early in meditation, you notice that you lost track of yourself in the meditation. There´s a fight. “I shouldn't…Why am I doing this? Why am I still sitting here?” Then later there's no fight. There´s just like, “Oh, here I am.” You recognize the moment you see you have lost yourself, you have found yourself. You are not in that fight like that anymore. The resistance is that you are in your transformation. There´s a way to look at resistance and go, “Yeah, I am in my transformational process. Good for me.”
Brett: Yeah, it´s like bumping up against our edges and a sign that you are growing, but it really doesn't always feel that way. It often feels like a sign that you are not growing.
Joe: Yeah, it's that tension between the two things. I want it to be different. There´s a frustration. Even like little kids when they are learning to walk, they get really frustrated with themselves when they fall down, not at the beginning of the transformational process but in it. They get really frustrated.
Brett: What about the resistance to the wanting to be different itself? Because wanting to be different also has its own wisdom, and that can be something to resist on its own.
Joe: This is an interesting one. Oftentimes, not that it needs to be this way, but oftentimes when somebody is beginning their journey, before they get on the journey, they are like self help, spirituality, blah, blah, blah. Then they want something to be different. Then at some point they are just like, “I don't want anything to be different. I just want to be me. I want to be as me as me can be. I want to see what I am.” There´s this acknowledgement that evolution happens. There´s acknowledgement that development happens, but it is not particularly wanting to be different. It's not wanting to improve. Generally, that seems to be the progression that people go through.
My guess is, it is very necessary. It is very necessary for someone to have the phase of wanting to be different, and then there's this phase that it's very necessary that they see that that level of friction no longer serves them. That level of resistance no longer serves them, and so then they move into a different level. I think it is like almost anything we do whether it's recording sound or making movies or doing business. The more we do it, the more sensitive we become, the more refined we become in it and the more it is done with discord, the more it becomes unpalatable for us.
A great musician hears something that´s a little out of tune, and they are like oh. Me, I am like what, out of tune, I like it. It has got a good beat. You can dance to it. Whereas I might sit with somebody and notice a little bit of tension in them that they wouldn't notice for 30 years or 10 years or two minutes, who knows? But as you do the work, you become more sensitive to the discord. In that, the discord of I want to be different, it stops becoming an accelerator and you start seeing it as a break. But don't go rush.
I think this is what David Whyte is saying. Don't go rush and try to get to the place where that want is gone. It's got its wisdom. It has its movement. Let it have its dance. Enjoy its dance.
Brett: A question that comes up for me is what part wants to be different. In a lot of these episodes, we have arrived at this place where if you stop wanting to be different, if you let go of your ideas of being different, you will naturally change and you will naturally grow.
There´s a part of you that does want to be different. You could look at evolution, and species want to be different. There´s just not like a knowing somewhere of how that's going to go. It seems like if we are wanting to be different, and we have an idea of what different would look like for us, then we are using our intellect, which is a limited logic-y form of it.
Joe: It might be a great form of it, too. It doesn't really matter, because a tree is going to grow the way a tree grows. We are going to grow the way we grow. I don't know, correcting is– because my intellect says so or my mind says so. This is the soil. This is the sun. This is the seed. We grow, and it doesn't mean we give up our ambition either, which is interesting, or our will. The sensation is more, that the ambition and the will belongs to something greater than us. The feeling is it is more of a universal will or a universal ambition. In some aspects, far more gentle, and in some aspects, far more powerful.
Brett: What do you mean by universal power without jumping off the woo train?
Joe: You are going to try to stop me from jumping off the woo train?
Brett: I am going to show our listeners that I am trying to keep you on the tracks.
Joe: It´s a felt sense. It's an experiential. It's like trying to describe. There´s a moment in which the sense of self changes in a kid. There´s a point where you ask them if they want GI Joewith a kung fu grip for Christmas, and they are like yeap. You are like what mom wants. She wants GI Joe with a kung fu grip. Dad wants GI Joe with a kung fu grip. Then at some point, they differentiate themselves, and they see their mom and dad might want something different than what they want for Christmas.
That sense of self develops, and it seems to get bigger. It goes from I am me, to I am my family. Even in the distinguishing nature of it, to I am my nation, I am people, I am the ecosystem. As that sense of self changes, the parts of you belong to the bigger thing. You can see this all the time where people get lost in I am the nation or I am my political party, and if they feel offended, it is not just them that are offended. It's their nation that should be offended. It is projected that way.
I think it's not anything different than that. It's just that the sense of self becomes bigger than you. It feels more universal or something like that. It feels more like one-ness.
Brett: That makes sense. It also points to how this path can lead to better collaboration because you could start by, “This is me, I am me. I have my problems, and everybody else is in my way.” to, “Hey, we have the same sort of problem.” Everybody has got their own position that they are experiencing it from, and we can share and integrate all of our different sources of information and come up with something more complex as a result.
Joe: Yeah, there are levels of it that are better with collaboration, and levels of it that are not as good with collaboration. Then there are middle stages that are kind of strange. For instance, oftentimes at one stage of seeing the world, you might go into consensus and think everybody´s voice is equal, and then that obviously is a great way to destroy an organization. There are manuals of the CIA written in the 1950s about how to destroy an organization, and consensus building and committees.
Brett: Wow, tell me more about that.
Joe: It is a great document. Basically, it is like a document that was written in the 40s or 50s. The CIA had a go in and destroy a business in a country where you want to destroy that business. It is like delegate all decision making to committees, make sure the committees are all over six people. If you go into super dysfunctional organizations, that´s what is happening all the time and sometimes designed that way. Maybe congress and the senate are designed to be not entirely effective, because you only want the really most critical laws to pass. But a lot of the nonprofit world is created this way where offending somebody or making a call without everybody's agreement is very bad or considered very bad. Then they become very ineffective in their work.
I would say eventually collaboration just becomes nature, but depending on where you find yourself in that process.
Brett: I guess it is important, collaboration remains collaboration among individuals with different perspectives rather than an assumption that everybody is the same and should end up with the same decision.
Joe: Or has the same authority or has the same expertise. It is that integration of. There´s a great way to say it, which is that selfishness is the engine of unity. It's the selfish gene that makes the human, and it's the selfish human that makes the human race. It's all these selfish cells and bacteria and fungus that are all making this beautiful earth, so the interdependence is created by our selfishness. It puts you in that same perspective of without tension, there is no evolution. Without resistance, there´s no transformation. Without selfishness, there´s no unity.
Brett: I think I can hear half of our audience flipping out about this right now, and there must be ways for selfishness to lead to more connection and collaboration and selfishness to lead to more resistance and fight. I think that could be a way to bring us back to resistance. A lot of the things we have talked about in this work is impulse resisted turns into a contorted impulse, that leads to disconnection, and a lot of the behaviors people consider selfish in a bad way or in a harmful way.
Joe: Yeah, I mean the key to being really good at selfishness is to really understand the underlying want. The first want is, “I want to go get drunk and screw as many people as I can.” That doesn't actually satisfy you, and so then what´s the deeper want? Then, what's the deeper want? Hopefully, you don't have to play them all out, and eventually you find the deepest want. Even close to the deepest want ends up being a deeply compassionate thing for the people around you as well.
There´s this idea that I have to choose between being good to me or being good to you. I don't find that experience. I find that when I am truly being compassionate with myself, almost always that action is truly being compassionate for the people around me.
Brett: It seems like that also continues to relate to resistance, because we might think we want something we are used to wanting and we just get stuck in that groove. We want to start defending that want, because we have already gotten so invested in it. When we start to say that maybe we want something different, that could be the seed of denial.
Joe: Or don't take that away from me, or it becomes the surrogate of something. There might be some political future that we have that most of America doesn't want anymore, but the transformation of it is so scary. The same thing in ourselves. I don't want to be watching television three hours every night anymore, but then I sit with myself for the first 10 minutes. I don't want to feel that, so boom, back to the television.
It is almost like it is not selfishness that's the problem. It's almost just undeveloped selfishness is the problem. We are competing against it. It's really strange. Every time I hear somebody call themselves selfish in a session. Maybe not every time, but I will say something to the effect of when your parents called you selfish, what did they really mean? Almost to a T what they all really meant was, I want you to do something different. That's what it means. I have never called my kid selfish. It is usually just a parent saying I wanted you to do this, and you did this other thing. You are selfish. I am not even sure I believe in the word selfishness in that way.
What I really like is, what you are saying is, that there are moments of resistance that will move us away from and will create an evolution of us where we can see more clearly what´s going to make us happy. We can see more clearly what's going to bring us peace. We can see more clearly what creates harmony amongst the people we love.
There's something very true about that. One of the principles I live by is embrace intensity. That's exactly for that reason, which is that intensity, that resistance is– I have found the more I embrace it, the more I run towards it, the more I run into it and through it, the more I love it for what it is. The less I resist it, the more at peace my life becomes, the more loving I become, the more generous I become. For those people who don't like what I am saying, great. Beautiful. There´s some resistance to run towards. I am not saying agree with me, but feel it.
Brett: That brings back to one of the kinds of resistances is, when we start to recognize something is true that we didn't want to be true. We recognize a deeper want that isn't convenient for us or doesn't seem convenient for people we are in agreement with. Some of this advice or a tool is to embrace intensity. What else can we do to recognize those moments, give ourselves the compassion to feel that resistance, not problematize it and then embrace that intensity?
Joe: In a weird way, that´s like all the work that all spirituality and all psychology and all psychotherapy– It is kind of answering that question. That's all it really is. There´s our natural movement towards ourselves and our own evolution, and there is the resistance. The question is how that resistance gets met. What's the most effective, efficient or joyful way to meet the resistance? My rule of thumb is: Go for the joy. I don't want the resistance to chance, so how can I meet it most joyfully? If you think it is like fake a smile, you'll notice that's not very joyful. It's more to ask that question.
Then there's also the question of who is resisting or what is resisting. That´s a great question as well. How do I love the resistance? That´s a question. How do I find the wisdom in the resistance? All of those things are hacks. The one that's most commonly not seen is, “What´s the feeling I am resisting. What's the thing I don't want to feel?” And go and feel it.
Brett: I guess in the case of procrastination or some forms of resistance is the resistance itself, which brings me back to what you said earlier in this episode, about just going all the way into it, which seems counter-intuitive at first. But it makes more sense in this context, because you can just enjoy going into the resistance and be like this is what it's like to feel this resistance, great.
Joe: With procrastination especially, it's really unique. That's the thing. Each form of resistance has its own little nooks and crannies. For instance, procrastination, the reason it becomes like an AC current instead of hot frying pan, so to speak, every time you think about doing the project, you are giving yourself a negative reinforcement so why the fuck would you want to do it. Okay, I am thinking about the project, and now I am beating up myself for not doing it. The project is associated with beating yourself up.
Think about it. On a mammalian level, a dog comes and every time it sees you, you kick it in the face. It doesn't want to see you anymore It doesn't want to be around you. It doesn't want to approach you. Every time you approach a problem, and you kick yourself in the face. Procrastination can be really easily solved if every time you think about the problem, you then envision yourself enjoying the shit out of doing it instead of why haven't I done that yet. Positively reward yourself every time you move towards that thing instead of negatively rewarding yourself.
I think this is generally the way in which the AC current happens instead of the hot frying pan, like that reinforcement that occurs. Generally, our resistance is painful and unwanted, and we associate it with the thing. I worked with a woman once who lost her dad when she was a child, and every time she thought about her dad, it hurt so she just doesn't think about her dad anymore, which is a world of denial, world of pain and of unfelt emotions, severe rigidity. All that stuff is happening. It is all because she unconsciously negatively reinforced herself, caused herself pain every time she thought of her dad.
Brett: Caused herself suffering, not just letting herself feel the pain of losing her dad.
Joe: If we are making the distinction the way Buddhists do, yes, which is suffering is the resistance to the pain.
Brett: Something that has been helping me lately with things I am putting off or procrastinating is, sitting with what it feels like to be avoiding doing it, which invariably feels less good than actually doing it, even though the perception is doing it, I am going to feel confused. I am not going to know what to do. I don't have the answers. But actually doing it, like writing something, like writing an email, even if you don't know what you want to say when you sit down and do it, starting to type feels better than staring at it and kicking yourself in the face.
Joe: Even in the [crying noise], you are kicking yourself, which is what is causing my smile right now. I love not knowing what to do and getting it wrong.
Brett: That´s a funny double bind. I really actually get bored immediately once I know what to do.
Joe: Exactly. If I have an email all laid out in my head, it is far more likely to take me a little time to get to it. If I am like, I have no idea what to say here, then it is more likely for me to actually do it, which just lets you know how arbitrary the whole thing is. It is the whole thing, is this arbitrary notion of what we define as what feels good and what feels bad. We define that because of our past history, because of an idea we hold about it.
As that stuff starts evaporating, as we see through our ideas, as you are experiencing this podcast, hopefully this podcast has just destroyed a couple of ideas you had. That's the idea. It just pummels them, and then you are like, “Wait a second, I don't know how to feel. I don't know what to think here.”, and you are left in that place. As that occurs, all of a sudden we can create the relationship we want with it, not the one we were taught.
Brett: One of the ideas I had was, I have had so many stories I have wanted to write about my adventures and experiences, and I have spent so much time thinking about what I would write. At some point, I just never did and then the moment passed. I am realizing now, triggered by something you said earlier, that in a number of those cases, I was figuring the whole thing out in my head and then eventually I knew exactly what the story was. And then it became uninteresting and receded into the background. I never actually wrote it because I wasn't actually writing when I was doing the figuring out, so nothing ended up written down.
Joe: To tie it back to resistance, this is the whole I have this idea of how it is. Even that can be a form of resistance, just like you said at some point becoming better, the idea of becoming better. The idea, not the actuality, but the idea of becoming better has too much friction. The same way this can have too much friction as well. It starts becoming unpalatable.
Brett: I definitely feel right now a lot of the ideas and perceptions I had about myself are somewhat broken right now after this conversation.
Joe: Somebody was frustrated with me the other day. They were like you did all that. Now what I am supposed to believe? I am like nothing. Stop trying to construct a reality around yourself. See what's there.
Brett: I am definitely sitting in a lot of questions now, which I am looking forward to getting into. Tell me about a time you struggled with some resistance for a period of time, and then suddenly found a way not to do it or just simply stop doing it.
Joe: In my 20s, I smoked a lot of pot. I don't know if it was a lot compared to what I see nowadays, but I definitely had a pot habit. Mostly it was on the weekends, and then there was a short time it was daily when I didn't have this job. I beat myself up over it so bad. I mean I remember just like the critical voice in my head got so loud, and I became so abusive.
I see that now a lot with pot smokers generally. Depression over prolonged use seems to be part of it. They are not motivated to do stuff. They are constantly seeing the faults in themselves and the world. I was just like fully in it, and no matter how hard I fought to get out, it just drove me deeper into it because the more that I was abusing myself about it, the more I wanted to escape myself and the more I smoked pot.
That was a cycle I was in, and at some point along the line, I just realized what is it that I really don't want to face. What is this self that I really want to face? It was really early on in my spiritual journey. I think just after my first meditation retreat, or a couple of years. I have a bad sense of time. I just ran into that. I just ran into that feeling, and it turned out to be sadness was really the thing I didn't want to feel. It was just some emotions, some anger, some sadness.
Then I ran towards it, and then pot just became, I don't want to fucking abuse myself like that. Then it was like, I like it once a week. I cleaned my house, and then– Anyways, by the time I was like 28, something like that, it was like the habit had almost completely disappeared and then it completely disappeared. I look back. I am like wait, I didn't try at all to end this thing. I didn't at all try to stop it. Now it holds absolutely no appeal. I look at it and no. Someone offers it to me at a party or something, there´s zero appeal. There is no temptation. There is no will power. There is just a lack of interest.
The more I resisted the habit of pot, the addiction of pot, the more it grew, the more shame grew with it. As soon as I looked at the underlying thing and embraced the intensity, then the whole thing just kind of disappeared, just dissolved without will, without trying. It just undid itself. I find that generally that's the case. There's a place where I am in the fight. There´s some resistance, not resistance, some intensity underneath that´s wanting to be embraced.
What's interesting about that is, I used to think there was some rush in that. I used to think, oh my God, I have got to embrace all the intensity. I have to fix all the issues. I have to stop all the resistance. I realize.
Brett: There's only so much time.
Joe: Yeah, there's only so much time. I realized it doesn't really matter if you do. It will stay there. It will wait for you. If you don't solve your pot addiction today, it will be there tomorrow. There's no rush. Whatever it is that you want to transform about yourself, it is going to stay there. The problem doesn't go away until it is addressed. You can be patient. That in itself was just another way to let go of another level of resistance, another fight in me.
The way I think about it now is, I can't let go of resistance. It is letting go of life. I can't let go of that tension. The question is, “How I hold it with the most gentleness and love? How do I hold without ever letting go of it, without ever losing contact? Without ever losing the intimacy with resistance? How do I hold it as lightly, as gently, as lovingly as possible?”
Brett: I really like that. That sounds like an episode.
Joe: We´ll see.
Brett: Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe & rate us in your podcast app. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.
Links/resources:
David Whyte: https://davidwhyte.com/pages/consolations
Simple Sabotage Field Manual (CIA, 1944): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/page-images/26184-images.pdf
If you do much Art of Accomplishment work, chances are good that you will have a transformational experience. When you return to your life after a profound breakthrough, you may experience feelings of confusion, being lost, or even being unmoored from everything that once grounded you. That’s why integration is so important when doing this work.
"As you're moving forward, it isn't a straight line, so what you think to be moving backwards might just be the way humans learn. Kids go from walking to crawling. To be easy on yourself about your learning process and be appreciative of those moments that you are learning, this helps integration out more than anything else."
Brett: If you do much of Joe's work, chances are good that you will have a transformational experience. You may suddenly recognize some pattern you have played out over and over again in your life and find the ability to step out of it. These types of experiences have changed lives, but we know the moment of epiphany is not the end of the story.
When you return to your life after a profound breakthrough, you may experience feelings of confusion, being lost or even being unmoored from everything that once grounded you. That's why integration is so important when doing this work. Joe, what is a transformative experience?
Joe: Yeah, that's a great question. The funny thing is, when I was listening to your introduction, you talked about an epiphany. It's really important to distinguish between epiphany and transformation.
With epiphany, epiphany is a recognition of a belief system that offers you relief. It is like you understand something. There's this click in your system, and there's this relief that occurs.
Transformation is distinct from that in the fact that transformation actually changes the way that you act. It changes how you do things. The epiphany, it's a really important part of some transformations, not all transformations. It's a really important part, but the thing to recognize about an epiphany is, it is dead almost as soon as it arrives. You have this epiphany, and you are unburdened from a thought, but pretty soon that epiphany can become your next burden.
Maybe in some part of the development, you're hanging out and you have this epiphany. I have will. I have free will. I can choose. That's a really important thing to get out of a victim mentality, or to see where you can be more empowered in your life. Then you're like choice, choice, choice. Then that becomes the next rut because, being completely in choice, which was very important, prevents you from seeing grace. It prevents you from seeing the fact that, maybe you’ve never really been able to control any thought you have had. They have all been gifts. Every emotional experience you have isn't something you can control. You can repress it or not, but you can't control it. Maybe you can't even decide to repress it or not. Maybe it's just instinctual.
Each one of these epiphanies is like the tender beginning of a rut, and I think it's really important to see that, because the important part is lifting away. The important part is the freedom from a constrictive thought by seeing through it. It's not to attach yourself to the epiphany. It's to recognize that moment of freedom that is created, and to step into that moment of freedom more and more often.
Transformation is a little bit different than that. Transformation is I now can't do things the same way. It's not will power. You can will yourself into some transformations potentially. It's not an effective way to do it, but you can do it. But it's especially transformation that gets especially confusing, when you can't choose the same way anymore. We have people in our work that all of a sudden, they go into a grocery store and they just can't buy the same things they have always bought. I know that seems weird, but it has happened more than once where people are all of a sudden more in tune with their system, where they just can't eat the same old crap they have been eating.
Those are the ones that are a little bit more scary. It's why transformation can be a pain in the ass sometimes, because there are some moments of feeling out of control because you don't have the experience you have relied on, that habit you have relied on for years. Sometimes it happens in the weirdest ways, so transformation is just the change of what you do. Intellectually, the change is what you get done and how it gets done, but emotionally it is changing your decisions, because you are allowing more fluidity of emotions. You want to feel more emotional things instead of repressing them.
Brett: That it's changing the emotional context within which all of your decisions are made.
Joe: That's right. Because neurologically speaking, you make decisions based on emotions, as what you are willing to feel and what you are willing not to feel, what you are excited to feel, what you are excited to feel, that you used to be horrified at feeling. That will really change a lot of the decisions you make.
Then there's another transformation that is created, not from the intellect or the emotion but from the sense of self. When that sense of self changes, those can be some of the biggest shifts that happen. It's an experience of deep freedom because usually when the sense of self transforms, it widens, it grows. It becomes less of a small thing, more of a big thing. So there's less to defend.
Brett: What's an example of that sense of self changing? What's a common example in one of your courses that someone might experience?
Joe: What would be somewhat common is, let's say there's a feeling of an abyss, a place in their life or their psyche that they don't want to look, a person doesn't want to look. Every time they kind of glance over it, they are like, “I don't want to look there.” Then all of a sudden they see it for what it is, and they see it as a direct path to freedom. They jump into it. They are like, “Oh, that's actually where I want to go.” It's very much the allegory of the cave, or Luke Skywalker going into the cave where they are just like okay, I am going to go and face that thing.
Oftentimes when that happens, the sense of self collapses in on itself in some way, particularly because we define ourselves in contrast to other things. The sense of self becomes more universal. If you were to think about yourself in this moment and say, “What am I? But I can't think of it in terms of what I am not. Therefore, I am a soul, but what that means is you're not material.” Or, “I am my thoughts.”, but that means you're not your body. If you think of yourself not in terms of a not, everytime one of things you think you're not, goes away and you find out you are that, too, then the sense of self changes.
Oftentimes, people avoid these big abysses, and when they don't, when they go into them, that sense of self completely shifts. Then there are some really shifts of sense of self that can happen, and those are the most disorienting transformations.
Brett: What kinds of situations can trigger these breakthroughs?
Joe: Almost anything. Deep depression often transforms people. Times of transition, stress, where the sense of self or your ideas or your emotional frameworks are not working, and so they have to change. Stress can change things. Sometimes just the truth smacking you in the face. You just have that moment where you are like fuck, that is not working. You can also just change people's contexts, like take a wealthy high falutin person and stick them in a ghetto with no money. They are going to have transformation, or vice versa. There's going to be a switch.
Brett: A change in perspective.
Joe: The change in perspective. It also changes who you think you are, because so much of who you think you are is based on context and what people tell you you are. If all of a sudden you aren't around people who tell you you are that, it starts to shift. Also, emotional fluidity is a big part of how transition changes. To have big emotional experiences, neurologically speaking, it allows you to reprogram some of the behavioral learnings you have. Big emotional experiences can do that. All of those things can trigger breakthroughs and transformation.
Brett: What does transformation look like deep in the process? What different ways can it show up?
Joe: Literally, almost any way you can imagine. For instance, if we talk about the awakening sense in the Zen, Buddhist sense of awakening. Everybody says awakening, and it can mean so many different things. But we are talking about that moment when the sense of self dissolves into universal, where you see that you are everything and everything is you. That moment of awakening particularly is what I am talking about here.
For some people, they don't even notice it. It is such a gradual thing. It is like months after it happened, they look back and they are like oh, holy crap. For some people, people like Byron Katie or Eckhart Tolle, it is like they are in the deepest depression and the next day they have this utter freedom. For some people, it looks like Zen sickness where they have that epiphany. The Zen have a word for it called Zen sickness, where the sense of self shifts out of you, so you aren't you anymore. Everything is you. You feel depersonalized.
I was talking to a psychologist who was a mediator and had some awakening experiences. He was saying a good percentage of what people call depersonalization disorder is like a Zen sickness of awakening, where you get that feeling of not being just you, but you don't like it so you try to stop it. You are like, “Er!” That tension creates a tremendous amount of dis-ease in your system. If you go on to the depersonalization disorder websites, and you look at people talking about when it happened and how it happened. It is like exactly awakening experiences that you read in religious texts. It is unbelievable. I mean to the letter kind of stuff.
So it can happen every way. It can be like a dark night of the soul. It can feel like the bottom fell out from underneath you, like you have no place to stand anymore. It can feel like absolute bliss and love.
Brett: It sounds like transformation isn't always a good thing then.
Joe: For sure. Is it a good thing to get into shape? Yes, I would say. Are there going to be uncomfortable moments of getting into shape? Absolutely I would say. There's freedom on the other side of it. The question is, how much resistance and fear is there between the integration or how it looks. They are exactly correlated. If you get Zen sickness and you say, “Oh, okay, this is normal, this is Zen sickness, this passes, no big deal.”, you have a very different experience than if you are like, “What the hell is happening, how do I get it to stop?”
Brett: It is again putting it into context.
Joe: Yeah, exactly. There are moments that can be uncomfortable. Those moments can be seen through in an instant. I think a large part of my work when I work with people is, when they meet these states just to let them know it's common, to let them know I have seen it many, many times before. Almost that often can transform everything, because they just get scared. What they knew isn't available to them anymore.
The thing about integration is when it is integrated, you have complete availability to where you were before, and you have availability to a new thing. It increases your flexibility. It doesn't decrease it. If you want to go be angry, prejudiced, hateful or if you want to go be in the bad habit again, or the habit you felt was uncomfortable, you can. You have that choice. You can go back and eat the stuff. It's just going to hurt more.
Brett: So then let's talk about integration and how to support the smoothest integration from these experiences. What does integration mean to you? What makes it important?
Joe: I think it is the integral people who talk about it as transcend and integrate. I think about it on those terms a lot. There's a way in which if you go from walking to crawling, you don't lose your capacity to crawl. You just walk most of the time. It is like that. There's a new flexibility. There's a new way of doing things. That's what I think about when I think about integration.
It's that time of moving from the unknown of a new epiphany or a new skill set into the known. If you look at really early stage child development, there's a primary reaction, the tertiary reaction. It's basically a little kid, a baby, they have a hand, and they don't know that hand is part of them. The hand hits them, scratches them, and wacks them in the face, and the baby is surprised. What the hell is that thing? Then all of a sudden, they see that that hand is theirs, and they know it. But they don't particularly know how to control it. Then they learn how to control it.
These are the ways that we develop in everything. There's the original epiphany that happens, and it leaves us in this unknown, like what the hell is going on. Then the second stage is oh, I see it but I haven't completely mastered it. Then there's the mastery of it. This can take many years for some epiphanies and it can take minutes for other transformation, other experiences.
That's how I think of it, but there's almost always those three stages that go on. The integration is getting from that first moment of, “Aha, oh woah!”, to, “Oh this is normal.” The amazing thing is, oftentimes when it is normalized when you have mastered it, you forget it is there. The reason you forget it is there is because you've confused the skill with the feeling of euphoria or epiphany that you get when you first get the realization. Watching an infant for the first time, they walk and they are like, “Ah!” They get super excited. Then they are not excited when they are walking at three years old. It is just normal. They are hardly conscious that they are walking, but they don't confuse walking with the elation.
But as you get into other stages of development, you confuse the elation with the new perspective, because it's all happening internally. It's not physical. You can't measure it or see it outside of yourself.
Brett: What does it look like when this process is healthy? It sounds like that story with the baby is what healthy integration looks like. You have the epiphany. You see yourself in a way that you hadn't seen yourself before. You're not immediately sure what to do about this, but you start to find that your actions change, your words change and you start to develop this relationship with your fuller self. Eventually, it becomes second nature, and then you stumble into a new epiphany.
Joe: I would say the choices you can make in the integration that I think are really important and that help with that healthy integration, are things like not trying to find the answers. After a good integration, you have less answers, not new answers. It's not going from like this is the right answer to this is the right answer. It's going from I know less in a way, and I am more comfortable with it. There's more of a mystery out there. I am more comfortable with it.
At the same time, I know more of my own truth. I know more of my own self. There's a deeper knowing of self and truth, but less of a knowing of having solid answers to things. It's also choosing the sensitivity side instead of the less sensitive. Often, with transformation, we become sensitive to new things because we are not repressing stuff anymore. Embracing that new sensitivity and not trying to block that sensitivity.
Those are some of the choices that you can make. Also, to see, as you are moving forward, it isn't a straight line, so what you think to be moving backwards might just be the way humans learn. Kids go from walking to crawling. Be easy on yourself about your learning process and be appreciative of those moments you are learning, this helps integration out more than anything else, these things.
Brett: The first you draw a boundary of a particular kind or speak your truth in a particular way, it might be messy.
Joe: Most likely it will be messy. That's right.
Brett: It sounds like a lot of what you have just been describing is, as we transform and start to see ourselves more clearly, we let go of some of our deeply patterned behaviors so that they may just become a little bit more ambiguous. We don't assume to know what's going on in the world, and we have more space for curiosity, wonder and to see the subtlety in things. That leads to the not knowing what's going to happen.
Joe: So there's more flexibility in life. It's a less patterned response. I think if you are saying, if you know the integration is going well, if you want to look, it's not short term. You can't monitor every minute and say is this happening, but over weeks or months the question is, “Do I have more emotional fluidity? Do emotions move through my body more smoothly? Do I take things less personally? Am I more aware of physical sensations? Am I experiencing that world differently? Are patterns losing their grip?” And pendulation, going back and forth between the old behavior and the new behavior, these are the marks of integration happening.
Brett: Let's talk a little bit more about what can go wrong. You talked a little bit about the Zen sickness type thing. What else can happen?
Joe: Almost all of it, I wouldn't say all of it, but almost all of what can go wrong is resistance to what is. Oftentimes when transformation is happening, we have a deeper acceptance and love of ourselves. The next thing that needs to be loved, the next thing that's been rejected shows up to be loved. We don't see it as showing up to be loved. We see it as showing up and fucking with us. “Er, I was just in this bliss state and now there's anger!” instead of, “Ah, there's the anger.” It needs to be loved now, too. It needs to be integrated now, too.
When we start resisting the movement or start fearing the movement in particular, that's when things can go really sideways. I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to have emotions this often. I don't want to be this sensitive. I don't want to see the world in a non personal way. Instead of saying, “Ah, this is it and this is the natural flow of things. It must be, because I am experiencing it and being settled with it.” That lack of resistance is what makes everything go very smoothly.
Usually most of the stuff that goes wrong is really just people in fear of the transformation that's happening, that particular stage of transformation that's happening. When I work with people, as soon as they find out it's normal and they see I am not bothered by it. It kind of feels like you are walking, but it is not entirely you walking. That could be an experience. Your visual field changed. Oh yeah, you go to the grocery store. That's happened before. Then they can get curious about it, and everything shifts.
Some exceptions to this are things like some Kundalini energy awakening stuff, it's definitely impacted by how much you allow it but you can push transformation through your energetic channels. I don't really speak about this very much. I think the idea of energy is misinterpreted by a lot of people. I think as soon as you say it, anybody who defines themselves as rational can say energy, rah rah. There's no such thing, or whatever they want to do.
Brett: I think one way to bridge that for anybody listening to this and looking for a rational bridge to this stuff would be to think of it as nervous system activity. There are a lot of different ways you can produce a lot of different nervous system type responses, that can be described metaphorically with energy.
Joe: That's exactly right. Somebody who I learnt a lot from around it called them close cousins. They are almost identical, hard to see the difference between the nervous system and the energetic system. I absolutely agree. That's the best way to think about it.
I think the other way to think about it that can be very helpful is bodily sensations, non muscular bodily sensations. That's another way to think about it. Anyways, those things can shift in such a way that maybe they keep you up all night or you are excited too much or something can go out of whack there. That's far more of a physical thing that's happening. It can be really exaggerated by certain breath work or certain yoga practices. If that's happening, and you've confused that Kundalini thing is going to set you free, then I really suggest going to see a professional, a really good acupuncturist or somebody like that that can rebalance that energetic system or nervous system.
Then the other thing that can happen is, people can go into traumas and relive a deep trauma and not be held in a deeply loving container for enough time for them to integrate that trauma, and see that they are not living anymore. It was something that was in the past, and so that's another place where it can go wrong. Somebody goes into a trauma, and it's like they can't be held in love. They can't be held in unconditional acceptance. Therefore, it gets stuck again. It will move, but it's just not the skillful way to move through it, and it's definitely not the most gentle way to move through it or the most efficient.
Those are some of the places where it can go wrong, where one person who is not very skilled at holding trauma. They have just processed their own and they decide they really know about trauma, and somebody moves some trauma because they know some of the exercises or things that can move that trauma, but they don't know actually how to hold it. That's another place where it can go wrong. I really recommend if you are moving trauma to move it with somebody who has some experience in that place, to really dive into those places.
Brett: Along those lines, I am curious about a pattern I've seen before in this type of work, and this happens in all kinds of student teacher relationships, where there is a mentor in the role of transmitting the wisdom of some practice or facilitating a trauma release of some kind. The student walks away from an experience feeling transformed, but also increasingly feeling dependent on their teacher or some other projected gatekeeper of wisdom. What do you have to say about that?
Joe: In general, avoid teachers who do that is what I would say, but it can get a little confusing there too. The kind of teacher I would recommend is a teacher who is constantly pointing you back to your own truth, who is teaching you the skills you need to be independent, to be more successful and more self aware, more skillful in your means so to speak. The way to get there most efficiently is to really teach you how to listen to yourself and follow your own truth and encourage you to not take their word as solid gold or even wisdom, but to take their words and experiment with it and find out what's working for you.
That's the relationship. The relationship is where the teacher doesn't see themselves as better than, worse than or equal to you, but they see what can best be described as you. That's the best relationship, the most effective relationship. Maybe you need something else, and maybe you need to explore the depth of a dysfunctional teaching relationship or one where you decide somebody else knows better for you than you do. But it's definitely not anything I would recommend.
If you are doing that, go into it consciously. The confusion is that if I was teaching you physics, you wouldn't assume that you understand physics after I taught you two workshops. Okay, we spent four hours together learning physics, and you are like okay, I got it. There are things the teacher should know, because they have more experience in the work that you might not know. You might not have spent the time on the landscape. You might not have been in the terrain as long. The teacher should hold some value, but it shouldn't look like dependency. It should constantly look like it is increasing your capacity as a person.
For the most part, pretty consistently, there might be some strays, some backwaters you get caught in, but sometimes you have students who are just like okay, now I have spent 16 hours with you. I am ready to teach. They always find out the hard way teaching isn't as sexy as they think it is.
Brett: There's the contrast between the pre transformation self and the post transformation self, where all of a sudden you feel like you see the world so clearly, and there's a part of you that immediately comes in. The ego comes in. Now I see the world completely. I'm ready.
Joe: That's where the idea of a tradition holds power. I mean it holds some things back, and it gives really good things. Since we are talking about Zen today, let's talk about it. Somebody has a big awakening in Zen, and a master will smack them on the back of the back with a cane. It really hurts. They are like who felt that then, where they are basically challenging that part of you that thinks now, “I get it!” The part of you thinks that there's a finish line and it's not a constant evolution and there's some place where transformation stops.
That's one of the really beautiful things about a tradition. There are other things that limit you in a tradition as well. You start thinking that the tradition is truth or the writings are truth or the teacher is truth, instead of what's happening internally being the truth.
Brett: I think something that happens that contributes to the starry eyed teacher worship thing is having a transformative experience where what you have described is, you have been de-patterned a little bit. You feel like there's sort of 404 like you have described. You are sort of sitting in the unknown. I think that can lead to a fear of being in that unknown and a desire to collapse that unknown down onto something, like a teacher or some particular belief that gives us that sense of knowing again.
Joe: Absolutely. We are constantly trying to find some way that we feel like we are in control. I know this is real. The truth is it's just the opposite. The more you go, the more you realize it's not real. At the same time, interestingly, almost paradoxically, you are far more grounded. It's far less likely you are going to be swayed from your love, your freedom and your truth.
Brett: I think this speaks to the importance of community. The courses of yours I have taken, it has been really, really helpful to have other people who have been through the same experience and be able to cross reference with them how they are doing with their lives and not just be dropped back into my previous life and having a hard time contextualizing.
Joe: Community is far more important than the teacher, I would say. They really help each other out hopefully. There's so much more wisdom to be gotten from a community of practice with a similar intention than there is from a teacher. If I am teaching someone how to access their anger, my capacity to do that is not as good as the person who just learnt or at least they have some capacity that I do not have, someone who has just learnt to release their anger in a safe way. It's like it's electric.
A community can do that, because there are people at different stages learning different things. They can teach each other. We see this in learning math with 3rd graders. That community is incredibly important. I think that's really important. It's also really important because there's a relatableness that people going through the journey together can have, and so less fear can interrupt the transformation and maintain the pattern. I think that's another reason that community is just so critical, and to allow yourself to be a part of that community and be vulnerable in that community is tremendous.
The weakness of a community is a whole community can decide the teacher is special.
Brett: And the teacher can buy into that, and the whole system locks into something. It becomes a cult.
Joe: That agreement between a community and a teacher, facilitator or leader. There's something natural in us that wants sex. There's something natural in us that wants somebody to know what the hell is going on, to have the answer, to know which way to go so that we can feel safe. It's why when we do longer term courses, one of the things we learn is that that wisdom is best found in the community. It's found in group intelligence, which is really tricky to access. You need a lot of skills to get there, but I mean that's the far deeper wisdom.
I teach that, because I like to access that wisdom. I can sit here and talk. I can play the role of the person who knows something, but one of the places I get the most insight, I learn the most is to watch a community access it's deeper intelligence. I love that. I love working that way in business. I love working that way with people. It's where I learn and grow the most and I find everybody learns and grows the most.
Brett: For people who are coming out of courses and going back into their world and trying to create or be a part of a community or be doing this work with the people in their lives, I have experienced it can be really difficult to present the work. How do we present what we are doing to people in our lives? I just did this course. It was really great. It was transformational for me. What is the best way to describe this to people?
Joe: Don't. I would say don't try to describe it to people. Describe your experience to people. Don't describe the work, meaning just show up with more unconditional love for the people around you. Show up with more self awareness. Show up with less patterned responses. Show up in a way that inspires them to join you and meet you. But I don't recommend missionary work or using the tools on people who are not in agreement to do it. It's a form of like better than-ness. You have to think you have just discovered something.
There's a very natural part of it where you just discovered something that gave you freedom and you want to share it with everybody. If you can even own that, like, “Okay, I just experienced something I really want to share, because it is giving me so much happiness, and I realize that I do not want to push anything on you. How do you want to deal with that?” I think that's a beautiful thing to say to somebody and see where they are with it, but to do it without permission, to do it without consciousness, just don't. Just be in your new world. Enjoy it. Enjoy them just as they are. That's what I suggest.
Brett: What would be a good line to draw between the tools that are meant to be brought into the world, having a VIEW conversation and questions, and some of the tools that are perhaps not ready to be brought to people who haven't been exposed to the work, projection reclamation or something like that?
Joe: If you are asking them to do anything, then don't do it. In VIEW, you don't have to ask them to do anything or be any way. You just ask questions and speak from a vulnerable, impartial, empathetic and a space of wonder. You are not requiring anything from them, but as soon as you are asking them to do something or you are telling them about their experience or you are trying to cajole them into a new way of being or trying to have power over them or feel in control or not feel the helplessness that you have being their friend. Anything like that, then don't do that.
Brett: It sounds like that comes straight back to being in VIEW, not being partial, not trying to change them.
Joe: That's exactly it.
Brett: Do you have any more tips for those of us who have just come from a course and are ready to present our new, transformed selves to the world and to the other people in our lives?
Joe: I think the main thing there is, there is natural pressure from society or a group or a marriage to have you be who you were. It's hard for people to see the new you. It's hard for you to see the new version of a person across from you. There are behaviors that you have agreed upon. You have an agreement. “I am going to save you. You are going to be a victim. You are going to bully me. I get to be resentful.” No matter how healthy or unhealthy those agreements are, there's a pressure to stay in those relationships.
I think about the 3 to 5 rule in this, which is when you have a new behavior, you are drawing a new boundary, you should expect that the person is going to treat you like your old self 3 to 5 times. Each time they are going to up the ante on the behavior. Let's say you have got a husband who is a yeller, and you are like, “Okay, I don't want to be with your yelling, but I really want to be with you. When you are yelling, I am going to leave the house and I will come back in 30 minutes. If we can talk, great, and if we can't, I will leave the house again for 30 minutes.” It's going to take 3 to 5 times of doing that before the husband gets it and is like, “Okay. I got it.” Yelling doesn't work anymore.
Most likely, they are going to use a whole bunch of other tricks to keep you in. They are going to up the ante 3 to 5 times, and then the behavior falls apart. So that's the expectation. I am really grateful that it's built this way and that humanity tends to act in this way, because it really forces us to learn to keep that boundary. It forces us to really learn what's necessary to change this behavior even under stressful circumstances.
It's actually quite a gift, but it's good to keep it in mind that you are not going to go back into your world and everybody is going to be like, “Oh, hey, he's different. Now I am going to treat him like the new person he is.”
Brett: There will be resistance, and it's an opportunity to double down on doing the world.
Joe: That's exactly it. Well said. I think the other thing to know is, some people are going to go away. If you transform, some people are going to be like, “I don't like the new agreement.” That only happens I find, like 70% to 80% of the time people stay and 20 to 30 people leave. Everybody is very scared of it. Whenever somebody transforms, one of the ways they try to revert is to go, “I am going to lose so and so.” They are scared of the result, but it doesn't happen as frequently as you would think. Only 20 or 30% of the time, and it's basically like, “Hey, this is the way I want to live and this isn't the way I want to live.”
If you can see it that way, it's really beautiful. It's not personal. It's just choices people are making. It's great to see it that way, because it can just be really transparent that way, too. It's like, “I have decided I want to live in a world where we show up and love, instead of showing up in shame with each other. Do you want to join me? Do you want to support each other in that transformation?” The more transparent that articulation of your vision is, then the easier it is for people to meet you. The less likely it is that they are going to decide to leave. Some people are going to leave. Some people are just not going to want to inhabit the world you want to create for yourself, but it's nothing to fear, because better people show up. Not better, but people who want to live in those agreements, they always show up.
Brett: Those who stay are getting a more self aware version of you.
Joe: That's right, and not only do they show up, you also start inviting people in who are also transforming. That propels your own transformation. It really works out well. Oftentimes, those people can't show up if the space is filled by someone who is abusive or doesn't have the same agreements.
Brett: We touched on this a little bit earlier. You often highlight the importance of staying in the not knowing after a breakthrough or seeing through some habitual way of perceiving things, but integration necessarily seems to involve some kind of collapse of the unknowing state into some new identity, which becomes a new rut. How do we stay the most in that unknowing without collapsing it but still staying grounded in our lives?
Joe: That's a great question. I think it's not about trying to stay in the not knowing. It's more about not trying to get into the knowing, I think. Some big thing happens, and your mind is like, “Let me figure that out. I've got to figure that out.” Your mind always figures it out. I guarantee it. If your mind at this moment hasn't figured it out, I guarantee it will. Have a little patience with it. It might take a couple months.
I was talking about those three stages of development as far as the baby's hand, not knowing it is the hand hitting and scratching its face, and then there's I know it's my hand and then there's the I can control my hand. Those three stages are really important. If you cut any of them short, the full integration doesn't happen. Babies need to crawl for a while for them to get solid left right brain cohesion. It's just a really important thing to allow the not knowing to be there as long as it wants to be there, meaning not forcing it.
Then the knowing shows up, like oh, I get it. It's not figured out. It's like I get it, and then all of a sudden you can articulate it. That process is the smoothest, and it creates the deepest integration. If you strive to put words on it and strive to understand it, then you are limiting it. You are containing it in a way that doesn't allow it to fully transform you.
Brett: Thanks a lot, Joe. This has been a great episode. Thanks for talking to us about integration.
Joe: Pleasure, good to talk to you as always, Brett. Love you, man.
Brett: Take care.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe & rate us in your podcast app. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.
Many of us have learned to associate vulnerability with weakness. We fear that being deeply vulnerable will open the door to being dominated or taken advantage of by others. What’s the difference between vulnerability and timidness, and how can unprotected vulnerability be a sign of strength and courage?
Vulnerability is the V in VIEW; and the topic of today’s episode.
"In every moment, you can feel where your fear and your truth are together. And that's the vulnerable action."
Welcome to the Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease.
My name is Brett Kistler. I am an adventurer, entrepreneur and a self exploration enthusiast. I am here with my co-host, Joe Hudson. Joe is a business coach who has spent decades working with some of the world's top executives and teams developing a unique model of human patterns that underpin how we operate with ourselves, each other and the world. A good entry point into this model is a mindset called VIEW, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy and wonder.
Through understanding and cultivation we learn to easefully drop into the VIEW state of mind, deepening self awareness and increasing our connection with the world around us. To learn more about this podcast or courses, visit artofaccomplishment.com
Brett: Many of us have learned to associate vulnerability with weakness. We fear that being deeply vulnerable will open the door to being dominated or taken advantage of by others. What's the difference between vulnerability and timidness, and how can unprotected vulnerability be a sign of strength and courage? Vulnerability is the "V" in VIEW and the topic of today's episode. Joe, what do you mean when you use the word "vulnerable"?
Joe: What do I mean by the word, when I use "vulnerable"? It means speaking your truth even when it's scary. That's what I mean by vulnerable. If it's not your truth, it's not vulnerable. If it's not scary to say it, it's not vulnerable.
Brett: Semantically, how do we tell the difference between saying the scary thing and just saying something while scared?
Joe: Wow. [chuckles] That's a great question. The difference for me semantically is that in one of them I'm embracing the fear, and in the other one I'm trying to get rid of the fear. If I'm saying the scary thing, then I'm embracing it. I'm saying, "Here's fear. I'm going to actually feel this in my body. I'm going to open up to this thing. I'm going to jump off this cliff, if you will, and I'm going to say the thing."
It's not overcoming, but it's facing and feeling your fear, whereas if you're just saying something while you're scared, that's more like, "What do I say to get out of this situation?" In that one, you're trying to avoid the fear. You have it, but you're trying to get rid of it.
Brett: This embracing of fear, of learning of the fear, that's the benefit of a vulnerability practice?
Joe: It's one of them, yes. It's something that happens when we embrace the fear or we face it if we say, "Yes, I'm happy to feel this fear." One of the things that often happens is, it shifts to excitement, but also, it's a deeply empowering move. It's a deeply empowering move to say, "I can feel this, I don't have to cower to this emotional experience. I don't have to avoid it, and I don't have to push it away. I can actually embrace it. I'm powerful enough to embrace this emotion that most people want to reject." That's one of the benefits.
Another one of the benefits is that, when you know this often when you start, especially when it comes to judgment, when you start being vulnerable about things that you judge yourself on, which is one of the ways that you can be vulnerable, you start realizing that most people aren't going to judge you for it. You're going to be like, "Oh, I'm lazy." and then you notice that most people don't maybe even think you're lazy. Then those who do, maybe they´re like, "Yes, that's part of who you are and I'm okay with it."
The amount that we judge ourselves is far more, far greater than what other people judge us for, for the most part, and so every time we act vulnerably, we get to see that, we get to position what the voice in our head tells us is wrong with us compared to what the world tells us is wrong with us. That's another thing that's incredibly useful about a long term vulnerability practice.
The main thing that a vulnerability practice gives us that's outside of those two things that we just talked about is, that it allows us to find our truth. You find out that as you speak your truth, even though it's vulnerable, your world starts aligning around your truth instead of your presentation of yourself. All of a sudden, it brings you closer to yourself. The more you're vulnerable, the more you're setting up the world to see you for what you are, to respond to you for what you are.
Over time the world changes around you, because you're not going to accept certain things that you were when you weren't being yourself or you are willing to say things that you weren't willing to say when you weren't being yourself, then all of a sudden you can start understanding yourself more and more clearly, see yourself more clearly, because you're more in alignment and you're more aware of your subtle ways that you are not aligned. That's the biggest benefit of a vulnerability practice.
Brett: What you said about finding that others won't judge us for the same things we judge ourselves for. That seems true, but it also must be true that people will judge us for some of the things we judge ourselves for, and even some things that we don't judge ourselves for. It can't always be true that everything about us will be accepted. What do you have to say to that?
Joe: Yes, it's totally true. We're going to be judged all the time. I think there's a couple of things about it. The first thing that you notice is, that what people are judging you for is really not about you, it's about what they judge themselves for and that becomes pretty apparent if you allow yourself to open to their judgment.
Oftentimes I work with people and they're like, "People are judging me," I'm like, "Yes, look around there's somebody here judging you, no doubt about it." Just allowing that in for people changes something. It's like, "Oh, I've been running away from this my whole life and it's happening all the time." There's some way in which allowing yourself to be open for the judgement helps, is one of the benefits of the vulnerability.
The other thing is that there's kind of the current shame and past shame that happens, and oftentimes when you're being vulnerable past shame can be recognized and seen and people don't need to be ashamed of it.
A great example of this is, there are a couple of movies out there, one is called The Work and one is called What I want my words to say to you. There are kind of group process work in prison and you are sitting there with these prisoners in this movie who are telling you their innermost work and you know they're killers. You know they've slashed people open and you're just sitting there like you have this empathy for them, you don't want them to feel ashamed. They are doing the work.
There is a way in which that past shame, which is what is really not useful for us as people. It really helps resolve that and heal that, because generally a lot of people have some acceptance for that if you are being vulnerable about it. If you're being all harsh and hardcore about it, they may not, but current shame is the more likely place where people aren't going to immediately not judge you, like I'm stealing from your house at this exact moment.
That's because current shame is actually quite useful. It's our signal that what we are doing right now isn't what we want to be doing. It's not in alignment with who we are. That's what current shame is for. Past shame is this idea that if I brutalize myself, then it will somehow change the way that I act in the future, which tons of studies show that that's just not true. It's not really useful and it's what really condemns us to repeat that pattern. It's a form of resistance and so that pattern persists.
On one level, yes, people are definitely going to judge you and there's some benefit in that, because you get to see that they are really just judging themselves, especially in the past shame. Also, the other benefit is, it really helps you point out the current shame that's going on. The shame for what you're doing in this moment or in this day, so that's another way to look at it.
Brett: This is interesting to me, because a lot of the expected reactions that for somebody that we might imagine, can receive criticism and can receive judgment, the expected response you think of from a strong person is just to let it roll off their back and that's not vulnerable. That's like they are protecting, so what is it really that makes you be able to-- What's the difference between letting judgment in a way that doesn't produce unnecessary shame or just trigger and bring up and dredge up past shame and bring into the present moment?
Joe: It's letting it break your heart. If you're feeling your body any time that you're judging somebody, you can feel the discomfort of it. You can feel that it's an avoidance of feeling your own emotions or your own insecurity or your own deeper feelings. There's an exercise that we do, where people basically say what they are judging somebody for and then they identify the feelings underneath that judgment is holding at bay.
What it is, is to actually feel your feelings, feel the judgment, is to let it in, and when you see somebody rolls it off their back, that seems like a strong thing for us. It's strong when it's natural. You're not like, "Okay, I'm going to let that roll off my back, whereas you just don't notice it." It's like that famous saying that, if you're trying to be patient, you're not patient. It's just as strong, if not stronger to lean into it and feel that judgment and let it break your heart.
It doesn't mean that you have to grovel at the floor for the person, which is immediately what people's brains go to. Now you're just a groveling, weak, pathetic person which is incredibly far from the truth. One of the greatest strengths that most people don't have is the ability to actually just feel their emotions. They're just constantly trying to manage them because they're really scared shitless of their emotions.
Then the other thing just to say is, that, if you think about vulnerability and you think about-- The Catholics have confession and AA has its version of making amends and talking about all the things that you did while you were drunk. This is a huge part of almost all healing work, vulnerably admitting to yourself to others what you've done and to see that you're not doomed for it, to see that there is salvation or repentance or whatever you want to call it. That you can still be loved despite this. If we don't share those things, there's no way that the shame can come out of the closet and be seen and be loved.
Brett: One big facet then of vulnerability is, letting judgment in a way that breaks our heart open instead of sending us into a shame cycle, and also there is the vulnerability and feeling the pain behind the judgment that we have for others. What other kinds of vulnerability are there?
Joe: Asking for what you want, that one is usually really vulnerable for people. Drawing boundaries can be incredibly vulnerable for people. Expressing yourself, singing, or sharing your poetry can be very vulnerable for people. I think the most vulnerable thing for almost all of us is letting the love in. It is really dropping our guard and dropping our wall of protection and really allowing love to come in. That's an incredibly vulnerable thing to do, especially if we've been taught, which most of us have, that love is criticism or love is abuse or love is rejection.
Also, speaking of rejection, it's just allowing yourself to be rejected, like you said, with the judgment really. When you allow judgment in and you feel it all the way, it's the same thing as saying, I'm allowing myself to be rejected, and you let that break your heart open, and as you do let that heartbreak what happens-- This is the weird part about it, is that if you really let that heartbreak in and you really feel the pain of it, what happens is it just starts to not bother you.
I had several experiences where there's been something where let's say, it's a lot like judgment, where I noticed that when people judge me, my defense goes up, my chest expands a little bit, and I'd maybe look down on them or something, and I'm like, "I don't want to do that anymore. I don't want to really let that break my heart." I did. For weeks, months, I'm trying to think. It's probably about six weeks, and I'd be crying in odd places and all that crazy stuff, and now when people judge me there's just no, very seldom a reaction.
There's still sometimes a reaction when it's somebody who I deeply love and respect and they do it, and then I'll notice maybe I get defensive, or maybe my heart still breaks, but the tremendous amount of judgment that you get, particularly in a position like this. Tons of people have an opinion and want to judge what you're saying and doing, which is absolutely their right. It doesn't even cross my consciousness anymore, and that's what the heartbreak provides. It provides you the courage to love more deeply.
Brett: Now, there seem to be good game-theoretic reasons to keep our fears and intentions closer to our chests sometimes. How do we speak our truth and share our internal world like this without being taken advantage of?
Joe: Right. Well, the first thing to say is that, like I said, just a little bit earlier boundaries are vulnerable too. When you draw a boundary, you draw it in the way that I think about boundaries, which is not asking somebody else to be different, but saying what you're going to do differently. Like, "Hey, if you're going to yell at me, I'm going to leave." In that kind of a boundary, often what you're saying is, are you going to reject me for being myself? That's what the boundary is saying, and accepting that they might do that.
It's incredibly vulnerable to draw that boundary and also when you're really capable of stepping into that vulnerability, you're less likely to be taken advantage of. Most people are taken advantage of, because there's something in them that says, "No, this isn't right. I know this isn't right, but if I say that, I might get rejected." The vulnerable thing is to say it and find out if you get rejected. Vulnerability actually protects you.
One other way to look at this a little bit is, that most of the time when people are taking advantage of it's because they're avoiding their fear. "I might be poor my whole life and therefore I'll listen to this person or I'm scared that I'll procrastinate my whole life. I'll buy this thing from this guru or I want to make the money. I believe that my boss is going to promote me when they don't promote me." It's fear that allows us to be taken advantage of, not vulnerability.
If you really vulnerably say, "Wow, I just noticed that I'm curious if I'm going to be taken advantage of here." Wow, the chances of you getting taken advantage of are a tremendous amount less. My experience is that people think about differently is, because when they were young, they loved unconditionally, and it hurt, and so they think that they're going to be hurt if they're loving, and vulnerability in the end of the day is an opening up to your love, to your openness, to your truth of who you are, and so people associate that with the pain, but it's actually the fear that drives the being taken advantage of far more.
Brett: What makes this-- You touched on this just now, but let's dig into a little bit more about what makes this so counterintuitive to most of us. If vulnerability really is strength and vulnerability and embracing our fear is the way out of being taken advantage of, what makes so many of us have this block? It may have been the case when we were kids that something happened, but we've grown up now, what makes that persist?
Joe: Yes, when we're kids, and we're not accepted for who we are as kids. Very few if any people get just fully accepted for who they are, "Don't have a temper tantrum, don't cry, don't get angry. Don't get sad. Don't be scared. Man up, lift up your chin." It's like what we are is not fully accepted. "Calm down, don't get so excited, blah, blah, blah."
What that makes us feel is, it makes us feel helpless as kids. It's this deep, helpless feeling of, "This is who I am, and I'm not supposed to be this way and I am having love removed from me if I'm myself," which feels really bad to not be yourself and it feels really bad to get love removed from your parents where your entire biology is designed to get the love from your parents, and so you start to feel scared, and you also feel like you're wrong, and so that's the memory that lives with us, and it controls us. We don't want to feel that.
As I think we've discussed before, there's different brainwaves. There's alpha and beta and theta. Theta is that dream state. It's where you go into hypnosis and kids from zero to seven, zero to eight, they're in theta all the time. This is the programming, the programming is, "Don't be yourself in these ways because if you do, you're going to feel really helpless. You're going to feel scared and you're going to feel wrong," and so when we start to be ourselves, that's the feeling that we have to move through.
When you move through it two or three times, it's done. You just got to move through it three or four times, two or three times, you're finished. It's not very many times that you have to move through it, and then the system has changed itself. It's like muscle memory more than anything else.
Brett: Right. This muscle memory, our relationship to vulnerability is imprinted on us when we're young by other people, and a lot of things seem like it's about other people and their effect on our imprint of vulnerability, but now when we're doing this work from the inside out, do we need somebody else around to be on the same page with us, to be vulnerable? How do we develop this vulnerability from the inside out when it was patterned on us from the outside in?
Joe: Yes. One of the things that I've noticed is that, when people have really strong access to their emotions, they care less and less what other people think. People who have a really strong ability to feel their anger, have fluid anger and a fluid sadness and fluid fear, that they care less, and it's because they're incredibly related.
The vulnerable thing to do when you're by yourself is to allow yourself to feel whatever you're feeling. Right now, in this moment, you can close your eyes and there's something in your system emotionally uncomfortable, and you can lean in and open to it, embrace it and welcome it, and that's the same feeling of vulnerability. If we got rejected as a kid, we've rejected it internally as well, and so allowing ourselves to feel it and embracing that intensity. It can be done in really, literally every moment of the day.
That's showing yourself that these feelings that you have, this truth that you have, is acceptable. It's a great way to grok that like, "There is nothing wrong with me." The thing that we think is wrong with us is resisted emotion, emotion that we think we're not supposed to have. Internally, it's jumping off the same cliff, it's like, "Oh, I'm going to allow myself to feel this feeling." It's the same when you're being vulnerable and you're speaking your truth, you're like, "Oh, I might feel rejected. Oh, I might feel judged. Oh, I might feel abandoned," and it's allowing yourself to feel these feelings, whether it's internal or external.
Brett: What's a specific example of one of these feelings, these uncomfortable feelings that we might find if we do this exercise, and then a vulnerable action that might come from embracing that feeling?
Joe: The feelings are some of the ones I've mentioned, like rejection or abandonment or anger. It can be different for everybody, but what can be even more different is what the action is that's vulnerable.
For me, it was very easy to move to fight if I felt attacked, and what was far harder, more vulnerable for me some years ago was to say "Ouch." to say "That hurt." to say "I'm sorry.", those were far more vulnerable actions, because I felt like I would be attacked if I did that, but there's some people who always say I'm sorry and they're more vulnerable action might be to stand up for themselves.
It's really different. The vulnerability is not something that can be like-- It's not a morality. It's not like this is the place to be vulnerable. This is not. It's in every moment you can feel where your fear and your truth are together and that's the vulnerable action. It's really a very personal thing.
Brett: You're talking about the fight part, how does vulnerability look in the face of outright direct hostility? Perhaps there's no physical danger that you're in, but you're in the face of strong aggression.
Joe: Yes, again, that's different for everybody. The story goes, say Gandhi got shot, and he forgave the person before he died, that might be a great act of vulnerability, but it might not, that's the crazy part. That might have been second nature for Gandhi.
It's really about seeing what your truth is. If you're in outright attack, the vulnerable thing might be to say, "I don't want to engage with you." That could be really like-- If you learned as a kid that walking away from somebody was something that was going to get you attacked, then that might be the really vulnerable thing, and you might do that five, six, seven times and find out, "Oh, I can do that now," and then now it's not vulnerable anymore and then now, now it's vulnerable. Now it's vulnerable, might be like, "Oh, my goodness, yes, please share all that, I see you're really angry at me. Please share that all with me."
You might do that for five or six times, and all of a sudden that's not vulnerable anymore and then the vulnerable thing might be like, "I love you and it hurts that you're attacking me and I love you, I'm not going to stop loving you." You just can't determine what that is for a person. It's very much what it is for you. It's your truth, it's your fear, it's not anybody else's and it could be, stop it. It could be, I'm not going to accept this from you right now. It could be literally yelling back.
It's very different for every person, but if you don't feel like you have the freedom to do all of those things, then you're not free. There's a saying that says, if your hand is always in a fist or if your hand is always in a receiving position, both of them are cripple. You really want that flexibility, and vulnerability gives you that.
Brett: A lot of the examples you gave there wasn't really a clear– like it's really person-dependent. People could find themselves using-- I've seen this happen before, people will use vulnerability as a defense, or as a way to attract attention or manipulate a situation, and maybe it'll be a false vulnerability, or maybe they will truly feel that that's vulnerable for them, because it's just making them feel the fear that they’re patterned to feel. What's going on with that?
Joe: Yes, I've got a big smile on my face. This is again, this belief system that weakness is vulnerability. What's happening there often is that people are using-- they're saying, "Look, I'm weak." It's making you feel guilty or making you want to take care of them or making you feel like you've done something wrong. It's really not vulnerability at all.
If you think about those moments when you've done it, when you've played weak to manipulate or-- we all have on some level played weak to get someone to help us. I think guilting people is one version of this. We're neither in our truth nor are we scared when we're doing that. It's just confusion over again that vulnerability and weakness are the same thing.
Brett: How do you know if you're in one of those situations, how do you know if you are really being vulnerable or you are having bad boundaries or you are trying to control? What's the pointer to that?
Joe: It's when you are in your truth and when you are embracing fear, and not feeling it, but embracing it. A good way to know when you're not being vulnerable is that there's guilt involved, because almost all the time when we're manipulating somebody, there's something that kind of feels dirty in us and that's like a guilt feeling. That's another way to know if you're doing this to control. You see this all the time nowadays where people control by saying, "I don't feel safe."
They say, "I don't feel safe," and that's like, "You have to change for me." We can turn anything into control. We can turn boundaries into control. We can turn vulnerability into control, and you see people do this to where they were like, "I was vulnerable with them and they weren't vulnerable back," as if it's an exchange, it's as if we're keeping score, and that happened, you won, because you get to be vulnerable. If you're keeping score, if it's guilt, then you know that you're not in a vulnerable state.
Brett: Got it. Vulnerability is already widely accepted as a directionally correct heuristic for personal relationships, notwithstanding the challenges and different relationships people have are the definitions of vulnerability, but what about in the workplace? What happens when we bring vulnerability to the workplace, where it often seems like vulnerability should be or is expected to be reduced in a workplace?
Joe: What happens, you manage people better, you sell better, you build better products. That's what happens when you're vulnerable in a workplace. It's interesting to hear you say it, ask the question, because I know that so many corporate environments are built on a lack of vulnerability, but it doesn't matter what you look at. If you look at the people who are outstanding performers, that are really outstanding performers, there's a way in which they're vulnerable in their work. It's even-- I know it's kind of crazy to even say this, it's even in rap music.
If you look at rap music, and all the belligerents and all fronting and saying how cool they are, and how they're going to get everybody else. The people who are most vulnerable in their raps are the most successful, the ones who actually show themselves like Eminem, whatever they are. They are kind of revealing a part of their psychology that would be hard for anybody else to reveal if it was in them.
Those are often the most successful and it's just like that all the way around if you-- There's tons of stories, there's a woman in Brazil who had her company work without a paycheck for six months, because she was so vulnerable and let them know there's reinventing organizations.
There's a story of a CEO of a company, they lost a third of their business and he vulnerably went to everybody and said, "I don't know what to do." The whole company was like, "Hey, let's reduce our salaries for a third until we can get another customer in," and they got a customer relatively quickly.
There's just so many stories. They talk about brand authenticity. That's a vulnerable thing. I saw the head of the COO of Patagonia get up and speak one time and he said, "For brand authenticity, I want to tell you what we're not doing for the environment that we could be doing." He just listed it out. That's how he started. Immediately, everybody was just like, Oh, wow, you really do care about the environment. [laughs]
Whereas other people are like, “This is everything I'm doing.” You know, like greenwashing. Vulnerability works. If you even think about the great presidential speeches and they're evoking a vulnerability of, I am responsible for this. After all, I'm the president. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
Those sentiments are all these vulnerable sentiments of opening up our humanity, because it's our humanity that creates connection. All businesses is connection. It's a connection to our thoughts. It's a connection to each other. It's a connection to our customers. The deeper we are in connection with ourselves, with our ideas, with our emotions, with our customers, with the product, those levels of connection, it just makes us better in business.
Brett: What tends to happen if somebody who's embarking on this journey right now and bringing more and more of themselves and their vulnerability to their workplace, what can they expect? What's that going to look like?
Joe: Probably a bumpy ride. [laughs] I would say that it's a bit of a bumpy ride at first, because one of the main reasons people fight is the question of who's in charge. If you've been acting like you know everything all the time and you start being vulnerable people might be like, oh, is he not in charge anymore? They might test that for a while until they realize that no, you're still strong. You still are determined. You're just also being real. You're just creating connection. Also, most of the time when people start being vulnerable, they oscillate between vulnerable and defended, and that creates a confusing signal for the company. It can be a little bit of a bumpy ride, but it definitely turns the corner relatively soon if you commit to it.
What happens is, you know yourself better. There's a famous Drucker quote, which is basically, "You can't manage others if you can't manage yourself." Self-knowledge happens. People are more prone to trust you, because you're actually real with them. You create, like I said, deeper connections and people they follow authenticity. If you really look at who we pick as our leaders, they can be assholes. They can be kind. They can be saints. They can be incredibly intelligent, but the people that we pick are the people who are authentic. The less authentic say, a presidential candidate is, the more it feels like they're putting on a show, the less likely they are to get elected.
Brett: I like that you pointed out the people that we pick as our leaders because, in the workplace, there's often an assumption that we didn't pick our boss, but we really did pick our job and pick who's going-- we did in a sense. Now as a leader, as a boss, and you had mentioned that as people show up to the workplace with more vulnerability, they go back and forth between clean vulnerability and then being messy and that can be really disorienting for people around them. As a leader, how can you create an environment that allows people that space, that slack for messiness as they show up and try to bring more vulnerability?
Joe: That's a great question. A question that a lot of people never get to. I would say that the real way to do this is to have really clear boundaries. No emotions at people, you take accountability for the mess that you make. Those are the things that are most useful for the people who are there. Somebody says, I'm going to be vulnerable, and they are vulnerable and in a normal business, maybe they would say, that was unprofessional, we need you to be professional. Basically, take that part of yourself and stuff it. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it's just not the most efficient thing.
If you're choosing to be vulnerable and somebody does that same really big mess, it's like, I really understand and again, at the end of the day, these are still your responsibilities and it's still your job to treat your employees or your peers with respect. How do we accept this part of you and still make sure that all the other expectations are met? I think a lot of the times when people start being vulnerable– It can allow people to get messy and too entwined in trying to save each other. If somebody is vulnerable with you and then you try to save them, it can get really quite messy.
It's really the thing is, if someone's vulnerable with you, it's how do you empower them? How do you turn it around so that they see that there's actions that they can take responsibility for? As an example of this, I was recently working with somebody, I was very explicit, "Please do not do this. It will hurt a lot of our customers if you do it." They went ahead and did it. I basically said, "Oh, I noticed that I've lost trust and I don't want to work with anybody that I don't trust. The way that I could see rebuilding trust is that you identify what created that behavior in you and you tell me how you're addressing it so that I can be confident it's not going to happen again."
It's just an incredibly clear boundary and holding them accountable, which is the deep form of empowerment and there was no anger. There was no shame. There is no you've been bad. There was no me trying to save them. There was just [laughs] I actually appreciated them for showing me some things in the conversation that we had prior. Where I was like, "Oh, I really appreciate that you showed me these things and these are ways that I can improve, and I still notice that I don't have trust in you."
Brett: Something you got to a little earlier was, vulnerabilities seems to be contagious. If you show up to a relationship or a workplace becoming more vulnerable, it seems that often others will become more vulnerable too. You can just expect that to happen and that you can expect them to be messy. Maybe if you're doing it from the framework of VIEW in our course, you might have more theory to fall back on on how to let your messiness be and they might have less.
It seems like as we are preparing ourselves to experience being more messy as we become vulnerable, we can just expect other messiness to show up around us and vulnerability. What´s your advice for that?
Joe: Well, first of all, yes, messiness is going to show up, but it's not going to be more messy than what's happening now. It's just going to be added, it's just going to be raised to the surface. It's not that vulnerability just is going to make your world a mess for a while. It's just going to shine light into the corners you haven't swept.
Every one of those messes if it's approached with more vulnerability and boundaries and that kind of thing, then the world gets more and more clean, and then there's less and less friction and then everything happens more and more smoothly.
The question that you're asking though is still a good one, which is, “What do you do when you shine the light and see that there's a whole bunch of dirt?” The response is, you clean it out and VIEW conversations are a great way to do that. It's really working with each other and holding each other accountable with vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder.
Brett: As we continue to practice vulnerability, how does the way that we express it change over time? Beyond this early shifting that seems like it might be higher magnitude, what then happens over a longer period?
Joe: A deep authenticity shows up. I think about my wife all the time in this. Particularly other women, I watch them just sit in awe of my wife often, it's almost like they're watching a puppy. The same kind of awe that you see a puppy with. You've met her. You know. She's just so much of herself. She's just like, “Oh, tea, flowers.” She's so in her world of joy and everybody's like, “Oh, and that's what happens is that you're more yourself and more yourself means you're more in love. It means there's more joy in your life.”, and people want to be around that. People are fascinated with that and it creates awe in people.
Think about it this way. Think about a friend that you have, that you like very much, you have a deep love for and there's just something that bothers you about them. You put that person in your mind and imagine if that thing that they bothered you with, they were just super vulnerable. They are like, “I noticed that I am constantly bragging and I'm really sorry for that. It's not how I want to be with you. I don't want to have to try to make myself feel good or make you feel bad.” That's one example. Just imagine you have a friend like that. What happens in your system if they're vulnerable like that with you? You immediately want to be around them more.
Brett: You drop the defense. You drop the judgment.
Joe: Exactly, and that's what happens. The more you're vulnerable, the more that happens.
Sales is the same thing. There's good studies about people who care more about the relationship, who are actually really driven by serving the people through sales, and how much better they do performance-wise. It's not the only thing that makes a good salesperson for sure. There's definitely data that challenging people can make you a better salesperson, but challenging people is a form of care. Asking questions helps sales. We know that but asking questions actually shows a concern for them as well.
In a weird way, if you look at all of the things that make great salespeople, they're all based on the fact that they're centered on the other person, that they're not about closing the deal. It's about building the relationship. It's about helping the person discover something. It's about entering into their world. In sales, it's the same thing. It's like all those things are very vulnerable moves.
If you look at creating relationships generally, or you think about the people in business that you want to work with the next time you're in business. You're starting your company and you can handpick 10 people that you want to work with. How many of those are based on some level of connection that you feel with that person? It's probably something like 7 out of 10, and then the other three are highly competent in something. That's another way to look at it.
Brett: A point you brought up about challenging people was interesting. There are vulnerable ways to challenge somebody and there're invulnerable ways to challenge somebody. Let's assume that you've done it in the most vulnerable way. Let's say, it's sales business, something relatively high stakes, and other people are depending on it. You are authentically vulnerable in a way that challenges somebody. What if that is received as an attack?
Joe: Then you apologize. Then you say I'm so sorry I had no intention of attacking you. I was just hoping that we could discover something together. If you're challenging, asking scary questions is a huge part of VIEW and that is challenging. Almost always when that question is really scary, it's really challenging.
If you do it with vulnerability, which is the scary part, the impartiality, empathy, and wonder, then it's far less likely to be seen as an attack. Still, it can be seen as an attack, and then you just go, “I'm sorry, I had no intention of attacking you.” Or you double down and you say, “What's making you defensive. I don't understand. What are you defending?” Which would be another scary question. If you're actually in wonder, not in judgment. If you're not trying to prove yourself right.
Brett: That points back to the state of being that VIEW is, because you could say, “What makes you so defensive?” Or you could say, really, “What makes you defend against that?”
Joe: Yes, exactly. Or you can say, “Oh, I see that I have offended you. I really don't want to offend you. Can you help me see what it is that I've attacked in what you're defending?” Because you must really care about it if you're defending it.
Brett: We talked a lot about what vulnerability is and what it looks like. Let's talk a little bit more about the state of being that all of this points to. How we can know when we're in it and when we're not in it. What are some compass points that point towards this vulnerability, so that we can use as we walk away from this episode?
Joe: That's great. Intellectually, like we said and probably several times now that you're inviting your fear and you're saying what's true to you. That's the intellectual. I guess part of that's emotional, inviting your fear. There's also a heart-opening– and the fear can often turn to excitement, if you fully embrace that vulnerability, or it does maybe through the process of saying the thing that you want to say. There's that heart openness that happens.
From the guts perspective, it's very much like, yes let's do this. There might be a no in the nervous system but the gut is like, yes, this is true, this is it. That's what you can feel. Those are the ways to feel the vulnerability but the easiest is just to say, oh, what's the scary thing that's true for me right now?
Brett: I think one of the things that's in both, the fear and the excitement of saying the vulnerable thing, is knowing that your idea or your authenticity is about to be tested. Knowing that the relationship you're about to find out how real it is for the other person, or how much connection there actually is here. Or you're about to find out if you're going to be rejected or not instead of continuing to wonder for a long time while you pretend to be somebody else.
Joe: Yes, that's such a beautiful way of putting it. It's true. The interesting thing your mind does in these moments is, that what your mind does is, it seems like that's the end of it. Like, “Oh my God, I'm going to see if I get rejected, and then they reject you.” You can double down on vulnerability and you can be like, “Ouch. I was really hoping not to be rejected and I don't want to push you into not rejecting me.” Then they might go, “Wait, hold on. I'm not trying to reject you here. I just want to be seen in my truth. What am I missing?” It doesn't end.
The thing is it just never ends, but the fear tells us that there's this cliff and it's over that cliff. Oh, we're going to be rejected. I can't tell you how many times–
Today at lunch, there was an old babysitter of ours and her mother was sitting there and I saw them. I'd seen the babysitter maybe two or three years back, and she didn't look happy. I saw her today and she looked great. I said, "Wow, you look great." She said, "Oh, Thanks." I was like, "Yes, the last time I saw you, you looked like you're wilting a little bit and it's just great to see you look so good."
I'm sitting at lunch with my daughter, 11-years-older and the mother comes over and chastises me for saying what I said to her daughter. I could feel rejected and I did for a moment. I was like, “Oh, ouch.”, and then I walked over and I looked at the daughter and I said, "I'm sorry, I had no intention of offending you and I'm sorry if I offended you." Then she said, "Oh, it's no problem. I just couldn't figure out a time recently where I've felt withered or whatever, felt bad." I was like, "I don't think I've seen you for two or three years." She was like, "Oh, okay." The mom was still twisted about whatever what was going on, but the daughter, she thanked me, "Oh, thank you for apologizing." I'm like, "Yes, no problem." There's no end. There's just when you want to stop. Sometimes it's really vulnerable to say, "I can't do this anymore."
Brett: There's two directions I want to go with that. One that reminded me of a story from about 10 years ago, working on a commercial production job. The key actor who was a famous musician at the time showed up to set and just looked like death. Everybody on set tiptoed around that and just coddled and then he sits down, and the makeup girl walks up, and she's just like, "Wow, you look like shit." He was just like, all of a sudden all this tension just released. He's like, "Oh, my God. Yes, I just feel like crap. I've been having these personal issues and this and that and the sleep–" He just got to just let it all out.
Joe: Yes, exactly. I don't know how many times I've said, "Wow, you're being an ass." But with just total joy and no judgment in the system and the person's like, "Oh, yes, I kind of I am, fuck." Then we have a real conversation. It feels vulnerable to say that though.
Brett: Which brings another thing to be excited about with vulnerability, is the dropping of pretense. You're about to find out. This is probably where part of the fear comes in, that you're going to have to revise your model of reality because you're testing it.
Joe: Yes, exactly. All the time. Yes, that's it. That's beautifully said.
Brett: Well, this has been a great episode, Joe. Thank you so much for your time.
Joe: A total pleasure. I look forward to the next one, Brett.
Brett: Likewise. Take care.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe & rate us in your podcast app. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.
Links/resources:
The Work (2017): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cca5QWdSTMQ
What I Want My Words To Do To You: http://www.pbs.org/pov/watch/whatiwant/#:~:text=What%20I%20Want%20My%20Words%20To%20Do%20To%20You%20offers,whom%20were%20convicted%20of%20murder.
Drucker: https://www.thinkleansixsigma.com/article/the-effective-executive#:~:text=You%20can't%20manage%20others,practices%20and%20five%20crucial%20habits.
How does empathy affect our decision making? We often think we are making decisions based on intellect but in reality we make many, if not all, decisions based on trying to feel or trying not to feel certain emotions. If you look forward to all of your emotions what will that do to your decision making?
"When you have empathy with someone, they are more likely to be open because they feel that you are with them, and you can't do anything to show it to them. You are just empathetic, and it just occurs."
Welcome to the Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease.
My name is Brett Kistler. I am an adventurer, entrepreneur and a self exploration enthusiast. I am here with my co-host, Joe Hudson. Joe is a business coach who has spent decades working with some of the world´s top executives and teams developing a unique model of human patterns that underpin how we operate with ourselves, each other and the world. A good entry point into this model is a mindset called VIEW, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy and wonder.
Through understanding and cultivation we learn to easefully drop into the VIEW state of mind, deepening self awareness and increasing our connection with the world around us. To learn more about this podcast or courses, visit artofaccomplishment.com
Brett: When we imagine a professional environment, we often see a world where emotions are held inside and remain unseen by others, filtered out as distractions. We might focus on the business stuff, that is the logistics and agreements that seem more relevant than the feelings behind them. Even in our personal lives, intense reactions from others can feel like a distraction from the connection that we want.
What if learning to be acutely aware of others' internal experiences, can give us more useful information than the words they speak? How can our personal and professional relationships change as we learn to notice and address the hurt behind an angry attack or the fear behind a hasty agreement? This is the practice of empathy, the E in VIEW. Joe, how do you define empathy?
Joe: It's so hard. Empathy is so much of a feeling, more than it is an intellectual understanding, but I would say it's being with somebody’s experience without losing yourself in it. That's what I would say empathy is. It's not watching somebody's experience and it's not wanting to change somebody's experience. It's being with them in the experience without losing yourself in it.
Brett: Give me an example.
Joe: Oftentimes when I'm working with clients, for instance, they'll be all agitated around something, and I'll just ask a simple question like, "Is this yours?" Recently there's some COVID anxiety that one of my clients is feeling and I was like, "Is this yours?" They just immediately dropped. They're like, "No, it's not mine." That's one way. That's why, kind of when you're in it.
The other way to define kind of what it isn't so to speak is, you see this all the time with babies crying. Baby starts crying and some people get instantly annoyed and some people can be with that crying, and that's really a deep expression of their capacity to have empathy in that moment. There's actually something biologically that happens too after a baby cries for an extended period of time. For a man, their testosterone increases. In those first couple of minutes of crying, our capacity to empathize with that child or be agitated by that child is really kind of that linchpin.
Brett: Okay. You said earlier this question, is it yours? What do you mean by that?
Joe: Yes. Oftentimes, highly empathetic people go beyond empathy, the way I would define empathy. They would go beyond it and then they're not being able to tell what's their emotional state and what's another person's emotional state. This really happens to people who were children of alcoholics or children of abuse, people who had to survive by knowing the emotional state of somebody when they walk into the room. They can very much get lost in the other person's emotions and think that they're theirs.
We have these things called mirror neurons in our brain, and they basically allow us to feel the state of other people on some level. Sometimes when we're feeling somebody else, we forget that we're feeling them, that it's not us that's feeling that way. In a weird way, we start feeling that way, so then it's really even more confusing because then you're like, I'm feeling it. If you ask yourself the question, is this mine, and then that can clarify a lot.
Brett: Yes. That makes a lot of sense. The idea of mirror neurons is a little bit interesting. The way I see it is, that basically our entire system, all of our consciousness is mirroring our reality in some way, mirroring and correlating perfectly with it and then losing ourselves or are we correlating with it and being with it and experiencing it and learning from it?
Joe: Yes. Mirror neurons in neurology is such a mystery still. What is it that allows-- Is it some form of mirror neuron that allows a whole bunch of birds to know how to turn at the exact same moment? There's something particularly around mammals, where most mammals communicate without any words, and so they're really relying on their ability to sense the experience of the other animals.
Brett: Yes, social nervous system. Tell me how practicing empathy will benefit us. What does this do for us?
Joe: Well, one of the great benefits is, that if anything that you have a hard time empathizing with, means that you have a hard time with that emotional state for yourself. That's fantastic because our decision making process is really based on emotions. If I take the emotional center of your brain away, you cease to make decisions, it would take you half an hour to decide what color pen--
We're really making decisions based on trying to feel or trying not to feel certain emotions, whether we like it or not, whether we think we're being logical or not. If that emotional center of your brain gets taken away, you still have all the intellect, you still have all the rationale, but you still can't make the decisions.
It really helps us clarify our decision making, it really allows us to help us be with our own emotional-- and to discover where we're having a hard time being with our own emotions. If you think about your life in this way, if you think about how much of your life has been decided by, "I don't want to feel like a failure," or "I want to feel like a success," or "I don't want to feel unhappy," how many decisions have you made based on that criteria and to be able to be with all of your emotions, what will that do?
If you look forward to all of your emotions, what will that do to your decision making and how does it change your emotional state? If I have sadness and I don't want to feel it, it feels very different, than if I have sadness and I want to feel it. Those are a lot of the things that'll benefit us on an inward perspective.
Externally, obviously, people like it when other people are with them. If you think about your friends and the people you feel closest to in the world, you can find that they're more able to be with you than people who you don't particularly like. If you look at your friends and you say, what is it about your friends that you want to have changed, oftentimes, it fits into the category of their inability to be with you or see you for who you are. There's that whole thing, too, where it's just, we want to be empathized with, most of us want to be empathized with. It just creates a deeper connection, more loving, more capacity to love.
Brett: Yes, it seems like the first half of what you described as feeling into our emotions to find out where our thoughts and rationale are coming from, and then in others being able to see behind that, too. If somebody is presenting you with a solution or an idea, whether it's a business context or in a relationship, to be able to see behind that, what the feeling is that that's coming from can allow you to address a deeper root cause or need.
Joe: Yes, at least it gives you the capacity to do it. Sometimes people get upset if you do that. [chuckles] It's like, "Wow, it really doesn't seem like you're angry, it seems like you are hurt." "No, I'm not." You know that kind of-- but generally, it goes pretty well and people want to deal with the underlying thing.
So many logical arguments are really not at all about the logic. It's not really about the tactics or the facts. I mean just look at most public discourse. It's not really about the facts. It's about the emotional state of people and their fear, and what they need and what they want and what they are angry about. Yes, to be able to connect with people on that level and to not tell them that they need to be different, but to actually be with them, it's a huge capacity. It really allows you to have a much deeper authentic relationship or communication with people.
Brett: I think the public discourse is a great example, because a lot of people get so triggered around other people believing different facts than them. I think that that's really just coming from a lack of feeling seen, a lot of that.
Joe: Yes, or feeling that they are out of control in their world, or they are helpless or that there's forces beyond them that are controlling them or so many emotions are happening there.
Brett: Earlier you said this a couple of times, "To be with somebody in their experience without losing yourself." How do you prevent that?
Joe: The easiest way to do it, I mean it's just a really simple way. Just put some attention in your own body while you're with somebody. If you happen to be that type that has that deep empathy and you lose yourself in the person, the traditional way people do it is, they become defensive, just whole level of defense, and they are like "No." That works, but it doesn't allow you to be empathetic. It just prevents you from getting lost in them.
To be empathetic in a successful way is to maintain a certain amount of your awareness in your own body. Like right now when you're listening to me, you could also be paying attention to the bottom of your feet or you could also be paying attention to how the sound of this podcast feels in your inner ear. Then that allows you to be with yourself while listening to me and being with me and my experience. It's about as easy as that, just putting some attention in your own body.
The other more intellectual way is to just be aware of when it's happening. I think that's the biggest challenge for most people is that they just don't know when it's happening. A great sign that it's happening is, if you buy into the story of whatever anybody is saying. Let's say you have a friend and they are like,"Oh, my boyfriend, and dah, dah, dah, dah, and the world and my boss and dah, dah." If you're like, "Yes, you've been victimized and we need to do something about it." Pretty much you're in them now or just the opposite. "These people are bad and dah, dah, dah," yes, then you are in them if you buy into the story.
If you are with them emotionally, but you know that the story that they are telling is true within their context, but not true within everybody's context, then you're pretty much not lost in them.
Brett: Yes, this sounds very non-intellectual and a lot of people are going to want to try to understand this more. What would you say to folks who want to understand or analyze emotions or just have that tendency or just want to analyze this process?
Joe: [laughs] Yes, you are screwed is what I would say. [laughs] I mean we can tell you a good story. We're doing it right now. We are telling you good stories about it, but it's not going to really help. Empathy is a felt sense. It's like, say, you close your eyes and you know where your left foot is. That's called proprioception. It's knowing where your body is in space. How do you describe that logically? You can describe what it is logically potentially, but you can't really describe how to do it logically.
Similar with going to the bathroom. How do you know when you are done going to the bathroom? Where is the logic? Are you measuring something? Are you timing it? There's just a felt sense, "Oh, that's done." It's the same thing. Empathy is a felt sense and felt sense can't really be described by the intellect with any kind of accuracy. It's like looking at color. How do you describe seeing green? It requires a label that is arbitrary.
Logic isn't really going to do any good here for that, and it's why it's so easy to dismiss things like empathy and energy or whatever words people are using. There's a felt sense to it, and I think you find this in a lot of things, prayer, or meditation. It's really easy to dismiss those things even if you hear the logic behind them, until you feel them. Then once you have a felt sense of what prayer can do, whether you believe in a God or not, or what the felt sense of believing in a God is like, and what the felt sense of not believing in a God is like.
All those things, they are a very felt sense. You can argue it night and day, but it's why nobody changes their mind on this stuff until they have a change of felt sense. If you want a logical conversation about empathy, go and feel people. Go and be empathetic and stay in yourself while you do it. That's a far better way, just experiment.
Brett: That is true across all of these VIEW podcasts. These are all pointers, intellectual pointers to something that you ultimately need to feel into and experience.
Joe: It's why oftentimes in these conversations they could be logically contradictory. It's because we're just creating frameworks that make it easier to feel into or realize something. It's not about telling it like a truth. [chuckles] It's not like there's one way, or there's something that's right here. There's just, “How do you want to be?'', is the question and that question isn't answered with logic.
Brett: Just feeling our way beneath any fear response we have, which brings me to another question. We have been talking about losing yourself in the other person, not being empathy as you are defining it.
Losing yourself in another person sounds a lot like the flight-fear response that we've discussed before, like fleeing from your experience into theirs to try to fix it. Then you'll dive into a story about why they have that experience. Then you'll create some idea of who's the abuser of the tyranny or the victim. I imagine there's something equivalent that we do in the fight-- in the freeze responses as well. How do these other forms of fear impact our ability to be present with others in their emotions?
Joe: Yes, if you think about it from an evolutionary sense, we have fear. If you are really scared, it's really not time to empathize. That part of your brain goes offline and your fear response comes online. If you are in flight, like you said, you're looking at the world around you, the environment, and the actors in that environment, and you're trying to figure out how to manage those.
If you are in fight, then immediately that emotion that you're starting to feel in your system is going to make you angry and you are going to try to stop it, like the angry person on a plane when the kid starts crying, and the freeze response is the disassociation. It's like a checking out. You can just watch the eyes kind of haze over. It makes sense when we are in fear, it's really hard to have any empathy at all.
Brett: How do you prevent this fear response, or let it pass through you? What do you do with this, when you know a deep bodily patterning to fear in a particular business context or a relationship context?
Joe: Yes, you feel it. That's the trick to all of this stuff. It's like, how do you feel the emotion? When I say feel it, I don't mean be taken away by it. You know there's just some saying that I heard the other day, it was beautiful. I think it's from some supreme court judge. I don't know, but it said, "I wouldn't give you a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I'll give you my whole world for the simplicity on the other side of complexity."
What it's speaking to, is that before we start our learning process, things are pretty simple, then we start learning processes that get really complex and somewhere along the line, it gets very simple again. With emotions, it's very simple for a two-year-old, "I feel angry, and so I'm going to yell at you or punch you."
Then there's the complexity of actually learning what those emotions are, what's happening, identifying them in your body, feeling them, expressing them in a way that doesn't hurt people, letting them move without resistance, finding out that they're very similar to one another, finding out that you can love all of them. Getting to the other side is, "Wow, you just have emotions again," and they're just fluid, except for, you're not run by them. You're not controlled by them. You're not hurting other people with them.
The only way to do that is to actually learn how to feel the fear. If you have a fear response, feel it and invite it in. Don't put it at anybody. Most fear is not wanting to feel something, which is pretty cool when you think about it, like "I'm scared that I'm going to get fired," but if I told you, "Hey, if you get fired, you're going to feel awesome," would you be scared of [chuckles] being fired anymore? It's really us not wanting to have emotions that we're at the core very scared of. When I say feel the fear, I mean welcome it. I really mean like invite it in, breathe it in.
Brett: What's a good way to tell in the moment, if we're working on empathy and how do we tell if what we're feeling in the moment is true empathy and not one of these coping mechanisms or distortions? Another one that comes up is sympathy. There's a lot about how sympathy and empathy are different and often confused.
Joe: It's a wonderful question. The main thing is, are you putting yourself outside-- It's not quite outside, I guess it's above the other person. The differences in, when you're putting yourself above the other person, like subtle ways. Like you want to fix them, but for you to fix them, you have to be less broken, or you want to help them not feel it, which is assuming that you're not feeling it is the better solution.
Brett: That means buying into another story and being that story like, "Oh, yes, fuck that guy."
Joe: Exactly. It's just you're with them. When you're with somebody the way that we all want to be with, it's like we're supporting. We are with, but we are not saving. There's this great phrase that, I think it was from an Aboriginal community or a native community in South America, and says, "Hey, if you're here to help me, no, thank you, but if you're here to work together on our mutual freedom, let's get to work." That's really the essence of it.
Brett: Another thing that happens a lot is that being empathic is often associated with being manipulable or easily taken for an emotional ride. How could it be that deepening our empathy in the ways that we've been talking about makes us less likely to fall into a fear response and abandon our needs or our boundaries?
Joe: You get that fear a lot from people, they're like, "Oh, if I empathize, then I'm going to fall for them." I think that what they're thinking about that person who's fully into the other person's reality and they've lost themselves in it. If you do that, you're more likely to be taken advantage of. If that's what the person wants to do on the other side or is capable of doing, but in all cases, we don't want to feel something, if we're allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of, "I'm going to sell you this magic pill and it's going to make you skinny in two days." If you buy that, it's because you don't want to feel something anymore or you definitely want to feel something.
There's something that you want to feel or scared of feeling to allow yourself to be taken advantage of. To have empathy, it really requires you to be willing to feel whatever is arising for yourself and that other person. It actually prevents you from getting taken advantage of, because you're welcoming of everything and you're not trying to get rid of it. It doesn't matter whether you're non-empathetic or like, "I'm not going to feel that person." That means you don't want to feel shit. It means that you can be taken advantage of pretty easily. Just look at the most non-empathetic people on our planet. They are the most likely to be manipulated by politicians or authorities or advertising.
Then the other side of that is someone who's totally like in that other person's world. Then they're going to sacrifice themselves for it, but if you're actually like, "Oh, I can feel you, I can be with you, and whatever you throw at me, I can feel I can be with." What makes you need to do anything that is contrary to your truth?
Brett: It seems another example of that is in a business relationship where somebody is coming at you with a bunch of emotion and making you responsible for something that you're not responsible for. If you're with them in that emotion, but you're like buying into their full story, then you're going to think that they're entirely right. You're going to lose your boundaries and be taken for a ride.
Joe: Absolutely. If somebody thinks that you're bad and you get locked into their emotion, then you start thinking you're bad, that's exactly a great place where you're going to be taken advantage of by somebody who doesn't think they're taking advantage of you. It's by somebody who feels like they're a victim in that moment typically.
Brett: Back to what you were saying about the people who are the least empathic are the ones that are most likely to be taken for a ride. Many of us simply don't seem to feel emotions in others as much as we'd like. When we start doing this kind of work is when we start to notice this.
When I started to work with you, I experienced certain emotions and others when we were doing exercises. I was watching them as an ant colony. I could see and recognize the patterns, but I wasn't in it with them. Like, "Oh, I didn't have an alcoholic father. That's not my problem." I can see what that does in you, and now I can see your problem. I think I can try to analyze how to fix you. How can we tell the difference between observing someone's experience in a non-empathic way and genuinely being with them?
Joe: The body is the telltale sign here. I think I remember that when we were working together and you're doing that, and I believe I came up and shook you a couple of times. Then you could feel a different way. There's a rigidity that happens in the body when you are trying not to feel, no matter how you're trying not to feel, whether it's by creating distance or disassociation, which is somewhat of what you were doing, being the watcher or wanting it to stop, any one of them. It just creates rigidity in the system. This often happens in the belly, shoulders, jaw is locked oftentimes when I do a workshop, like this one. I'll walk around and I'll hit people's jaws, so that like tap their jaws to remind them they're holding all this tight, or their belly is really tight.
That's the main way, is to keep your body loose and you'll have to feel it. Our feelings are a muscular thing. Our feelings live in our muscles. If you're the person who was told you can't get angry and you are not angry, all the time now, and anytime anger comes up, you either give it to yourself or suppress it really badly, your muscles have to contract in such a way and become distorted in such a way. It's why there's a whole science behind just watching how somebody walks into a room, you can tell a tremendous amount of their upbringing.
Once you know what you're looking for and you've experienced it yourself, the way a person's face is, you can tell what emotions they want to feel, or they don't want to feel. By the way they hunch their shoulders, by the way they tuck their butt, by the way that they hold their lips, how they purse them when certain things come up. It is why we have body language and it's why we have micro-expressions.
Brett: Something I've noticed over doing this work is, that I've started to detect when somebody is disconnecting from me in a conversation. I can roll back a little bit and recognize that I had actually disconnected from them, then they're responding to that. It's as though the feeling for them is the difference between being with a good friend who's there with them and their experience, and being with a shrink who's psychoanalyzing them.
I think that happens a lot for people who want to be there to help others. A lot of it comes from wanting to deal with their own pain, their own history. I think this happens a lot in therapeutic communities where people take the therapeutic role, but they're really analyzing and they're not being empathic.
Joe: It happens definitely in some places there. It happens just with a lot of people who find themselves like the savior or helper of their group of friends. You'll see a lot of that happen. The truth is what-- Sometimes what that is, is they're trying to manage their life by managing other people's emotional states. [chuckles] If you feel happy, I'll be happy. If you're not angry, I'll be happy. If you're in a good mood, I'm in a good mood, and A, it doesn't work and B, you can't change people's emotional states and C it's just far more enjoyable to be with them in the emotional state.
Brett: Which comes back to that self empathy thing we're talking about, like, as I've experienced my ability to actually have empathy with others has directly grown from my ability to actually feel that equivalent feeling in myself.
Joe: That's right, that's exactly how it works, is our capacity to love the parts of ourselves is directly correlated to our capacity to love the parts of other people and other people in general.
Brett: Sometimes being empathic with somebody and holding a highly charged emotion can leave us with a sort of static residue in our system. It can linger or put us on tilt. It takes time for integration, or just leaves us feeling that thing for days. For some people, this is really strong, the empaths.
The self-identified empaths will just avoid certain situations, because they are like, “I just can't handle that energy.” How can we navigate this and be deepening our empathy without closing ourselves off or avoiding situations, especially if we are frequently going from one high energy interaction to another in business or something else?
Joe: Yeah, I had to learn that really the hard way. For me, when I started coaching people and you know the depth in which the coaching can happen. I would go from that to a conversation with negotiating lawyers over points on a contract, and then back into a coaching session. I had to go into these big, highly charged things, one right after the other, and similarly when I do the seven day really deep retreats, it is like one emotional baseball bat after another in the best possible way.
Brett: With real baseball bats sometimes.
Joe: Right, but obviously not hurting anyway. It is something I really had to learn. The main thing is avoid it, and the way you avoid it isn't by not feeling the emotion. It is by being in your body. It's just putting some of your attention in your body while you are with other people and their emotions so you're not losing yourself. That's a huge thing.
If you do that, as you get better at that, that takes care of about 70% or 80% of the problem. Then the other stuff, it is really about grounding. It's about staying grounded, realizing what's yours and not yours. Your body and your breath is the best way to do this. Releasing whatever emotion residue you have, letting the tears flow, shaking it off, grounding yourself in the different ways people can ground themselves. There are some tai chi moves that can do that, yoga moves that ground you.
Brett: Just asking, “Is this mine?”, that was a really good one from earlier.
Joe: Yeah, is this mine? There are some things to calm the nervous system down, different breaths. There are all sorts of things you can look into. If you go into any kind of system that says how I ground, no matter what kind of system from functional medicine to this, you can find those things and they work really well.
My personal favorites are deep breath, walking barefoot, sitting in silence, meditation. Those things, I feel very grounded in those things. Massage will help me feel grounded probably quicker than anything else.
Brett: If you are going straight from a sprint planning meeting where everybody got in an argument, started yelling at each other, and you are carrying that energy straight into a performance review. You really want not to take that out on the person you are reviewing. You have got like five minutes between them.
Joe: First, I wouldn't buy into the story you have to. I would say I am not prepared for this meeting right now emotionally, and I would rather give you the actual emotional attention you deserve. Let's postpone it. That's one thing, obviously. For instance, if there's a big fight in the sprint meeting, I would probably enjoy it, because I could be with the anger and energy, and I would say look at all these people who really give a shit. They really care. They really want it done right, or they wouldn't be fighting.
Brett: Way better than a bunch of apathetic checked out people.
Joe: Exactly, and because I would be enjoying the tension, it would also change the dynamic in the room, the anger, because so much of the fighting that happens is based on a level of resistance, because unresisted fighting feels very much like clarity and decisiveness and a deep care.
Again, staying in your own physical sensation is a huge part to prevent it, but I mean literally just shake your body for two or three minutes between the meetings can work. Taking deep breaths can work. Getting in touch with what's aware of your emotional state instead of your emotional state can work. Yawning 10, 20 times in a row can work. Having a quick cry. Crying doesn't take very long. It can be a minute or two. All of those things can work.
Brett: Can you tell me a couple of stories about how empathy transformed a situation for you in a business context, something like this or different?
Joe: I remember a time when I was fundraising. I can't remember, somewhere in like the $10 million range of fundraising. I just noticed that I was with the person who I was talking to and I noticed that they were getting distant. I just said, “Wow, I notice you are getting distant. I notice something turned you off. What happened?” That is what allowed for a far deeper conversation about what they were looking for, what about my attitude had scared them. We could address it directly. I got to learn that I was objectifying the person probably a little bit more than I would want to. They could learn that they were in a past deal, not in the current deal in front of us.
That's a good example of one. Same thing, raising money, I have been able to empathize with the people on the other side of the table to realize they have objectified me or they see me as an employee rather than a partner. I don't want that. I think investors who see their investees as employees, they are dangerous. You can sense it by the way that they keep a distance from you or how they hold themselves emotionally with you instead of the way somebody who holds you as a partner. That has prevented me from having some really bad investors that way.
Another example is selling. Oftentimes you see in a sales process a customer goes into resistance, and the salesperson tries to convince them, which puts them into more resistance instead of saying be like, “I notice something is not working for you. What's going on? If this isn't working for you, I don't want you to do it. If it's not working for you, there's a potential there's a misunderstanding so I would like to clarify it. But I don't want you doing something you don't want to do, because then I just have an unhappy customer, and that's not good for business.” You can't really do that unless you can feel the person.
Brett: What are some other examples, like working with peers, for example, or within a team?
Joe: For instance, I hear something from managers all the time. They are like, “We all had alignment, and then nobody did it. We all agreed. We all sat in the meeting. We all agreed and nobody did it.” I always say, “In that meeting did you feel like they were excited?” “No.” I am like, “Okay, what stopped you from saying I don't feel the excitement in the room. What's preventing the excitement?” You can't do that with anything beside empathy.
If you are addressing the emotional reality instead of just the intellectual reality, because people, like I said, make decisions based on emotions. That's why people can all agree to something in a meeting, but if they are emotionally resistant, they are not going to go and do it. You can feel into that resistance, feel into where the excitement is, feel into what's being held, where the rigidity is in the room and clarify it. That makes things far more--
It's the same with product development. Kind of a famous thing where people spend a lot of money on a focus group, and then the focus group goes, “This is great!” Then the product fails, or vice versa has happened too. It is because they are asking them about emotional decisions through the intellect. Sometimes it works, but it's not a perfect translator. It's really feeling your customer. It's really feeling, what makes it important for them to buy it.
Henry Ford said, if I gave my customers what they wanted, I would have given them a faster horse, but you put a person behind the car, and you see them drive it and what happens to their face, and you see the way people look at them and what happens in their faces. It's pretty clear who is going to buy what.
Brett: I've always thought that one was interesting, the faster horse thing, because it's not really what they wanted. If you asked them what they wanted, if you asked them the solution that would have solved their problem, they might have bought a faster horse, but really what they wanted was better transportation.
Joe: Exactly. That's the exact point. The intellect is limited in its capacity to see what the emotions want. Transportation was horse and feet at that time, so that was the limitation of the intellectual part of it. But if you looked at the emotional experience, then you know there are other solutions.
Brett: I think this happens in product research all of the time. The research will be conducted in some way where it is like, what do you like better, the red plastic or the blue plastic, and you will get an answer. You will have a meeting where there's a graph that shows how much of the market wants this versus the other thing, but you missed the deeper question and the deeper emotional connection to the product.
Joe: That's exactly right. It's why there's a felt sense to great design. You see something designed with beauty and you feel it. You go, “That's beautiful!”, not just beautiful as in looking, but the design is elegant, and there's a felt sense to that. It makes it appealing to us. There's no way you are going to use the intellect to describe that, unless you have been trained in design for years.
Brett: How will we see our lives and our work change as we deepen our ability to feel our emotions and empathize with others? Some of these good examples are good examples, but what are some other things that would happen in our lives?
Joe: Decisions become more clear, because we are more likely to feel emotions and be happy to feel emotions. We start caring for people instead of care taking them, meaning we are not trying to make them feel better. We are just being in support of them and therefore we get that in return as well. You get more people who are happy to be with you. You also see the people around yourself, and you become more and more empowered. As you stop fearing all of these emotional states, then you just stand in your truth more and more and more. There's just a deeper level of empowerment that happens, for you and for the people around you.
One of these things, I was working with a CEO of one of the companies, and he tended towards care taking. Obviously, because he is care taking, there are a lot of people that fall into that victim thing in this company, and there was this victim mentality in the company because he felt responsible for them. As that changed for him, as he could be with people instead of taking care of people, all of a sudden the decisions that could empower them could start to be seen.
Instead of coming in and saying, “Here's how we are going to fix the world.”, he would say, “How do you want to fix the world? Clearly, you are unhappy. How are you going to fix it?” He would empower people to fix their own problems, and it changed everything for his company.
Brett: You can just use my name when you are talking about me.
Joe: That wasn't you. You were not the person in my mind when I was saying that.
Brett: I know, but I just felt it as like yeap, that's exactly been my journey. What else happens? A lot of times when we do these kinds of practices, there are shifts in our lives that are short-term uncomfortable or destabilizing. Is there anything like that that would happen with practicing deeper empathy?
Joe: As the emotions start to get felt and the resistance isn't worked through, it can be a bit turbulent. It's not the emotions that are uncomfortable. It's the resistance to them. There can be a little bit of turbulence. There can be moments of tears where you would prefer there weren't tears. They don't happen very often. They are pretty rare. People are like I am going to be crying all over the place. It is like I cried at this one place, and actually somebody came up to me and said something sweet. Yeah, it can be a little bit turbulent.
There's also this idea that if I allow my emotions, then they are going to take over me and control me. It's the projection you have been controlling your emotions, so you think they are going to control you. It doesn't happen like that. I have seen anybody at all of the thousands of people I've seen go through this process, I've never seen any of them who are like, “I am controlled by emotions now.”
Brett: Damn you, Joe.
Joe: Exactly. It has never happened. I would say that. The biggest thing is what we have really harped on, on this talk-- If you empathize with losing yourself, that can be really damaging. Learning how to be in your own body while you are empathetic is so critical. I just even recommend for the rest of the week, put some of your attention into your physical body during every conversation. See what that does to your world. It will rock your world, if you do that for every conversation for a week. It will just rock your world.
I just say it's important to take it slow. I would say if the emotional tube is kinked, just be gentle with the unkinking. Take it slow.
Brett: There's the wisdom in taking it slow, and there's also another side of that, that I can see. A lot of times these emotions are stacked on each other. You get beneath one of them, and you let yourself feel it. You might get yourself to feel the anger, but then if you don't feel the hurt underneath the anger, then a completely different thing starts controlling you. You get the disruptive thing going on in your life, and you are entering another pattern. There's like being gentle with yourself and taking it slow, and then there's being curious about how far down it goes and what's beneath this one I am not feeling.
Joe: I would definitely agree with that. To think there's an end is no good. It's not going to be servicing your journey at all, so seeing it as endless, being curious about it, being vulnerable with yourself about your emotional state, being impartial with how you feel. You can use all of those tools, and use it for this empathy. It might upheave and you might find yourself bawling, crying and shaking. All of that can happen while being gentle with yourself.
Brett: What are some ways empathy can go wrong? What does it look like if we are trying to be empathic, we aren't quite there so it is shallow or it is false? How could it be used directly as a weapon if somebody starts using these practices and they are like, “I could actually use this to manipulate people? What happens then? How does that look?”
Joe: Creepy, you can see it. The difference between a good interviewer and a bad interviewer is one is using real empathy and one is faking it, and you can tell. It makes your skin crawl on some level. It might work for some people, but it is only going to work on a small percentage of them where empathy creates connection consistently. You can use empathy as a tool. They do all these skills that are based on that, mimic their body language, nod yes when people speak, and blah, blah, blah.
Brett: Mirror the last three words of the thing they said.
Joe: Use their name in the front of sentences, and blah, blah, blah. You can do all of that stuff, but if you are not in empathy, it comes off as false, fake, and gross. We have all been with that person, but if-- you could do all of that stuff with deep empathy and then it's actually quite appealing. It is really the empathy that is appealing.
I think the reason those tools work when they do work, sometimes is, because they actually hack the mind into empathy.
Brett: They are disarming, and if the intent is to disarm, then it can get you closer to it, to disarm yourself that is, not to disarm the other person as a trick. So what are a couple of summary bullet points on how all of what we have discussed would apply to a VIEW conversation and practice with the rest of this course?
Joe: One of the things is you can ask questions. You can ask how, what questions that are based on nonverbal cues, on empathy. “Wow, it feels like you distanced yourself right there. What happened?”
You can say, “It looks like you don't agree with that. What's going on? What's happening with you right now? How did that feel?” You can ask questions like that, and people generally stay up on the intellectual and won't ask questions on the moetional.
Brett: And in a curious way. “I saw you disconnect there. I saw you disconnect there. I know it. Tell me.”
Joe: Empathy as an attack. That's right. Also, basically, you'll notice that, when you have empathy with someone, they are more likely to be open, because they feel that you are with them. You can't do anything to show it to them. You are just empathetic and it just occurs.
Like I said earlier, there's this creepy thing where people know you are managing them, and when they do, they back off. You don't have as much data. You don't get as much truth. You don't get to see the problem as it is. You don't get their ideas for solutions. With empathy, you get all that stuff. You get more data, and more ideas for solutions.
Brett: Or the solutions you get from them are actually their solutions to get you to stop managing them.
Joe: Exactly. Also, if you are in empathy, you can catch yourself being partial. If you are using empathy and you see somebody have an issue with you, you can be like, “I was being partial. I will catch my own partiality from being empathetic to their response to me.”
Brett: Like the way I was describing earlier, when I catch somebody rolling back, you are like, “Wait a minute, I see what I did there.”
Joe: Exactly.
Brett: As you close, I would love for you to tell us about an impactful experience you have had, that caused the deepest increase in your empathy for others in the shortest amount of time.
Joe: I want to give you two. The first one was, I was having this experience where I realized where I really just did not want to be with people who were having meaningless conversations. It was so annoying. “I was driving 65 miles an hour.” “Really, 65?” “Yeah, 65 miles an hour down to Santa Barbara.” Uh, it was so frustrating for me. I was like “What is it that I don't want to feel? What is it that's happening for them, for me that I don't want to feel?” I just opened myself up to it. It was awkward. I would be weeping in these conversations that were seemingly benign.
After two or three weeks of that, maybe a month of that, the personal recognition that came through it was so critical to my sense of self, that I had to be valuable. The idea that I might be spending time where I wasn't valuable, it was so hard on my system I didn't want to feel that kind of sense of worthlessness. That was an internal thing. Then to have the freedom to be worthless. “Oh yeah, I am happy to be worthless, and I am happy to be of value.” Having that freedom was tremendous.
Then my capacity to immediately be with people who were having that level of conversation happened, and what I realized is, even in that level of conversation, there are different forms of connection going on. There are different ways people are connecting that aren't verbal, that aren't about the immediate intellectual thing that's up front.
This one wasn't as quick, but it was bigger for me, which was getting in touch with Hand in Hand Parenting, which is really one of the main tools I learned empathy from. One of the tools in that is, it is called Parenting by Connection, and it allows parents to be deeply connected with kids, kids to feel deeply connected. The thought process is when kids feel connected, they naturally want to behave in a way that´s enriching for themselves and the family. All of the tribulations that we feel from children is just them being out of connection, and so how do you get them back into connection?
One of the tools, they have five very simple tools. One of the tools is, stay listening. It's like allowing the kids to have temper tantrums, and being with them in that temper tantrum and even encouraging it to move through and making sure it doesn't get stuck. I was not good with a lot of my emotions when I started doing Hand in Hand parenting. I got good with them really quick.
All of a sudden, I have a tremendous amount of emotional freedom I didn't have before. All of a sudden, my decision making got so clear, because I couldn't be with my child's temper tantrum until I could be with my own. I couldn't be with my child's anger until I could be with my own or their tears until I could be with my own. That process of empathizing and being with my children gave me so much more freedom.
Brett: How did these two stories impact your ability to have value for people?
Joe: I don't care. I mean if I were to look at it, seemingly I am more able to be more valuable to them, because I can be with them in a deeper way now, and I am not judging them or myself. That seems like that's probably more valuable. The bigger answer is it doesn't matter to me anymore.
Brett: I love that paradox, the driving wound of your first story to just not caring anymore, actually having that impact.
Joe: It was a great conversation. Thanks so much, Brett.
Brett: Yeah, thank you.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe & rate us in your podcast app. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.
Links/notes:
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." ― Henry Ford
“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes
https://www.handinhandparenting.org/ - a nonprofit that provides parents with the tools and support they need to listen and connect with their children.
In today’s society, we have an archetype of the successful leader as a commander; someone who knows what they want and bends the world to their will in order to get it. But so many of us end up elbowing our way into loneliness or controlling our lives into a place we later realize we don’t want to be.
How can we have clear goals and desires while staying in flow with reality?
What if accepting the outcomes we’re avoiding makes our desired outcomes more likely?
On today’s episode, we’ll be discussing Impartiality -- the I in VIEW.
"Recognizing something that's right and going with it rather than trying to get it to be your version of right is the practice of impartiality in business, and it is incredibly, incredibly useful."
Welcome to the Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease.
My name is Brett Kistler. I am an adventurer, entrepreneur and a self exploration enthusiast. I am here with my co-host, Joe Hudson. Joe is a business coach who has spent decades working with some of the world´s top executives and teams developing a unique model of human patterns that underpin how we operate with ourselves, each other and the world. A good entry point into this model is a mindset called VIEW, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy and wonder.
Through understanding and cultivation we learn to easefully drop into the VIEW state of mind, deepening self awareness and increasing our connection with the world around us. To learn more about this podcast or courses, visit artofaccomplishment.com
Brett: In today's society, we have this archetype of the successful leader as a commander, someone who knows what they want and bends the world to their will in order to get it. Many of us end up elbowing our way into loneliness or controlling our lives into a place we later realize we don't want to be.
How can we have clear goals and desires while staying in flow with reality? What if accepting the outcomes we're avoiding makes our desired outcomes more likely. On today's episode, we'll be discussing impartiality, the I in view. Joe, describe what you mean by impartiality.
Joe: Yes, my 11-year-old girl yesterday asked me that question. It was cool because it gave me a very different answer explaining it to an 11-year-old. The answer that I normally give is, it's to not have an agenda for another person, at least in the VIEW modality. It means that when you're having a conversation, you're not trying to get the other person anywhere.
That's what it means in that way, but the way I explained it to my daughter was, it's saying, "I trust you. You know what's best," when you're talking to somebody else, right? You're saying, "I trust, you know what's best. I'm going to follow your lead. I think you know what you need better than anybody else could know what you need. You have more information and data to know what you need and I want to explore that with you." That's impartiality.
Most of our conversations are very partial and it would be things like, "I know what you need. Let me give you advice. I want you to be better, I want you to be healed, I want you to be different. I want you to feel like I'm valuable in this conversation." That's the partiality instead of the impartiality. That's what I mean. Particularly in these kinds of conversations, there's other ways to think of impartiality generally and that are really important in one's journey. We may or may not get into that, but for the context of the VIEW conversation, that's what it means.
The reason on some level that this is so important is, because the subtle message behind partiality is, that you think that you're smarter than the other person. I know what's best for you if I can give you advice. You think you know what's up. That's basically agreeing with the essential myth so many of us live with. It's the essential myth that we're not good enough.
If you're telling somebody that, you're also making that true for them, whereas if you are looking at them and in the conversation, you see them as wise. You speak to the wise part of them, the part of them that knows and that's the part that's going to come out and meet you. That's what you get in that conversation instead of the helpless person you get on the other side of the conversation, somebody who's wise, because that's the part that you're asking to talk to and that you're talking to.
Brett: Let's dig into that not good enough part a little bit more. What is impartial about that?
Joe: Yes, there's this correlation between thinking that you're not good enough, and let's call that shame and that there's actions that prevent you from being happy. It's like, you think you're not good enough because you haven't worked out. You think you're not good enough because you still get angry. You think you're not good enough because women don't like you and you think that if you do all that stuff, if you work out enough and women like you or enough men like you or whatever it is, then you're not going to have shame and then you're going to be happy, but the causation is actually the opposite of what people think.
It's far more that shame causes the actions, than it is, that the actions are what caused the shame. Meaning if you remove the shame, then it's very easy for the working out to happen and for people to want to be with you and all that stuff. Shame is kind of like the locks that keep the chains of bad habits in place. I think there's a guy, Adia Shantay who said that. That's what I mean. It's the shame that holds the bad actions in place. I don't want to call them bad, but the actions that prevent us from being happy.
Brett: I like this dual direction of causation. I think it'd be interesting to see it as a loop as well. Our actions and the consequences to our actions can create shame and they can also heal us. But if we're waiting for the impact of the world to do that to us, then that's sort of disempowered when we could actually work on the other side of that loop which is working on our-- seeing our own goodness, seeing that we're good enough as we are and letting that shame dissolve, which then changes our actions to be less producing of consequences that would lead to shame.
Joe: Yes, it's absolutely a dance. It's absolutely a dance. They definitely can feed off one another. What I noticed in the mind of most people, they're not saying "Maybe I should stop being so shame-oriented, I should stop shaming myself." I think that's the most important part to call attention to. Yes, absolutely a dance.
Brett: What is the benefit of being impartial?
Joe: [laughs] It's like a CEO asking the CFO, "What's the benefit of revenue?" Yes, so many benefits. You don't shame people, for one. You're teaching people how to fish, not feeding them fish. You're empowering the people in your organization. You're empowering your husband, wife, kids. You don't have to save anybody anymore. You don't need to be valuable anymore. People are more likely to trust you because you're not trying to fix them, you're just being with them. Deeper levels of connection.
Just keep on going, there's so many benefits from it. There's only one perceived loss that people think they're going to have, is like, if I stopped being partial, then I'm not going to get what I want, [laughs] which is hilarious, because if they were paying attention to some degree, they had realized they've been partial their whole life and they're still not getting what they want in many arenas.
Obviously, you're going to get what you want and not get you what you want with partiality. But what I would say is that look for causation, even look for correlation. I find people get what they want far more when they are being impartial and owning their wants.
Brett: Yes, fascinating. I think it's intuitive to us that being partial often, being overly partial, it doesn't end up getting us what we want and so we learned some weird form of impartiality, which is really just like-- we use it as a way to be non-threatening in a conversation. If we were to turn the partiality all the way down to zero, our behavior would approach random chance and we wouldn't be going in any particular direction at all. How does being impartial help you have productive conversations and achieve goals and get what you want?
Joe: Yes, yes, okay. There's no way I think any mammal, but definitely, humans can be completely impartial. It's asymptotic, meaning that you can dissolve more and more of your partiality, but there's always some partiality. You see this in acting. A lot of the great directors, the way they direct actors is they just ask them what do you want in this sentence or this scene or this moment. It's how we do it.
If you really want to take it apart, every single sentence you have, has some want underneath it. It has some desire. It's a great exercise to-- Every sentence then says, what it is you wanted to achieve in that sentence. There's no way to get rid of partiality. It's as human as breathing or having emotions. I think that's a really important part. I don't think there's any fear that we'll walk around aimless.
I've never seen that in a person. I've seen people stuck, which is different, but that's not partiality. Everybody that I know who's really walking around looks aimless but it's really stuck, they're very partial about trying to get unstuck. The other thing is that goals are fine and wants are fine. That's not what we're saying. We're saying that in a conversation with somebody, you let them have their wants and goals and you have yours and you don't try to influence theirs.
It's kind of like saying, it's like looking at a river and if you're having a conversation with one person and you're looking at the river one way, then you're like, "I want to bend the river to the left." [laughs] A lot of effort and it's a lot of work and it's probably not going to work. It's only going to work temporarily. Whereas if the other one is "Where does the river naturally want to go and how does that work with me?" Or "How is it important to me not to work with that?" is the other way to look at that conversation and being impartial is far more like that.
Brett: What are a few more examples of that, of that metaphor in real life?
Joe: Hiring people. Earlier in my career, I would hire people and I'd be like, "Oh, they're talented. I want to try to get them on board," or I had a vision for somebody and I'd be like, "Okay." I think I took it to the other extreme for a while, which was like, I would just ask people what they want to do, and if it wasn't exactly what I wanted, then I wouldn't hire them. I would far rather work with somebody who is wanting exactly the role that I have to offer.
It's another way of looking at the impartiality is, I'm not trying to convince anybody who's talented to come and work for me. I'm just saying, "It's my reality. This is my world, do you want in? Is this something that inspires you?" Then I know I have them. I don't have something I've convinced to show up.
Also saying no in sales is another great example. The best salesman will challenge, ask difficult questions, will even look at a pipeline and try to get to know as quickly as possible. For instance, I worked with this artist who was having a hard time selling his stuff and I said, "Look, your job is to go and get 50 rejections. I need you in the next six months to get 50 rejections."
After the 10th call that he made, he was in three galleries. Because as soon as he could drop that partiality of trying to convince them, then he was successful at being himself, which is what they wanted, especially particularly from an artist. Anybody who's done a good sales program, they know that getting to a no is just as important as getting to a yes for time, effort and energy.
Here's another way to think about it. Think of your best bosses. Think of the people or clients if you've never had a boss. Who are the people who have been responsible for your paycheck and have been the best to work with? You'll notice what they are is, they're incredibly clear with their wants, this is what I want, but they're not self-serving.
Brett: What do you mean by that?
Joe: It means that they're being impartial. They're saying this is what I want and they're letting you have the autonomy to do the thing. They're not cajoling you or manipulating you or being partial about how you do it, or even partial about what you do, they're far more like, "This is what we need to do. If you don't want to do it, then maybe you shouldn't be here and maybe we can get someone else here."
If you think about those bosses, you just don't feel them as self-serving. What happens in partiality is that when you're not being impartial, the thing that comes up is, you look often political and you definitely feel self-serving to the people around you. Whereas if you just own your wants clearly-- The way this works in, say, a VIEW conversation, is, you can just own your partiality in the middle of the conversation.
It's a very vulnerable thing to do and say, "Oh, I noticed that I'm trying to fix you and I'm so sorry." If you think about it even crazier than that, imagine if you're in the middle of a conversation, you notice someone's trying to give you advice, trying to get you somewhere and they say to you, "Wow, I noticed that I'm giving you advice. I'm trying to fix you. How do you feel about that?" [chuckles]
You think about that for a second. Most people, most of the time, are going to say "Yes, please don't." Yet, we're freaking doing it all the time. That's how it builds trust and connection.
Brett: Yes. Speaking of being political, people all the time, all of us do it. We manipulate by hiding our true intentions and subtly nudging a situation in the direction that we want it to go. This could sometimes be confused with impartiality, but I don't think that that's what you're getting at. What's the difference between actually being impartial and just acting the part in order to manipulate. And how do we tell in the moment if that's what we're doing?
Joe: Yes. You're correct. They're not the same thing. It's true that there's a body sensation that goes with each one of them and impartiality, like VIEW, is really a state of mind, state of being. You know it, when you feel it more than you know it, if you're doing it intellectually. I would say the difference is, it's the same difference as hitting somebody in the face and or hitting them in the back while they're not looking. If you're subtly nudging or trying to, and you're not owning your partiality, if you're not owning your wants in that situation, then you're not being straightforward with them and it's a subtle form of lying.
The other thing is that most people know when you're doing it. Most people-- You know when someone's doing that, most of the time. We kind of have this social contract that says, yes, everyone kind of does that, so I'm going to put up with it, but none of us like it, and none of us like doing it. That's one of the other things is, that if you want to know how it is in your body, it's uncomfortable, [laughs] it's uncomfortable. People can feel it and you can feel it in others, and of course, there's some folks who are intentionally duplicitous. It's definitely not the majority of people, which is a misunderstanding. A lot of people who see someone who's duplicitous, they feel like, of course it's intentional. I find that often it's not, it's like a blind spot of narcissism and other things.
Brett: Lack of awareness?
Joe: Yes, exactly. It's like the only time we really believe those people is, when we want to, when we are trying to fool ourselves anyways. That's the other thing, the thing that you notice about people who are duplicitous intentionally, it always blows up in their face. Sometimes it takes five years, but it hardly ever takes more than five years to do that. Whether you see this on a large economic scale or in relationships, it eventually blows up on you, which is interesting, because you can see people who are not scrupulous, you can see people who maybe do morally questionable things, but they're straight forward about it, and they can actually do it for a long time. When they're not being straightforward about it and almost always blows up, which isn't really a particularly interesting phenomenon.
As far as how it is in the body, it's different for other people. Each person, their body registers things a little bit differently, but all you have to do is feel like right now going into a memory of when you were being subtly manipulative or not subtly manipulative and feel how that felt in your body and then feel how it is when you're being straightforward with your wants. Even if it's scary, you can feel it and that's going to inform you. Your body will know it much quicker than your mind will.
Brett: I feel like a lot of the times that I've done that in the past, it's been more just like an avoidance of even recognizing, that that's something that's in my awareness, but there is a part that's aware of it and it gets filtered out because it's inconvenient for my ego.
Joe: Yes. That's beautifully put. Yes. It's exactly like, even if we don't make the ego the enemy, but there's something that we'd have to feel or look at if we admit that to ourselves, which is, I think, typically the case when we're being manipulative. We have a want that we don't even-- Oftentimes we have a want that we're ashamed of having. We're trying to get our wants met without having to admit that we have them.
Brett: Yes. That points to this whole practice being a state of being, because if you're doing this logically and you're trying to meet the end point of, "Oh, I should be impartial. Impartial will get me better sales, will give me better relationships," and then you're constantly filtering for whether or not you look like you're partial or impartial. That ends up coming from a completely different place, than if it's the state of being.
Joe: Yes. If you want them to see you as impartial, then you're definitely being partial. It's going to be seen. Absolutely.
Brett: Which begs the question, if true impartiality actually requires this state of mind, that is actually impartial and that meaning okay with any outcome, then what can we do to cultivate that true impartiality when we are actually, in reality, afraid of so many things and so many outcomes?
Joe: Yes. I've been just focusing on this a lot, this question of fear of outcomes. Here's my new approach at thinking about this, which is, I don't believe in outcomes. The only way you can believe in an outcome is if you believe time stops.
Brett: What about a snapshot? Believing in an outcome being some lossy snapshot of the future?
Joe: That's exactly the point is, that it had to stop. Reality has to stop for there to be an outcome. It's like this age-old problem of, "Hey, I wanted to see what my future is," and someone shows you your future and you're happy and have a lot of money. Then you get there and two days later you're broke, miserable. Where's your future? Is it the moment where you're happy? Is it the moment that you were sad? What's happening there?
I don't believe in outcomes, because outcomes is the idea that there's some end state and there isn't. With that said, I understand we have our fear, and our fear creates the idea of outcomes. What do you do there is the question.
Brett: What if you're afraid of being in an eternal process of misery that continues? It's not a snapshot.
Joe: Yes. Even that as a snapshot, because it's eternal, what is it-- Is it you've just hit zero baseline. There's no movement ever. Anyway, yes, so one is, there's a tradition that's the Stoic tradition, the Tibetan Buddhists had it, Samurai had it, which is visualizing your own death over and over again to undo the fear of death. You can do this with anything. If you're scared of getting fired, go visualize yourself getting fired over and over again, every step of it before, during, or after. Feel everything that you would have to feel if you got fired, because our fear really isn't about the thing happening. The fear is what we will have to feel if the thing happens.
If someone was like, "You're going to get fired, but you're going to absolutely blissed out the entire time. You're going to find out it's like an absolute joy and pleasure, and then you're not going to have enough money, but that's okay because it's not going to even dawn on you that you don't have enough money. You're just going to be in this place of absolute- loving the situation as it is. Then money is going to come and you're going to be not attached to keeping it." I was like, "Wait, I don’t have any fear of the future. The fear is all in the emotion." Going through the situation in your mind and feeling all the emotions can really free you of the fear, because all of the emotions can be enjoyed, can be welcomed, can be loved.
Brett: That brings up something really interesting. In my experience base-jumping, often before jumping off of a cliff, you visualize the jump and I frequently find myself visualizing all of the ways I could die on the jump, visualizing pushing off in the wrong way. The thing that I ended up actually visualizing was the moment of terror, when I realized that fucked up and had gone past a point of no return, out of control.
By doing that visualizing and encountering that point of terror where I'd fucked up, it made it so that if something went off-axis or off of the plan, that I didn't have to feel the terror when that happened. I'd be like, "This is actually much less off the plan than all of my visualizations were, so it's salvageable. Let's work with this."
Joe: Yes. That's a beautiful metaphor. One of the principles that I work with often is, that the thing that we fear is often something that we are unknowingly, subconsciously inviting into our world because of things that we do to avoid the thing that we fear are often the things that bring them to us. What you're describing there is that you visualize the worst possible thing happening so you're not scared that it's going to happen. If I think about two people who are about to base-jump and one is petrified that they're going to screw up and one is okay if they screw up and they jump off. I can tell you which one of in my experience is going to have the higher chance of fucking up.
Brett: Yes, likewise. I've had a lot of experience in that realm.
Joe: Yes, which I'm sorry for, because I know the consequence of that. Yes, that's exactly how it works but it works with getting fired too. It works with every aspect of our fear. That's the other thing you can do is, just grieve the loss which is another way of feeling the pain in advance. The other thing you can do is just call yourself out for being partial, right. Somehow or other just saying, "Oh, this is the outcome that I want," can relieve you of that want for the outcome.
Brett: How does that happen?
Joe: It's like, "I'm sorry. I notice that I really want to be valuable to you, and that's not the best way that I can respect you or this conversation and I apologize for that."
Brett: Another thing that happens a lot, all of us, we've been in some kind of tense discussion or negotiation where somebody just throws up their hands and they say, "Okay, whatever, I don't care," which is sort of the opposite of a thing you were just getting at, which is like owning a want and then letting the partiality for that want dissolve. It is completely disowning the want, and it's a way of disconnecting. What's the difference between impartiality and this sort of impartial apathy or avoidance?
Joe: [laughs] I'm holding back my laughter so I don't interrupt your question. As soon as you asked that question, it hit me. I remember my daughter, I think she was eight or nine years old. At that time, kids are always like, "I don't care. I don't care. I don't care." She comes home and she goes, "Dad, I think I know what I don't care means." I'm like, "Really, what does it mean?" She says, "It means I care." I just laughed and I'm like, "Yes. That's my experience of it too is, that when people are saying that I don't care, they're saying I do care, but it's hurting so much that I don't want to care."
Brett: "I don't want to feel this."
Joe: "I don't want to feel this." Yes. “I don't care”, to me, is just a strategy. It's either a strategy to get what you want. Like to say, "I don't care," so that someone chases you or to get out of the responsibility or the feeling. That kind of apathy isn't really-- We call it apathy, but it's not the kind of apathy which is like if a stranger came to me and said, "Should I get a BLT or should I get a veggie sandwich today?" That would really be like, "Meh." They would be no desire for me to have that end up one way or another, but I wouldn't be apathetic about it.
Apathy is really just about people not wanting to be hurt from having a want. If you are impartial, you may stop a conversation right in the middle of it and say that it doesn't hold any juice for you. That would be a thing, which isn't particularly apathy either. It's just saying, "Oh, wow, I notice that this isn't inspiring me. How is it for you?"
Brett: Imagine receiving that. If you're trying to sell to somebody and the customer just does that and they are like, "Here's the information about what I'm actually interested in. All that presentation that you were just doing. I don't care."
Joe: Yes, there's a story. There's a guy named Mikey Siegel who has said this. It's on the internet. In our first meeting he was pitching me something when I was an investor, and we were just having a nice connection time and then all of a sudden he got into pitch mode. After about a sentence I looked at him and I said, "I notice my entire body is getting tense right now." That's owning where I am. Having no idea what he's going to say or the consequences. Is he going to be mad at me? It just created such a deep level of connection between us and our friendship lasts. It has been years of close relationship.
Brett: I've seen him tell that story and the recreation of the mind blow on his face at hearing that from an investor and realizing that, "Woah, I'm actually really, really trying to get something right now and it's obvious."
Joe: Yes, and when it went away, we could actually connect and the benefits that came out of our relationship are far beyond whatever the hell he could have gotten that he was after. For me and for him. I hope for him. Apparently, that seems to be the case.
Brett: We've worked through a lot of what impartiality is and what it is not. What are some of the benefits to practicing impartiality with intention?
Joe: It's a much deeper peace of mind. You're more likely to be in flow with a person and hitting that flow state is something we all want. That creates deeper connection. You also find out that, if you don't want to be with somebody sooner so you don't get stuck in a bad relationship as easily or for as long. You usually come up with better solutions. This is the thing that I have to talk to a lot of managers about because they're like, "Wait a second. Hold on. I'm getting paid good money to have a really strong agenda for my entire organization."
It's the same thing, what you're saying is that the organization doesn't want to fucking do the right thing. If that's the case, fire them. Fire them. If they don't want to do the right thing, what the hell are you hiring, why are you paying them? What the hell is going on?
There are people out there who want to do the right thing for your company. If you assume that everybody who is working for you actually wants to do the right thing, then it's just a matter of whether they're capable of it or whether they can see it. You don't particularly need to be partial to educate folks. You can just educate. You can just say this is my vision.
Also, you're missing something. Guaranteed, I don't care if you're Steve Jobs. I don't care if you're Elon Musk. You're missing something. The great leaders know they're missing something. They want to be around really smart people. They want people in the room smarter than them. The only way you are going to find out what you're missing is, if you let go of your agenda for a minute.
It doesn't mean that you let go of your goals. It doesn't mean that you let go of your wants. If you're sitting in a conversation and you're just trying to push people into a particular kind of action. More micro-management level or even macro-management on that kind of thing, what you're doing is you're not getting the best ideas.
I'm constantly seeing, when executives get this idea of, "Oh, right, if we all have agreed on the goal, so I don't have to manage anybody to an outcome. If we've all agreed on that, really, truly agreed on that, then everybody can work together to come up with the best solution. My way is never the best way. It is a part of the best solution."
Also, you're following data more. People when they're partial don't look at data the same way. They don't run the experiments the same way. You get to see what's real, which is a far better way to build a business or a relationship with what's real rather than what you want. Yes, all sorts of other ways.
I think the other thing is that you won't have the same conversation with the same person 10 times. We all have that relationship or have had that relationship where it's just like I'm talking to this person about their bad marriage again. I guarantee you if you're in that, it's because you want them to be different. If you were impartial, that conversation wouldn't come back over and over again.
Brett: Yes, it's like the only thing that could keep you in a stable loop in that way would be that you have some impartiality that is creating a confirmation bias, filtering your information to fit a certain story. Yes, that's really interesting.
How do our personal lives and our professional lives change as we practice impartiality? What happens to us internally and what happens around us?
Joe: You're going to find yourself surrounded by a lot less people stuck in victim scenarios in their mind. You're going to learn a lot more and therefore have better ideas, because you'll spend that time that you are trying to manage people, and learning instead of in management.
You will have to draw more boundaries. That's a really important thing. One of the reasons people are so partial is, because they're not drawing the boundaries that they want or not explaining the vulnerable want that's in their system.
Brett: What's a good example of that?
Joe: It's easier to try to fix your friend, who's dating the same guy with a different name 10 times in a row than it is to say, "I don't want to hear this story anymore."
Another example is, let's say, I have an employee and they're consistently not doing the things that they said they're going to do. I just have to hold a boundary instead of trying to manage them out of it and have partial conversations. I just have to say, "If this isn't happening, then I have to assume you don't want to work here because if you wanted to, you'd do it or you're not capable. If you're not capable, please let me know, right?"
You're far more likely to have to draw a boundary and to say what you want directly. Imagine a manager who sits around the table and tries to get everybody aligned and another manager who starts off saying, "What I really want, what I really, really want is for us all to be aligned, rowing in the same direction with a common set of goals, how do we do that? I have some ideas. These are my ideas. What do you guys think?"
As compared to, "I don't want to have to ask for that. I don't want to have to draw that boundary. I'm going to really want it to happen, but I'm not going to be outright forthright with it. I'm going to be partial in every conversation to try to make it occur." which is a lot of managers.
Brett: Remind me in a relationship of when somebody gets angry about not having something done for them that they didn't ask for. Waiting for somebody to notice what they want and do it for them.
Joe: Exactly. Right, because they don't want to be vulnerable in that want or vulnerable in the boundary. That's right. That's exactly right. That happens a lot less. That kind of thing will happen a lot less in your story.
Another good story that I have around this is that I was doing this workshop in Boston and Cambridge, I think it was. There was a man, he was an older man, had been a successful entrepreneur, had a lot of depression in life, but he was older. Somewhere in that, close to the second day of the thing, he just looked at me and started crying and goes I don't think I've ever had an impartial conversation in my whole life because he just had one. He just had his first impartial conversation in his whole life.
Then he was crying and it was an amazing moment. He kind of looked at me and he goes, "I had no idea the level of connection that I was missing." I think that's the big thing is, that if you think about the people who always have an agenda for you when you talk, how close do you feel to them, how much do you want to be around them?
Brett: How defended do you feel?
Joe: How defended do you feel? If you're a parent, especially of an adult child, if they don't want to be around you, I guarantee you have an agenda for them. I guarantee it. You want them to be safe, you want them to be a doctor, whatever the heck it is. They might be around you, but they don't want to be, and you feel it, you feel unloved because of it.
Brett: We've talked a lot about how this applies to relationships with others. What does it look like to be impartial with ourselves or in relation to something more abstract like our businesses or to a professional career?
Joe: With the VIEW, all we're focused on is being impartial with others. I just say if you're in the conversations doing the course, using the framework, really just focus on being impartial about the outcome for the other person, where they end up. It's a deeply beautiful and powerful practice to be impartial with yourself.
If you think about meditation, there's a saying that goes, most people who are meditating are managing themselves, which isn't meditation, it's torture. Meditation, when you're not managing your experience, when you're happy with whatever experience is occurring, that then it's just bliss, it's just joy.
Learning to not manage yourself in moments is incredibly useful because what it is, it's basically saying I trust my inherent goodness, I trust my impulse, the impulse of life that moves through me. That's kind of the big benefit, because that is the path that leads you to deep self-recognition, but we all have expectations of ourselves that we cling to. They're painful and we're constantly revising them and we're constantly trying to get ourselves somewhere and it causes us a tremendous amount of pain. We have this voice in our head that's just often quite violent and abusive.
A practice of impartiality with yourself is really useful. The impartiality with business is, it's again that really subtle thing about it's good to have wants, it's good to have goals, how you get there is where the impartiality can be incredibly useful. Again, with the film thing is, that when you're a director working with actors, if you tell the actor, "This is exactly how I want it, you're not going to get it," but if you can give them direction and then recognize something beautiful when it comes, you can get that easily and all day.
Recognizing something that's right, and going with it, rather than trying to get it to be your version of right is the practice of impartiality in business and it's incredibly, incredibly useful. I've been in so many-- Everybody can relate to this. It's like, there's this business, it especially happens to big businesses. You get a big business and they say, "I want to do it this way, but I have to check with this person who has." Then another person has to be checked in, it's like six different things because everybody's trying to get to some perfect solution where nobody's going to be mad at them and they're going to be successful.
It's like an ungodly amount of time and energy that would have-- It's so much more useful to do something, get some advice, make a couple of mistakes. It would have been a lot less painful and often a far better result if you can allow that level of impartiality and not try to have to make everything perfect.
Brett: It seems to be maybe a scale or a spectrum of short term partiality and long term partiality. In this state, we're just trying to get what we want right now. In longer-term partialities, we're willing to be more patient and that allows for more slack and flexibility in the how and exactly what it ends up becoming.
Joe: Yes, that's right. I think the short term partiality is far more fear-based than long term partiality. I think long term partiality is far more principles-based. It's like how do I want to be and what's the world that I want be in and what's my vision for the world.
You're watching for how the world wants to provide that for you and taking advantage of those moments rather than trying to force the world to succumb to your will, which is, if it works, it's a lot more effort and a lot less happiness in it. I think that most of the time you can tell the difference, because when people are thinking about long term stuff, they're really not moving from a place of fear, or the same kind of intense fear.
Brett: They're willing to go through a little bit of shit to get to a more global optimum.
Joe: That's right. Yes, they're not less likely to avoid stuff. There's a CEO that I worked with, and he used to say, he had this thing called the kitchen drawer theory, which is basically there's that kitchen drawer that nobody wants to look at, because they're like, "Shit, that's the mess. I don't want to have to fix that" and he's like, "My job as a CEO is to find all the kitchen drawers and go look in them."
If that´s your partiality, if your partiality is to do that, it's a very different thing, because it's not driven by fear that the short term per partiality. It's more of a principle. I have a principle of embracing intensity going into the mess because I know that that makes the life that I want.
Brett: As you practice this, and let's say you're in a high-pressure sales culture, or some other environment where partiality is encouraged and accepted as a norm, what's likely to happen when one person in that group starts to relax their partiality as a result of this practice and what challenges are they likely to face and what tends to happen in those kinds of teams?
Joe: Sales teams are the best for this because a lot of them are that way, so if it's not a short term sale cycle, if there's any relationship that can be built, the person who let's go the partiality gets better results typically because the person who--
Brett: If there is space for the long-term partiality in a relationship?
Joe: That's part of it. Part of it is that, if you're trying to convince somebody of something they can feel it, based on their mirror neurons and it's like being attacked on a cell level, so their brain turns off curiosity. They stop wanting to learn. We have all sorts of evidence that people when they're in fear or feeling attacked, they don't learn as well, so you can't educate them on your product as easily.
If people see that you really care for them and want them to make a best decision for them and that you're following their wisdom, then eventually, you're going to make a lot more sales than the short term thinking.
There's obviously some sales organization where that doesn't work, because it's like a phone bank, you just call people and so aggression works, because there's some people who will do what you say when you're aggressive with them. That's their personality type.
Brett: In the long term, that might not actually be what's best for your company, because you attract a certain type of customer and then your product gets fit to a certain type of a market, and somebody else could do a better job of serving the customer in a more long-term way, and then wipe you out.
Joe: That's actually happening right now. Of all places there's a company that's doing something like this, in credit, in buying bad debt and there's a company out there I can't remember the name but--
Brett: Debtly?
Joe: Say it again.
Brett: Debtly?
Joe: Debtly, yes, I guess that's it but basically it's the same thing where most of the debt is like, "I will intimidate you until you pay me," and these guys come in and they're like, "I want to work with you about this." Most people want to also relieve their debt and they get a much better result and it's just a perfect example of how that happens.
If you have a phone bank, it's all a numbers game, make a hundred calls so that you can get three or four to work and then aggression can work, but long term it's a bad business model. Like I said, it lasts, generally, about five years at most.
Also, if you start doing it, if it's a really aggressive culture the team will turn against you because they don't want to feel what you're making them feel. The person who does it often leaves, gets a better job, does something better in their life, becomes happy.
Brett: And the person who does the impartiality?
Joe: Yes, yes, they typically get out of that situation, find something that's actually life-affirming. Some people get off on the power of having that kind of intensity. It makes them feel powerful and they really need to feel that power, because they felt so disempowered in their life. If they start learning their impartiality, they just get out of those circumstances and find real empowerment instead of just the short term power. Occasionally you have a great team that has that kind of intensity and the whole team realizes it, but usually, you need a really great leader to see that.
Brett: How can this go wrong or be taken too far? In what situations, if any, would too little partiality be dangerous or counterproductive? Or if somebody is working on their impartiality in a team like that, is there a way that it could be distorted in a way that's destructive?
Joe: If you deny your wants, yes. If you try to pretend that you don't have wants [laughs] and then, yes, it's not good. So you got to own your wants, you got to own your boundaries and your wants. If you're trying to be so impartial that you don't have any wants and you're above your humanity, you start disassociating all this bliss and that kind of thing, which is true. It is all bliss, but if you're denying that your own wants and your own humanity, it'll sap all the joy out of your life.
That's the one way it can go too far, and it can seem like it goes too far sometimes when you stop being partial and then, the savior or bully, the person playing the different roles around you might say like, "Oh, I don't want this relationship anymore." Oftentimes when people say, "Oh, wow, I'm not going to try to fix my friends or make them happy or try to be valuable to them anymore." Some of those friendships don't last, and some of them get transformed into something far more beautiful.
Brett: Let's get a little bit more into the difference between wants and partiality.
Joe: The main difference is, that wants are owned and partiality is not owned, so to own your wants outright in a conversation is quite vulnerable. It allows you to feel exposed, and you're telling people your actual truth and so there's a vulnerability to it. Being partial, you can hide all that stuff on some degree and not take a look at it, and so it becomes implied and I think that's the main difference between the wants and the partiality.
The other thing is, that when you own your want completely, that ownership can actually make the want less intense and allow you to see what the world is like, especially if you add to an apology with it, which is like, "Oh, I want for you to be different than you are and I apologize for that.” It can really relieve you from that pole of trying to make them different and it puts you in yourself. It makes you feel empowered, because you realize that you want them to be different so that you can feel safe or that you can feel loved or whatever that is, whereas partiality is all under the covers. That´s the main thing between the two.
The other thing is that the wants, because they're owned outright and you can see them, it becomes really apparent how your wants, their wants can work together, and you can find something that works best for everybody. The partiality is often not owned, so it can't really be seen as the thing that it might become, which is something that can actually work for everybody.
For instance, if I'm partial that you have a breakthrough while we're having a conversation, that's really all about me. It's under the covers. It's not the thing that's best for everybody. If I see you as knowing, whether you want a breakthrough or not, it's a far more beneficial thing for everybody.
Brett: To summarize all of what we've been talking about for us to practice the impartiality in our view conversations, what are some bullet points, some do's and don'ts?
Joe: Yes. As far as partiality, it's easier to define them as don'ts. It'd be, don't try to fix people. Don't try to get them to a conclusion. Don't try to be valuable, or have them see you as valuable. Don't want them to be different. Don't try to get them to be different. Don't look to convince. Don't try to lead them to a solution. Don't want them to see things your way. Those are the big ones.
Brett: What is an example of a time that you really felt yourself wanting to be partial or being partial, work your way through it, noted it, recognized it, and ended up showing up with impartiality in a way you hadn't before, and what was the result?
Joe: Yes, it was pretty early in my relationship with my wife. I think it was in year four or five. She had invited me to come and do something with her that was really important to her. I had not seen how important it was to her, also didn't want to go, and she came back, and she was pissed.
I remember she was all dressed up for it, so she was incredibly beautiful at that moment and pissed. She was yelling, and we used to yell a lot at each other back in those days. She was just yelling, and I really wanted her to not punish me. I really wanted her to see me for the loving person that I was. I really, really wanted her to know that I loved her.
I really, really wanted her to stop being angry, which was typical in those fights, and there's something just clicked to me, and I was just like, "It's okay for her to be just the way she is." She just got angry and let it out. It lasted maybe like three or four minutes, and then she got angry at me for not reacting, that lasted for like a minute. It kind of wore off with her. She needed some alone time.
It wasn't like this quick fix or anything like that, but for me, it was like freedom. It was like, "Oh, oh, oh, oh, I don't have to be-- I don't have to curb myself. I can be me here. I can be me in the face of this. I can love her, and it was love." It was like, "I can love her just as she is no matter what's happening." The freedom in that was outstanding. It was such a peaceful place to be in.
Brett: That's a beautiful story. Thank you for it, and thank you for another great episode.
Joe: Yes, a total pleasure. Thanks for making the time.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe & rate us in your podcast app. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com
Links:
Mikey Siegel, http://www.cohack.org/
Debtly, www.debtly.app
Being in wonder helps you understand the value of the right question and If you’re in wonder, it’s a constant exploration. Questioning the assumptions that are in your mind is one of the quickest ways to get to wonder, where curiosity and awe are being experienced together.
"It's really a point of view of looking at the world. Follow your wonder. It´s a trail. Just follow it in the conversation about the other person, about yourself. In the conversation, just follow it."
Welcome to the Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease.
My name is Brett Kistler. I am an adventurer, entrepreneur and a self exploration enthusiast. I am here with my co-host, Joe Hudson. Joe is a business coach who has spent decades working with some of the world´s top executives and teams developing a unique model of human patterns that underpin how we operate with ourselves, each other and the world. A good entry point into this model is a mindset called VIEW, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy and wonder.
Through understanding and cultivation we learn to easefully drop into the VIEW state of mind, deepening self awareness and increasing our connection with the world around us. To learn more about this podcast or courses, visit artofaccomplishment.com
Brett: Most of us spend a lot of our time feeling a subtle pressure to know things, to understand our world so that we can make predictions, feel safe, and be seen as knowledgeable, but the moment we think we know everything is also the moment we stop learning.
What if there's always more to the story than we can ever know? How might living our lives from a consistent place of wonder give us more actionable information and opportunities, than clinging to what we think we know? This is the practice of wonder, the W in VIEW. Joe, can you tell me what you mean by wonder?
Joe: Yes, wonder is, there's a lot of ways to describe it, but one of the ways to describe it is to say we've all felt it before. We all know that like [exhales]. Maybe some of us haven't felt it since we were kids, but that's something that we all know. What it is, it's like curiosity without looking for an answer, because when you're looking for an answer, you can just feel in your system, that your system constricts a little bit.
If you're just like, "Oh my gosh, what is happening here?" and there's no pressure to find an answer. An answer may come, but there's no pressure. Then the physical state remains expansive.
The other way to think of it is, it's like curiosity and awe put together. The thing about awe, the reason I use that word in particular is, because if you're awestruck by something, you have a recognition that it's out of your control. It's something that's beyond you, beyond your ability to maybe even recognize in that moment.
There's only a few things in the way that the human psyche works that creates that. Gratitude is another one, that creates that feeling of there's something greater. Acknowledging that you need things is another, because just all these things are outside of your control often.
Most of the time, we don't say gratitude, like, "I'm really grateful that I kicked ass." We might occasionally, but most of the time, we're grateful for things that are beyond us, and that's the thing about wonder. It has awe, because we acknowledge that there's something beyond our ability to even maybe recognize.
That's another way of thinking of it, but the other thing that's particularly important to VIEW conversations is, that you're in the question. There was a time in my life when this question arose and it was, “What am I?”, was basically the question. I was in that question for 10 years, and it wasn't about trying to answer the question. It was about being in the question.
I could come up with answers, but every answer was based on some context. I could say I am my body, but then I would be in wonder for a while, and I'm like, "Well, which part of my body? If I cut my body in half, which part of my body is me?" To realize that even that isn't me, what am I? The power of that was being in the question. It wasn't ever finding the answer to the question. That's another way to look at wonder is that you're in the question.
Brett: Right. It's like the moment you come up with an answer, it's like the search stops, but if you stay in the question, there's always opportunity for some other aspect to come in, like some other aspect of yourself to be seen.
Joe: Exactly. Yes, that's beautifully put. Yes.
Brett: How does cultivating a persistent state of wonder benefit us? What does this do for us?
Joe: There are so many ways in which it does. If you just think about those times that you're awestruck, imagine a life when you're awestruck all the time, and just imagine living a life where that is 10%, 20% more of your life, just even 10% or 20% more awestruck by life. There's this thought process that people share about miracles and that actually we're experiencing miracles all the time, but we're so used to them or we can describe enough of them.
We can describe the sun, for instance. You can just be awestruck by the sun. You can answer forever how it got formed maybe and how it's working, or you see it every day so there's nothing to be awestruck about, but if you really just contemplate like, "Why? Why sun? Why universe? Why cosmos?" Goodness, how did it-- Yes, all this stuff happened, but how did it actually come to pass that we were circling the sun? It's just awe-inspiring and it leads you to places that you can't get to any other way.
I was listening to, out of all people, recently the head of Amazon, and he talked about the beginning of his day, he would just wander. He just wanders in his mind and in the space, that's part of what he does because there's a harvest from wandering or from being in wonder and just exploring without looking for a place to land. There's a harvest that comes from that, because you discover all sorts of cool stuff.
This applies in business and in relationships. Oftentimes, when people are in relationships, one of the things that you see is that everybody thinks they know everybody. [laughs] They categorize everybody and then the relationship gets dull, otherwise, if you're in wonder, it's a constant exploration. Who I am, when I married my wife, is very different than who I am today, and there's constantly an evolution to be discovered in my wife and for her to discover in me. That keeps our relationship fresh, keeps a business fresh in the exact same way.
It's nice in the body to be in wonder. It just feels really good. It's quite an enjoyable thing. Another thing that it does is, it's quite an antidote to fear. If you, say, do this experiment, close your eyes and imagine you are running from a tiger. The tiger is coming and it's getting close. You can hear the footsteps, you can hear its breath. It's panting to catch you, and you're running as fast as you can and you don't really think there's any way out. You know it's about to come and pounce and now wonder, "How much does that tiger weigh?"
You can't hold the fear if you're in wonder and you can't be in wonder, particularly, if you're holding the fear. To reflect on what you are in wonder about immediately does something to the fear, the more subtle fears that may be running through you. That's another one.
Brett: It's like the fear itself is something that optimizes us to produce a fast result and a fast output but not to process more deeply. I think that's a good thing sometimes. I imagine, if we walk around being constantly awestruck by the sun and the universe, that must have its drawbacks. There are people who do that constantly and they're disconnected from the world. They're not taking any action.
Joe: One more thing before we go there. One more thing is just to say, that the other thing that it benefits you being in wonder is that it-- In today's world, it's really not the answer. In the age of Google, anybody can find an answer. It's really the right question, are you asking the right question? Being in wonder helps you ask the right questions. One person can spend their life building Google and another person can spend their life building the local tire shop, and they can both work just as hard as each other. It's just a different question that they're living in.
Or one person can ask, "What's the phone that everybody will use?" Another person will ask the question, "What's the phone that's easy to use?" You're going to get two different phones. Being in wonder really helps you understand the value of the right questions, is the last one.
Brett: Right, it can help you break out of the limited context of your previous question into a bigger question.
Joe: Yes.
Brett: Which brings you back to that question that I just had of if we're constantly breaking out of the limited question into the biggest question of why sun, why universe, how do we ground ourselves in that? Is there a going too far with this wonder thing?
Joe: I don't know anybody who can actually be in a perpetual state of wonder. I've never seen that. There's a way to have a pretty consistent awestruck experience of the world.
It's actually interesting. I was recently listening to all these people who'd lived over 100 years, and I've actually met a couple as well. There is something that they all have in common, is that they all have this just like, "Isn't it wonderful?" Where they're talking about, they eat this food and it was just so amazing or they were doing little things, but it was these little things in life that just created so much awe and joy and wonder in them.
Yet they were 100 years old or more, and they had friends and they had family and they had careers that they've lived through, but that was the thing that they all had in common. It's just like kids are the same way. They have this amazing wonder in their worlds, and they've learned incredibly quickly. If you kill it completely, you can get a task done, but you might not get the right task done. Yes, there's a place where wonder ebbs and flows. It's really about your access to it in the moment.
I think that there is this illusion of this person who's constantly disassociated from life and they're in this constant state of wonder. My experience of those people is that they're not actually in a constant state of wonder. It's good for books and stuff, but what they actually are is, they're in a constant state of dissociation where whatever is happening in real life is very difficult for them. Their mode of being able to handle that isn't to fight, it's to disassociate.
I don't see people who are in a deep state of wonder too much. I just don't. I haven't seen it, but I can expect if you are in a state of wonder so much that you have stopped doing stuff, that obviously would go too far.
One of the things that wonder does, interestingly, is it propels you to do stuff. "I'm really curious. How does this work?", propels you to do stuff. Oh, wow, what would happen if I had this different kind of business or if I changed my business in this way, or if I looked at my wife this way, or if I looked at my best friend this way? It propels you to change the way you're doing stuff, run experiments, and learn. When I see people in that deep level of curiosity, then there's a lot of movement in their life.
Now, if there's other things that are happening that might stop them from taking action, that would be more things like depression or being lost in their head all the time in their thought, repressed anger, things like that, that would be a stuck feeling. I don't know a lot of people who have that stuck feeling or anybody who has that stuck feeling who also has a lot of wonder. Because let's say, you're depressed and you have a ton of wonder, what happens? You're like, “Huh, what's making me depressed? What is depressed exactly?”
I don't mean what is-- like what part of me, what's the me that's depressed. What's the me, that can see through, that can see I'm depressed? How does that work?
Brett: How is this feeling of depression being in-- like in my body?
Joe: Right, and as you start asking those questions, that depression starts to alleviate, because the depression is being created mostly because of a critical voice in the head that there's no curiosity about. You can just turn that curiosity right to the critical voice in the head and things will change pretty quickly, if you can consistently have that state of wonder about the voice in your head, not trying to solve it, but just to be in awe of like, “Whoa, what is this thing constantly managing me?” [laughs] “What gives it the right? What makes it thinks it's right? What makes it think it's good at its job, when it's created complete stagnation in my system? What makes it think it's good at its job, if it's still having to manage me over the same shit 10 years later, like what is happening here?
That state of awe and wonder is going to shift a lot. It's going to create-- you can just feel how that creates movement. I've never really seen people stop doing-- Obviously, if you're in a state of wonder so much that you are like can't [chuckles] you can't complete a sentence, because you're so in awe of the language, that's going to get problematic. I've just never seen it.
Brett: The example of the old people reminds me of something I learned recently about dementia, where there are people who die, who have a normal life and are vibrant throughout their older years, their later years, and then they die and their brain is autopsied, and they have the brain of somebody who has dementia but they didn't have it. The difference between the people who don't actually present it psychologically, are that they have-- they're constantly learning. They're constantly in wonder so they're constantly rewiring.
Even though the wiring is getting tangled, it's developing new pathways all the time versus living in the same pathways that are just breaking down over time and then becoming less and less efficient.
Joe: Wow. I didn't know that, that's beautiful. You can start to feel it in your 40s and definitely in your 50s, this desire to stay in the neuropathways, to stay in the routine of life, and it just starts to take the joy out of life, and like look at how few people you see in their 70s who are living a joyful life, that exuberant life. Their lives are great often when they’re in their 70s, outside of potentially some physical pain there. They're retired, at least in America. They're retired and they have a family and they-- but there's just no wonder in it.
Brett: What happens to us, when we shut that wonder down? Like in the moment, let's say in a conversation or a business negotiation where, for example, we're worried about getting it right or being perfectly understood and so we shut down the wonder. What happens then? More simply, I guess the question is what is the opposite of wonder?
Joe: [chuckles] The opposite of wonder is knowing, or wanting to be maybe seen as knowing since knowing is really impossible on one level of looking at it. The way I would say it is, I see this all the time, especially when I was a venture capitalist. I saw this all the time, which was, people would come to me and they would make their pitch. People would come to me and they'd make their pitch and the standard way of thinking about it was, that they were going to come and impress me with their knowledge and show me that they had a really good business idea.
Then I would know that they have a really good business idea and then I would give them money. That would be the kind of the standard way that they would come to the meeting, which is weird, because as a venture capitalist, I probably should know more about it than they do, because I'm in 10 businesses or at least the same amount as they do. They're coming in with this knowing, trying to share the knowing and what basically happens is, if I agree with them, I will fund it, and if I don't agree with them, I won't fund it, which is a very limited potential to fund it.
There's just like this very skinny chance, that we're going to agree, but if they come in with wonder, and I had this happen once. I remember I was so blown away by-- it was a great company. It was very successful. The CEO came in to raise the money and he was like, “Okay, what do you need to see to fund? What are the boxes that you need to check off?”
I immediately told him, because that would save me a shit ton of time, instead of having to listen to 10 slides on the total addressable market and what the market was like, as if I like hadn't done that research or whatever. Then he just went through and went through exactly what I needed to hear. He started in a place of wonder instead of a place of knowing. He knew that I would be more attracted to him in a learning journey than I would in a being told what is right and what is wrong.
If you just think about that, like, you look at your friends who know what's right and wrong and like how enjoyable is it to be around them? I don't know how many companies I've been in where I see somebody and they're like, that's the problem person. I'm like, okay. Then you can meet the problem person. The problem person thinks they know everything. That's the problem person. They think they're right about everything. There is no wonder in their system.
Brett: They're also probably pointing at a lot of problem people because they know it.
Joe: Yes, that's right. That's right. They're not in a learning journey with anybody. Nobody wants to be that. What people want to be is in a learning journey with each other. We like to have someone who knows some stuff, yes, it's great. People are listening to this podcast right now hopefully with the idea that I might know something, but my job is to go on learning journeys with people. My job is to ask them what they know. Is to ask open-ended questions to them. My job is to assume that they know the best step that's there for them in a way that I couldn't.
How could I know that? I don't know their whole history. I don't know everything that happened to them. It doesn't matter if I had the wisdom of every human being in the world, except for them, they still know more than I do about what they're supposed to do next. If you're in a state of knowing and trying to convince people of your knowing, that's the opposite. [chuckles]
Then being attached to your knowing, which is utterly ridiculous on so many levels, because knowing is only relevant based on context. Meaning, let's say, I know it's bad to lie. That's a context that I'm assuming. I'm assuming that we're all in the same context of whatever it might be, say, suburban living, but if I'm in the context of hiding people from an authoritarian government who wants to kill them, that's a different context. At least at that point, lying is more of a question. For me, it wouldn't be a question. It would be, yes, I would lie to the authoritarian government, but there'd be more of a question about the right and wrongness of it.
Everybody has their own context. To think you know something is to not only assume that you know the right answer, but it's also to assume that you know the context of the person that you're going around with. It's also to assume that they don't have some wisdom in what they're saying, which is ridiculous. We can't be that. It's far better to be in wonder, and then you're in a journey with the people. You're both learning and it's like your mutual freedom instead of you're telling them something.
Brett: Right. So how do you stop a shutdown of wonder from happening, this collapse into knowing? Wonder seems like it might be a pretty fragile thing sometimes, even being afraid of not being in enough wonder, telling myself, "Okay, now I'm going to walk around the world and wonder all the time-- Oh, goddammit I'm not doing it." Even that fear might be enough to cause us to start closing down. How do you keep the wonder channel open?
Joe: It's a great question. It's far more of an undoing, than it is doing. Effort is one of the things that makes wonder more difficult, but the trick is when I say it's an undoing, if I say, “Okay, now I have to go and do wonder and I have to be in a wonder state of mind”, that immediately makes it harder to be in a wonder state of mind. But there's no moment where, if you look, there's not something you're curious about. Just keep it really simple all you have to-- just look around your room right now. There's something that's wondrous.
You don't know even how the bedsheets were made. You don't know who made them. You don't know if the company still exists. You don't know about the detergents, and if you happen to be one of those people who knows exactly that, then you don't know about the paint. There's never a moment, especially when you're with somebody else, or when you're in nature when there isn't this opportunity for awe. To try to get there takes you away, but to just recognize that there's something in you, and if you see this with kids, they're just in a state of wonder all the time.
I remember this psychological study of when children are most likely to smile when they're infants, and it's not when they're about to be fed, which is what they thought, and they did this by facial positions of what a kid would see before feeding. It's when they're being engaged, where there's learning happening. Young kids just love to learn until it gets kicked out of them by a parent or a teacher or something like that. Curiosity is our nature. It's absolutely our nature, which means basically being in wonder and investigating, it's in our nature.
All you have to do is undo everything that's taking you away from your nature. That's it. It's simple. It's just like, what is wonderful about this? What am I awestruck about? What am I curious about in a way that I don't need to find an answer? Just what's-- what am I going to say next? [chuckles]
Brett: What are some examples or steps or pointers that we could bring from this podcast into our lives to cultivate a deeper sense of wonder.
Joe: Yes, practice is good. It's you're asking yourself, what am I in wonder about right now? If you just do that 10 times a day, that's a pretty tremendous way to get there. It's really a point of view of looking at the world. If you think about a little kid, and he's picking up a frog for the first time and how he looks, or she looks at that frog, that's the way you can look at life. That's the way you can look at your business.
If you were to, say just for a second, if you had two people who were looking at a business and both of them have the same level of knowledge, let's say, and one of them was looking at it with immense wonder. One of them was looking at it with like, "I'm trying to solve the problem." What do you think is going to happen with those two people?
How do you inspire that in yourself, it's just a question of intention. It's not a question of doing. It's not a question of effort. It's just a question of getting in touch with that part. If you ever are not there, and you can't find your way there, then I really suggest looking at the context of something or questioning the assumption of something.
Brett: What do you mean by that?
Joe: Questioning the assumption is a great way to also get out of partiality and to become impartial as well. It means that if I say to you, "Life is challenging, because I don't have enough work," there's so many assumptions in that. There's an assumption that it's challenging not to have enough work. There's an assumption that I don't have enough work. There's an assumption that I should have more work. All of those things, instead, there could be other assumptions. There could be assumptions like, "Oh wow, I have free time to start my own business." I could say, "There's something here that's asking me-- an opportunity here to take my marketing to the next level."
There's all sorts of assumptions that one can make about having less work one week, then say, the next week or one year, say to the next year. Questioning the assumption that's in your mind is one of the quickest ways to get to wonder, or in somebody else's mind is one of the quickest ways, and then also, to question the context, right? I don't have enough work in America is very different than I don't have enough work in Africa, which is very different than I don't have enough work in Iceland. They're different experiences, and so what's happening there? What makes you think your truth is truth everywhere or even true for you right now, because not having enough work for me is priceless? It's like that free time is lovely.
Brett: With every tool like this, there's always ways that they can be used in a way that's performative or inauthentic. I've definitely found myself in a number of conversations where it felt like the other person was pretending to be interested in me as if they were acting out of some curiosity script. This kind of interaction feels really creepy and probing. How do we cultivate an authentic state of wonder without creeping people out as we practice and try to be in wonder?
Joe: You're touching on some things that make-- like if wonder gets a little tilted, it can become a strategy, and as soon as it becomes a strategy, it starts to feel creepy. I know people who are always asking questions, but that's just to avoid any kind of intimacy about themselves. I know people who are asking questions, because it's their way of trying to create intimacy. But if you're trying to create intimacy, it's not intimacy.
Yes, I see that happen a lot, and the answer is, simply, is don't be inauthentic. The most simple answer is don't use this as the strategy, have wonder for the sake of wonder for the gifts that it brings, for the feelings and sensations in your body that it creates, that awe creates and be there. It's far more enjoyable than to be strategic about it or to try to avoid intimacy. Those are both far more painful states of existence to be in. That's the easiest way to say it.
Brett: I guess being strategic about it implies that there's a certain outcome that you're trying to get--
Joe: That's right.
Brett: --which is a certain kind of knowing.
Joe: Right, an outcome through defending yourself. If people are creeped out, if you really want to get into wonder, and if you notice that you're asking questions and they start resisting, you can just be in wonder about that. You can be like, "Whoa, what's making you feel creeped out right now?" [laughs] They might say, "I feel like I'm being probed. I feel like I'm under investigation." Then you can be vulnerable or correct or say, "Oh wow. What do you want to ask me?"
You can also just apologize and say, "I'm sorry, I was asking you questions as a way to avoid myself or as an experiment." Or whatever your ulterior motive was. The whole thing is in a frame of mind, and that's when we get back to that thing, VIEW is a state of mind. If it starts becoming a technique, it'll just cease to work. At least most of the time.
Brett: In a lot of conversations, the context of the conversation is built around us being looked at as an expert or the holder of knowledge. This can happen often in work like in consulting or sales or speaking, or your role in this podcast, for instance. How do you stay in wonder when you are or your ideas are themselves the topic of discussion are in the spotlight and you're expected to be delivering information rather than consuming it?
Joe: [laughs] I gave a talk I think three times, and the very beginning of my talk I was like, "I have no idea what I'm about to say." I purposely got here on this stage, without preparation on purpose.
The only thing I had in my mind was to not be prepared when I came on the stage, because I want to talk about what life is like in this state of just being in this moment and seeing what happens, seeing what comes out. Oftentimes, during all these podcasts, I am curious about what's going to come out of my mouth, and I'm in wonder of what does come out of my mouth often.
Almost as similarly, which is ridiculous, this actually might [laughs] make everybody lose a little faith, people will tell me, they'll be like, "Oh, this thing happened on your podcast. That was so great." I'm like, "Really, I said that?" [laughs] I have no recollection of it. Sometimes I'm quite impressed with what I say, and sometimes I'm like, "Oh, that's a little off."
To me, being in the question with somebody is far more valuable. When I think about the idea of, let's say, you watch a normal Ted Talk where there's somebody who's really there explaining some piece of knowledge, and it's absolutely, totally fascinating about it. It's a wonderful thing to listen to. It's made even more wonderful if you see their own awe of the situation, if you see that they're still in the question. That someplace in there, there's a question that they're still living in. Then you really want to be there with them.
Brett: It's like they're inviting you into the question with them and showing you a map of what they've seen so far.
Joe: Yes, that's exactly right. That's a whole different way than like, "Hey, I got through my Ted talk. I'm going to tell you what's what, and I'm going to tell you the conclusion to have, I'm going to tell you there's no more questions left." You just see people are more likely to bristle unless they happen to agree with this person, or they've never thought about it before.
The other thing that happens when you're in that state of wonder, as the expert, as the knower, it happens to me all the time, you've witnessed this, is people are like, "I don't agree with you." I'll be like, "Yes, I don't agree with me entirely either," because as soon as I switch the context, I can see, "Oh, yes. That's not true."
I can be speaking one moment about freedom of choice, that there's choice. That's a very useful thought for somebody who feels stuck and feels like they are a victim of things. I'll talk all about choice and then somebody can say, "Man, there's no choice. It's all grace." I'll be like, "Yes, totally. It's so true." I can't even decide what to think. I can't even decide to stop thinking entirely or forever. Yes, I don't have control over that. If I don't even have control over the most basic things, then how can I have control over everything else? I don't have any choice.
If you're in that state of wonder, there's no personal attachment to the knowledge, and there's the ability to see the other sides of it, and to start understanding the context. That's where a tremendous amount of freedom is, because most of our pain comes from defending an idea.
Brett: That wonder about our choice or our internal experience is interesting. Each of these tools brings its own interesting twist when we direct them inward. What happens when we have wonder for ourselves and for our experience?
Joe: It's really sweet. It's like a little slice of heaven to be in a state of wonder about your internal experience. There was a time in meditation for a while where all I did was focus on the unknown. I would just be silent with my eyes closed, and I would just focus on what I didn't know. It's a really cool experience if you want to make a chance for yourself to do that. It's so sweet. It's also sweet, because all the things that you tell yourself, that inner critic, just it starts to lose all of its grip, if you're able to focus on the wonder.
When your voice says, "You got to eat less, you have to work out more, whatever, you need to have a nicer butt," that is met with wonder, "Well, what's the nicer butt going to get me?" They're like, "Then I'll have somebody maybe who loves me for my butt." If I look in the world, the people with the nicest butts, do they have the life I want? What's happening here? There's so much freedom.
Brett: People could be in an entirely different context there. It's like, "Well, if I have a nice butt, then I'm going to get a lot of attention. I don't want the attention. I don't want a bunch of creepy guys on me."
Joe: Exactly, or creepy girls.
Brett: Or girls. I don't know why I use that from the other.
[laughter]
Joe: It's quite a lovely existence to be in wonder about yourself. It's far more neat instead of being like, "This is how I am, and this is how I need to change." Be like, "I wonder what I'm going to do next. I wonder what's making me do this again."
Brett: What's your favorite example of a moment when bringing a little wonder to the moment changed everything for you?
Joe: I had an example recently, [chuckles] last night, [chuckles] we've left California because of the fires and the smoke. We went to Arizona, and we took our girls out to a stunning lake. When we were driving back, there was this steakhouse and there were political signs that were in contrast with my daughter's political beliefs. My daughters are young, but societally right now, there is a lot of fire over the political system. A lot of people believe and have really strongly. My girls have adopted some of that stuff. I see these signs on a restaurant, which is pretty bold in America to potentially say no to half of your clientele because you're so enamored of a political candidate.
My daughters didn't like this political candidate. I was like, "Okay, we're going to go eat there. Let's go eat." One was scared and one was like, "No. I don't want to deal with these people." I was saying, "Well, how is that any different than racism? If what you think they're doing is ignorant, we're not in control of our own ignorance, just as much as we're not in control of our own race. What makes it okay to just not even want to be around?" That was the beginning of the wonder.
We have this new puppy. All of a sudden, some of the people around us were loud and boisterous. It was a desert bar steakhouse thing. They made the kids even more anxious for a while. Then all of a sudden, the dog got into-- There's awes, and there's this connection, then the waiter was super nice, and there was just, all of a sudden, it was just like we were humans together again.
As we were driving home, I heard both of my daughters, interestingly, see some of the wisdom on the other side of the political argument. To be able to see like, "Oh, I see how they would view things this way, given this circumstance, given this thing." Not that they agreed with it or disagreed with it anymore, but it was just like their heart opened up because they were in wonder about this whole situation.
It was an incredibly beautiful thing to watch. I think that that's the way it is all the time. We come across all-knowing, and we don't want it to be messed with, because we don't want that feeling of uncertainty. It's amazing what wonder does. Uncertainty doesn't matter in wonder. It's quite lovely.
Brett: That's beautiful. How can we expect our lives to change as we deepen our wonder?
Joe: More joy, more awe, quicker progress, deeper relationships. It changes stuckness, it opens up stuckness, more intimacy, [laughs] shit like that. All those cool and groovy things, man. It's just life is better. We're more capable. We're more competent. You can be certain and still be in wonder. I think that's the complication that people have a hard time understanding.
I know in my business what the next step is. I don't know that it's going to be the right step. I don't know that a better next step isn't going to show up a second from now. It's not like I'm not a wonder of, "Well, how is this the best step?" I have a certainty over my next step. I know the next thing that I'm called to do.
When I'm talking to somebody, I might be completely baffled by what's coming out of my mouth, which is a constant state of being, but I know that whatever comes out is the thing that's supposed to be coming out. I'm not questioning myself. I'm not like, "Is that the right thing? How did that?" There's a knowing of my truth. There's a knowing of a process that works.
If somebody comes up with something else, I can totally be like, "Oh, what am I missing? What's happening here? What am I not seeing?" It doesn't stop me from being certain, but it stops me from thinking that I know. That's what it stops me from. I don't think that I know. I just know what the right next step is for me, or for what I'm here to do. I only know that that's the right next step. For instance, if I'm taking the right next step, it might be just to find out how bad [chuckles] I've done it, or how wrong it is, or how messed up that idea was. It might be to learn. It might not be to succeed. It might be that I take that step only to find out, "Oh, I need to go back the other way."
There's a certainty that I'm living with that is not at all in conflict with wonder. I think that's something that people get confused about in wonder.
Brett: I think that relates back to the dissociation version of not really in wonder. That story earlier in the episode.
Joe: Yes, that's right. I just say being in wonder doesn't mean that you're not clear on the actions that you're taking. It's not like you're not clear on like, "From my experience, this is the thing to do." Then you're totally open that something might stand against it this time.
Brett: You're in the clarity, but also ready to update what you think the next step is by constantly surveying for new information.
Joe: Yes, exactly. It's the same way that mice move. Mice and other small mammals are desperately curious animals, but then it doesn't make them hesitate. They're going about their day, they're sticking to the sides of the wall, collecting seeds, making decisions about left or right every two seconds with clarity, and yet, they have this deep level of, "What's this? How do I-- Can I get through here? What's happening?"
Brett: Unless they're traumatized and freeze up in fear, which what we do sometimes.
Joe: [chuckles] Exactly. Yes, you can traumatize animals too.
Brett: Let's tie all of this back into VIEW, like a VIEW conversation. Can you summarize some pointers that we could use to bring more wonder into our view conversations?
Joe: The most important thing is just to follow your wonder. It's a trail. You just follow it in the conversation about the other person, about yourself in the conversation, just follow it. If you're going to have to hold an agenda, if you're going to be partial about anything, be partial about staying in wonder. That's the thing. You're treating it, like I said, like a kid holding a frog or a lizard for the first time.
Also, just seek what you don't know. Oftentimes, you'll be presented with data from a person, "My mother did this, my father did this. This is how it's affecting me." What is it then to say, "What do I not know?" I just got told all this information. There's a thought process. The first thing I'm supposed to do is, take all this information and then spit out a good question.
What if the thing you're supposed to do is first, find out all the things you don't know, because often if someone tells you the story, they're telling you all the things that they know. There's no new information, but if you start focusing on what you don't know, it might also be stuff that they don't know. That's another thing that you can do.
Then as we talked about questioning the context and the assumptions, those are all ways to be in wonder, but more importantly, it's to be in awe of what's happening for that person. It might be, you have this friend, and you have a friend who's constantly telling you about how the boyfriend isn't working. You're just like, "Stop talking to me about this." We all have this friend, or have had this friend at some point in our life, who is in their loop, and then they bring us into it with a conversation every week or so.
What are you in wonder about there? What's the thing that you don't know? What's the thing that you have just like how, how, how? Even maybe the question is, "How do you keep doing this? What is it that's working for you here that keeps you in this relationship?" There's something there always. That's where you can go. It's a lot easier to find if you're not trying to lead them anywhere, because then it's just a natural thing that arises in you.
Brett: All right. Let's close this episode a little bit differently. I'd love for you to tell me about your most spectacular, epic fail, wonder face plant, where just a little more wonder could have gone a long way but you just didn't have it.
Joe: [laughs] All good. Let's see. The biggest one. In college, I had the honor of being kicked out of my first college. Beyond that, I had the honor of having a 3.95 grade point average and getting kicked out of my college at the same time. That could only be done if I wasn't knowing instead [chuckles] of wonder.
The way it worked was I was, because of my upbringing, rebellion was really the thing for me. That was my caricature. I went to college. They had all these rules. It was the beginning of a stronger morality in college. The college decided that there was going to be some moral education as well. I really didn't like it. I didn't like it at all. I rebelled against it. That was my thing. I was being a punk. There's no doubt about it.
People would come in and put signs in the dorm, and it would block the windows. The signs would be Christian Fellowship or whatever those things were. I would just take down the signs like, "Hey, if you can just cover my windows, I can just uncover my windows." The people of power in the room or whatever, of a parent power in the room said, "What are we going to do about this?" I'm like, "I pay rent. I'm going to keep on taking the signs down." [chuckles] That was my attitude. I was right in my mind. I couldn't see their context. I was right. I was like, "You don't have the right to do this."
There were other things where the different things-- I got busted once drinking in my room. There's people who got busted smoking pot 10 times and nothing ever happened, but I got busted once. I was on a roof once, not correctly and whatever. Anyways, I got kicked out of the dorms. I got in trouble for one of these things that I did. 355M of the California Penal Code, annoying phone conversation.
The powers at be, were really annoyed with me, because I was not being compliant, and I was not buying into the whole situation. I went to the ombudsman and I said, "Hey, this is ridiculous." He's like, "Yes, and it is totally ridiculous, just say you're sorry." [chuckles] I was like, "I'm not sorry. I don't want to be sorry." He was like, "Yes, but if you don't, you're going to get kicked out of college." It's a kangaroo court. This is the ombudsman. The person who, you just say, “I'm sorry”, and you'll get a slap on the wrist. I didn't say I was sorry.
I had the longest court thing that they had ever had. I had RAs defending me. I had a petition of 300 people. I had my professors come in and talk about how I contributed. All it did was just piss these people off more, and more, and more. I just flying in the face of them. I wasn't on the learning journey with them at all. Then I got the response and they were like, "Okay well, so here's our agreement. We're going to kick you out of school for a year and we're going to kick you out of the dorms for life."
I had a history professor who didn't know me at the time, [laughs] and he said, "How can I expect you to go out into the world and have healthy children if this is the way you're going to behave?" It was something.
Luckily, I was still in my knowing after that. I threatened to sue the school. The 355M of the California Penal Code annoying phone conversation never landed. There were no charges, but the school, these authority figures, at the time, they did their thing. No doubt I was an ass. I just said, "I'm going to sue you guys. This is ridiculous. You can't do this." The Dean of students who wasn't involved was like, "Yes, this is utterly ridiculous." He suspended me for a quarter and out of the dorms for a year. Then I switched schools.
What I learned in that process was that being right doesn't mean anything. Having the best database doesn't make you the best database company. We have this idea that being right is important, but all the people who are right the most, what has it gotten them? It does it even increase their odds of success, or happiness, or good relationships.
Then I remember it striking me. I can't look back and say that I was wrong. I can't look back and say that, nowadays-- I can't look back and even say that they were wrong. I think we were both ignorant, because we were both in some level of war with ourselves and each other, but none of us got any closer to understanding ourselves and each other in the process. None of us made any progress. They didn't have a better dorm because of it. They weren't happier people because of it. Neither was I.
Brett: What was stopping you from being in the wonder throughout that whole experience?
Joe: I had a self-definition of being right. It was really important in my family of origin to be right. There would be debates, or arguments, or yells, and whatever they were, and if you weren't right, you were going to get it worse. You had to prove yourself to be right. I identified with being right at the time. I identified with a fairness and I was going to fight for that fairness. Now it's like, "How does that help me to be right? What am I? Do I want the answer to be right? I don't care if the answer's right. That's not the answer I want to the question, what am I."
Brett: Reminds me of a conversation I had a while back where somebody just paused me in the middle of the conversation and they're like, "It seems you're being very right, right now. How could we optimize for connection?" I'm like, "Oh, I see."
Joe: [laughs] Yes, exactly. [laughs] That's how I was in a conversation with the college about being right. [chuckles] The fortunate piece, this is the thing, I was completely certain about this stuff at the time. It led me into a job for the time that I was suspended, which was caring for developmentally disabled kids. It was a job that I got quickly. I got promoted quickly. Then I was in charge of this house of kids and these residents. That was who I was. That's what I was doing at the time.
Talk about seeing that you can have connection with people who are not even capable of being a quarter of as right. Developmentally disabled people, even a complicated thought process is not really at their fingertips. Yet, they could be beautiful people. You could have a deep connection with them. I learned the lesson that being right had nothing to do with anything that was important to me.
Brett: Often, their thought processes are more complicated in a different direction than you expected. There's actually something brilliant behind it. Or beautifully simple that you had overlooked.
Joe: If you sat in wonder with these guys, you were in for a treat. It was frustrating at times to tune it out, but you were often in for a treat, if you could just sit in wonder with them and see the world through their eyes.
Brett: Well, that wraps it up for VIEW. Thank you very much, Joe. I wonder what our next episode will be.
Joe: [laughs] Me too. Thanks, Brett. It was a pleasure as always.
Brett: Thank you.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe & rate us in your podcast app. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.
VIEW is a state of mind that, through a series of experiments and exercises, you can learn to drop into with ease. When we approach conversations from VIEW we are able to understand others and ourselves in any situation and in a way where even conflict can bring joy and connection.
"Think about this way. If you have a conversation with a person and at the end of that conversation, they feel like they understand themselves and their business better, they want to continue to have conversations with you."
Welcome to the Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease.
My name is Brett Kistler. I am an adventurer, entrepreneur and a self exploration enthusiast. I am here with my co-host, Joe Hudson. Joe is a business coach who has spent decades working with some of the world's top executives and teams developing a unique model of human patterns that underpin how we operate with ourselves, each other and the world. A good entry point into this model is a mindset called VIEW, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy and wonder.
Through understanding and cultivation we learn to easefully drop into the VIEW state of mind, deepening self awareness and increasing our connection with the world around us. To learn more about this podcast or courses, visit artofaccomplishment.com
There are so many approaches out there for deepening communication and interpersonal skills, whether in the realm of the personal or the professional. These frameworks are often composed of learned strategies and techniques that offer perspective style adjustments that may be directionally correct, but most fall short of pointing to the root conditions that facilitate true depth in human connection. What if the key ingredient at the core of strong communication was not a strategy, but a state of mind? How can we cultivate a more connective way of being through practice in our relationships as they are right now? These are the questions behind a practice we call VIEW, which we will be covering in this 5-part series.
Brett: Great. Joe, what is VIEW?
Joe: Practically, it's a way to have conversations. It's a communication methodology that allows your conversations to be far more effective. By effective, I mean more connected, more intimate and more productive, from anything from sales to product development to conversations with your husband or wife or coworker. It's particularly good at creating, like I said, more connection. Also, it's really good at embracing any kind of conflict or having difficult conversations. Practically, that's what it is. Realistically, it's a state of mind. It's communicating from a state of mind, and practicing that state of mind.
Brett: What do you mean by "realistically"?
Joe: To answer that question, I have to really talk about how the whole thing came about. The way that it came about was, I was an investor for a while. I hired this consultant at some point. This consultant had this amazing capacity. He had this capacity to do two things. One, he could sit down and have a conversation with somebody, and in a very short period of time, they could have a breakthrough where they would see themselves and the world differently in a way that gave them more freedom, and more capacity.
He also had this great ability to sell. He couldn't sell what he didn't believe in, so he always sold stuff that he really cared about, but he could sell. I would watch him sit with somebody who was absolutely the opposite of him in characteristic. He would just ask questions, and he would end up selling whatever it is that he was there to sell, about 80% of the time. I would say generally, he had an 80% hit rate in both of these two kinds of conversations.
I would say to him, "Wow, how did you do that?" He goes, "It's not the technique. You can't do this if you're channeling the technique." I've tried. This guy was a character. His name was Case. He would just be like, "You can't learn this. It's not a technique." That's what he would say. Anyway, Case got ill with cancer, unfortunately, has passed away. He wanted a very particular technique of healing that you can only find in California.
He came to California and he lived with my family. We became very close. We were very close before that. I would watch him have these conversations every day. I've learned a lot through osmosis. I had already been 20-something years of self-discovery, so a lot of it made sense to me. When he passed, I was like, "I know there's other people who can do this." I knew one famous person who could have a similar set of conversations. I was like, "I'm going to find out what makes this tick." I went around the world looking for people, found people, and realized what they all had in common. What they all had in common was VIEW, the acronym of VIEW. I'm sure we'll get into it in a second.
The main thing is that it is the state of mind that allows it. It is not the technique. That's why I say realistically, it's the state of mind because if you see this and view this as a technique, it won't work. If you see it as practicing a state of mind that allows for the technique to work if there's a technique even needed, there's definitely a technique that helps, then you can have a tremendous amount of success with it, and not just the success of like, "Wow, now I can have good conversations.” It's success in like, "Oh, now I talk to myself in a different way. Now I am in a frame of mind and I have a perspective that's more open, more free, more loving."
Brett: Come to think of that, I've seen some of the aspects of this work in other places as techniques and they just never seem to land quite as deeply, and the state of mind concept seems to really be key here. Can you explain a little bit more about that?
Joe: Neurologically and physically, when we communicate, there's a lot of things going on besides what we say. There is our body language, there is the empathy that's happening via mirror neurons, there's intonation, there's micro-expressions, there's so many things that are happening outside of language. As animals with mirror neurons, we know that that's happening. Whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, there's some part of us that has the awareness of this stuff and they can't be faked.
Micro-expressions can't be faked. It is a representation of what's actually happening in your system on an emotional level and on a nervous system level. If you are using it as a technique, it can't work, because the actual state of mind is going to shine through in these other non-intellectual ways. If you think about that for a second, it's like this. It's a very cool thought process.
If you see people, they learn these great techniques that are out there, like nonviolent communication or something like that and all of a sudden, they've been weaponized. You just see them being weaponized. It's like you see all this communication training go south. If you've done communication training, you know you've done it and then it's gone south. It's because communication is a natural out-point of your state of mind. It can help you change your state of mind, but if you just focus on it like I'm practicing a state of mind, and that communication comes out of it, it's just far more successful.
Brett: Can you give us an example of that?
Joe: Yes. Let's say your boyfriend or girlfriend wants your undivided attention and you don't really want to give it to them. You want to watch the soccer match or you want to watch ER or whatever it is, but you decide like, "Oh, they're going to be pissed if I don't, or oh my god, I'm going to listen to the bitch forever if I don't", so then you give them your attention, but it's unwilling. It's full of resentment. It's frustrating, let's just say.
Inevitably, you'll be paying attention to the person who asked you to pay attention and then they're going to start getting frustrated. Now, you don't really want to be here and you're like, "What the hell? I just stopped what I was doing to give you the attention that you asked for. Now that's not good enough?” Who hasn't been in this conversation?
Brett: That's how it starts.
Joe: Yes, exactly. That's how it starts, and it's because it's obvious in everything besides your language that you don't want to be there paying attention. It doesn't feel good, because we know it and that's what I mean. If the state of mind isn't, "Oh, I want to pay attention to you," it will never work. If the state of mind in the communication is "I'm trying to get something out of you," which is the antithesis of VIEW, then it'll never work, no matter what technique you use.
Brett: Then sometimes we actually are duped by believing somebody's intentions that aren't true through whatever techniques they're using. How does that work when somebody's state of mind doesn't shine through?
Joe: The state of mind, maybe if they're like sociopaths so they're not actually having a very natural human experience when they're talking to you, outside of something like that, then it's really two things that happen, when you can't sense this from other people. One is that you have something you want to believe and they are giving you that. We'll believe a lie if it rhymes with the truth that we want to believe.
Now you see this in mass media all the time. It's like, "Okay. Cool. They said that and that rhymes with what I believe, so I'm going to buy into that," or salespeople or infomercials. "Yes. You can be rich and without any effort." "Oh, I want to believe that so you can--" That's part of the ways that we get duped is, that we're actually basically duping ourselves. The other thing that happens is, that, if you study trauma and I don't mean huge trauma. That also is true, like a war trauma or a car accident of trauma, but even the minor traumas of always been criticized by somebody who is supposed to be nurturing you.
When we hear somebody that reminds us of that trauma, then we're not actually hearing them, we're not actually with them, we're with the person or people who helped us get that trauma into our bones. There's this great data on that about how you're not in the same time and space when you're moving to trauma. You see this with war veterans all the time in a major way, where they think they're in the war even though they're on their living room sofa. It happens in minor ways all the time. In those places, then we're not really aware of the person's intentions. Those are the two main ways it happens.
Brett: Those times when somebody starts acting like a child and it's like, "Wait a minute. Okay, they're acting the age they were, when the thing that this is mapping onto occurred to them."
Joe: Exactly. That's exactly right. It's why you can learn really duplicitous sales techniques and they work one out of eight times, because you're just basically fishing for the fish who wants that bait. You can do that, and it looks like it works. If you're authentic and you're actually in a deep care for the person, then it works a lot more effectively, and there's great studies on this of what the best sales techniques are.
You see that they did this with car salesmen. It was even a used car salesman. They were like, "Who are the most effective car salesmen?" There was good car salesman and really good car salesmen, and then there was these just unbelievably great salesmen, just in numbers. The cases of those unbelievably great performers, it was because they actually cared about their customer. They saw it as a relationship.
Those relationships came back over and over again. They saw their job is to really help that person be in the right vehicle, and people knew it and so it worked. The numbers were far better than the whatever it is, one in eight. You can't quote me on it, but it was something like three times the performance of an average car salesperson.
Brett: What does VIEW stand for?
Joe: The acronym. V is the vulnerability, I is impartiality, E is empathy and W is wonder. That's what it stands for, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy and wonder. That's really describing the state of mind. There's some techniques layered on top of that, not much and they're not necessary if you're actually in that vulnerable, impartial, empathetic, and full-of-wonder state of mind.
Brett: It seems like almost ways to check that you're in the state of mind. If you're in the state of mind that these point to, then you will be having vulnerability, impartiality, empathy and wonder.
Joe: Yes. It's like that. It's also they're great ways. I use these four ways to describe it, because they're great ways to sink into it quickly. If you're not there, what are the best techniques, what are the best words or reminders to get you there quickly?
Brett: That makes sense. Let's go through each of them. What do each of these mean to you?
Joe: Vulnerability is to speak your truth even when it's scary. That's what it is to be vulnerable, is to be very much yourself in your truth, even though you're scared of the result or the potential results. Impartiality is not trying to achieve an outcome for yourself or others. It's far more like wandering, than it is like goal orientation. Empathy is to be with a person in their emotions. Wonder, it's a lot like curiosity except for you're not looking for the answer. There's a lot more awe in wonder than there is in curiosity, but you're definitely not looking for the answer.
Brett: Vulnerability sounds a lot like a weakness for a lot of people. How did you come up with this definition for vulnerability?
Joe: Yes. I think the reason that people think being vulnerable as being weak is because they get confused with the difference between being weak and feeling weak. When we are vulnerable, there's often a visceral response in our bodies, an emotional response, a nervous system response like, "Oh, I'm going to get weak. I'm being weak and I'm going to get attacked." You're going to get that when you're being vulnerable, especially for the first 10 or so times.
I think that's where that confusion comes from. Vulnerable, the reason I describe it this way is, if you're not in your truth, you can't be vulnerable. If you're not in your truth, there's no exposure. If I'm pretending to be somebody else and you attack me for being somebody else, it's like, "Well, they're not really attacking me. They're attacking someone else." That's the truth part of it. Then the second part of it is even when it's scary.
Being in our truth isn't scary, if we don't think we're going to get attacked. Being in our truth isn't scary, when we don't feel like somebody will judge us, being in our truth isn't scary when we aren't scared of the consequences, and so vulnerability is being in your truth, even when we're scared of those consequences. It's really the opposite of weakness. It's actually an incredible form of strength.
Brett: Courage.
Joe: It's a very deep practice. Yes. It can take you a very long way if you practice it on a daily basis.
Brett: Yes. It reminds me of the definition of courage, which is that courage isn't the lack of fear, courage is the willingness to feel fear.
Joe: Yes. Not overcome it but feel it, that is so right. Yes. That's it. Yes, that's vulnerability.
Brett: Yes. Let's get into impartiality. It sounds impossible, especially in business. Theoretically, you could just be completely impartial in your entire life and how would you get anywhere that you want to go?
Joe: [laughs] Yes, that's the assumption.
Brett: There has to be some partiality.
Joe: Yes, there definitely is some partiality. If you really, really pay attention, every sentence that we have has some little bit of an agenda in it. It's very asymptotic in that way, meaning that we can keep on getting less and less partial, but we can't become completely 100% impartial.
What I'm talking about here is the difference between getting in your car at a very specific time to get to your job at a very specific time and making sure that you get there and getting in a car and driving around, following what feels great to follow in that moment, and wandering like the old-fashioned Sunday drive. That's what I'm talking about.
In that case, one is highly partial. It is "Let's get in the car, let's get there, let's get there on time. This is the route I want to take, and I don't want traffic and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." One of them is like, "I'm partial on the fact that I want to take a drive, but I don't care where I end up and I am here to enjoy myself," so that's the thing. The reason this is so important is because we feel when somebody has an agenda for us and we resist it.
Just tell a two-year-old to do something and the nature of them, they say no, right? The more agenda that we have and you feel with a salesperson all the time, they really want you to buy the less you want to buy. Even if you buy, you're like, "No." It's like, "Stop fucking trying to sell me." That's what I mean by agenda and with business, what's interesting is, everyone thinks that you need to be highly partial to be good at business. You do have to have a clear intention. You do have to have a clear goal. There's no doubt there.
How you get there if you're really highly partial, it's going to slow you down, because there might be 10 ways to get there that are better or quicker or better for the people who are getting you there. Impartiality is actually far more efficient as a way of getting someplace in business. The way I talk about or think about that often is, there is a river that we are on, particularly in business where there's where the customer wants to go, what's needed, what's wanted, where the employees want to go.
If you are reading that river and going with that river, then there's a lot less effort. If you decide you're going against that river, if you decide that you are going to not go with the flow but go against the flow or counterflow, it's a lot more effort and--
Brett: Or build a canal, as you've said before.
Joe: [laughs] Yes, or build a canal. Yes. That's the thing. To be impartial, it works incredibly well. I work with, as you know, some executives running companies of thousands of people, and there's this amazing click that happens when they realize like, "Oh, if I can be impartial in these ways, not give up my goal but be impartial in how this thing happens and be impartial with people, I actually discover what is, and then I can use that information and use that data to create a better plan.
“If I don't try to force a particular thing and we just agree on a goal, then all of a sudden, things move so much quicker and have so much more efficiency." It's the hardest one for people to get, impartiality. It's the hardest one for people to get. Yes.
Brett: It reminds me of an example you've mentioned before about trying to plan a whole basketball game.
Joe: That sounds like a good example. Can you tell me what it is? I've completely forgotten.
Brett: Oh, yes. You have a clear goal, which is to put the ball in the hoop, and if you try to plan the whole thing and you're partial to "No, the ball is going to go to this person now," but somebody is already in the way. Passing it to them is clearly not a good idea. If you're not open to other options, then you're not going to make it to your goal.
Joe: That's it. That's exactly it. Yes. Awesome. Thanks for remembering that.
Brett: Empathy then. Some folks feel lost in empathy, and they get lost in the other person, and they lose their own goals, they lose their own wants.
Joe: Yes. Empathy isn't that. I would say empathy is being with somebody in their emotions. It's not avoiding their emotional state, it's not trying to change their emotional state, it's not trying to make them happy, it's not trying to get them to an epiphany. Empathy is just like, "Oh, you're there and I'm with you," but it's also not being in it with them. It's not believing the story and saying, "Oh, it's true. Your husband does that, your wife does dah, dah, dah, and your boss...Oh my God, they are taking advantage." It's also not losing your own emotional state. Oftentimes, we'll be so empathetic with people that whatever they're feeling, we're feeling.
Brett: "Oh, you're right. I am the bad guy, I am terrible to you. Oh, shame."
Joe: Yes. That's a perfect way that people are empathetic in a way that they've lost themselves, so it's not true empathy. True empathy-- being with somebody, it's being next to them, it's holding their hand, it's not losing yourself in them.
Brett: Then wonder then. You said wonder and not curiosity or as opposed to or distinct from curiosity. Why not curiosity? Why wonder?
Joe: Curiosity, it's a lovely thing. It's like, "Oh, what's happening over there?" There's something that switches in your physical state. If you just, right now, think to yourself, "Oh, what's happening for Brett in this conversation?", there's an open expansiveness that happens with that question, but then as soon as you try to figure it out, something constricts. Wonder is living in the openness of the question with awe. Curiosity can be that, but curiosity can also become very focused on need the answer, need the answer, need the answer. I'm pointing, by using the word "wonder," to that being in the question without needing to get an answer.
If you just stop and think about, "What would it be like to be with a person who's just in the question with me, who just has wonder about what's happening with me and they don't need me to solve anything?" You can feel your whole system relax.
Brett: It makes for a lot of ease in a sales conversation as well.
Joe: Right. Exactly, because if you're not in that ease and you're focused on trying to figure out, "Err," then the person's mirror neurons are like, "I don't want to be around this."
Brett: In a way, all of this feels very process-based.
Joe: Yes, that's right. It's interesting that you mention it. Recently, I was watching a TED Talk on design process. One of the things that they were talking about in this lecture was how if you're shooting for a result, you won't get it. The thing you have to do is stay focused on the process, and it's going to go sideways, it's not going to go well at times, but the output is consistently better, than if you're going for a particular result.
If you look at design theory, they all talk about this process and having faith in the process and that it will lead you to the outcome. If you leave the process, it won't lead you to the outcome. This is the exact same thing. It's very much like living principled. You're saying, "Here are the principles I'm living by, because I know consistently if I live by them, it works out in the way that works for me and works for my deepest truth."
It's the same thing with this. That guy, Case, that I talked about in the earlier part of the program. He would get into these conversations because I have no idea what the hell is going to happen. He would always point it to that. That's what he's saying. He's saying that "I don't know what's going to happen, because if I did or if I tried to make it happen in a particular way, it's going to go to shit. It's far better for me to just be in this process and trust the process."
Brett: It sounds like this is a way to trust and flow with the self-organizing, social and business dynamics that are already occurring and not get in the way of them through a narrow-minded constraint or management of the process or over-management.
Joe: Yes, that's right. An example is, that for a while there I directed short films. One of the things that I learned was that if I wanted a very specific result from an actor, I'd get a horrible performance, whereas if I could give the actor a clear objective, then their performance just did really, really well. It's a really similar thought process, is that if you hold that objective and you trust in the process, then it works out.
That's not to say, this is an interesting part, because a lot of people when they start learning VIEW, they think, "Then I'm not allowed to have an opinion, or I'm not allowed to have a boundary," that's absolutely not the case. Those are really important things, and they can be actually incredibly vulnerable things to say, and in business all the time, I'll say, "What I'm not okay with is this." I'll just leave that upfront on the table. Like, "This isn't working for me. Here are the reasons it doesn't work for me. How do we solve that problem?" But then I'm impartial once I have that.
I'm even impartial as far as if someone says, "Why, what is it? What are you missing, dah, dah, dah?" I'm open to listening to that. If I'm not convinced out of it, I'm not going to pretend that I am to be in a VIEW conversation, because I can't be, because if I'm not being true to myself inside the conversation, I can't be vulnerable. I can't be impartial either, for that matter, and it's very hard to be curious.
Brett: The person's not doing business with you.
Joe: Yes, exactly. You're right, exactly, and then it's going to go to shit eventually anyhow. Exactly.
Brett: You mentioned earlier that there are techniques. This is all a process around a frame of mind that it emerges from, but that there are techniques. There must be something to help point us back to this frame of mind. Can you tell me a little more about that?
Joe: Yes. It's how and what questions. That's the entirety of the technique is to ask how and what questions. There is a technique that's more for running meetings that I've developed as well. The general thing is how and what questions, and the reason is, because they're open-ended questions. If you say, "Do you like ice cream?" I get to say yes or no. If you say, "How do you feel about ice cream?" You might hear a story of my childhood, and you might hear that chocolate chip is my favorite, then you might hear about my dairy allergy, or you might hear how I had a cow when I was a kid. You have no idea what you're going to hear. You get access to so much more data, which shows that you're actually in wonder. If you only want to hear yes or no, you're not really in wonder.
It's how/what questions, which are mainly-- because they are open questions. Obviously, there's who, what, where, when, and why. All those other ones are good, but they're just not very common. How and what are the most common ones, and we don't use why questions in the technique because of two reasons. One is most people when they're saying a why question, they're in judgment. It's, "Why'd you do that?" There's not real curiosity there. It's just like, "You should feel shitty, and I want you to make an excuse for yourself." That´s really what that communication is.
Brett: "Why wasn't this done on time?"
Joe: "Why wasn't this done on time?" It's like you're looking for them to make an excuse. You're already in a judgment place with them. Typically, not always. The other reason, that why questions don't work so well, is because they're the hardest questions to actually answer. There's somebody who said why questions are the questions that scientists can't answer. Like, "Why is the sun?" is a really hard question and I would say an unanswerable question, whereas "What makes the sun, how did the sun get there?" Those are answerable questions. That's the other thing.
Brett: At least there was a lot of information you can speak on about it.
Joe: Yes, exactly, so true. Exactly, you get information. You get data. The other thing is, usually when I talk about all this, somebody will say to me, "Yes, but you can be judgmental with how/what questions." Yes, you can. You can be judgmental with anything.
Brett: "What makes you such a dick?"
Joe: Yes. The funniest thing is when I'm doing VIEW, I might actually ask that question like, "Hey, what's making you such a dick right now?" If I say it from VIEW, if I say it with vulnerability, impartiality, if I say it like, "Oh my God, this is scary to say this to this person," but it's true for me that they're being a dick and I'm actually quite curious, I have wonder there and I don't really need them to answer in a particular way, nor do I want them not be a dick, and I actually can empathize with them, then their answers can be--. It happens all the time in my world where I can say, "What's making you such a dick right now?" and they'll laugh, or they'll say, "Oh, yes, I've had a bad day or blah, blah, blah" because it's not, "What makes you such a dick?"
Brett: One of those ways of asking it is open to all answers like, "Hey, did you have a rough day? What's going on with you?" Another one of them is just like, "You better have a really fucking good excuse for this."
Joe: That's exactly it. Why questions just imply it more, and it's easier for the person on the other side to assume it, than how or what questions. Also, how and what questions make you reframe questions in a new way, which triggers your brain. It opens your neurology for a second when you say to somebody something like, "What is it that's making you such a dick?" It's not a way we'd normally phrase the question. It does something to them and to us.
Brett: Yes. I've found after doing this work, there's been so many times I've been in a conversation, I'm about to say something and it starts with something other than how or what, and then I pause and then I find the thing I'm curious about. Then a question comes out and the conversation goes in a totally different direction.
Joe: That's right. Yes, exactly. That's what happens all the time. It's not just different. It's also far more meaningful and productive often. I'll do this in a room full of high-powered executives. After we have our first few conversations, I'll say, "You just had a 10-minute meeting. Have you ever had such a productive 10-minute meeting?" That's the moment of realization that everybody goes through where they're like, "Holy crap, without an agenda, I just solved more puzzles or I just overcame more roadblocks than I have having an hour-long meeting with a direct report, pushing them to an answer."
Brett: Right. There's a two-sidedness to it. There's the side that we'd spoke to earlier, where the open-ended questions give you more information, more data. On the other side, the person gets to be heard and speak their piece and speak to their wants and needs rather than checking a box of like, "Oh, which option was I given, vanilla or chocolate?"
Joe: Yes. Exactly. Because of that, you can actually come up with a better solution for a problem if you're in that position, in the conversation. But also, oftentimes that's all that anybody actually needs. I see this happen all the time where say a manager wants to be able to go in one direction and the people don't want to go and all they actually need is to be heard. When they get fully heard, they're like, "Okay, I'll go in that direction. That makes sense." We've all lived in that situation where we are basically being stubborn and, “No, I don't want to do it.” Then when we feel fully heard, we're like, "Oh, okay."
Brett: Almost every complaint I've ever heard about a boss or an employee has had some form of, I don't feel heard in it.
Joe: Yes. That's right. Tell me a time that you were at your peak productivity and you felt unheard.
Brett: Yes, no.
Joe: Yes. Exactly. Nobody can.
Brett: Unless I was shutting myself out from everybody else and doing peak productivity with myself.
Joe: Right. Which means that you were being productive in a team. That's right.
Brett: Let's swing back to the science around this. Tell me more about that.
Joe: There's a lot of stuff out there in psychology, neuroscience and CBT, all sorts of different kinds of studies, that support what's happening if you're in a VIEW state of mind. Let's focus on, let's say two or three of the main ones. One of them is just a simple thing. If you are under attack, you can't be curious, or if you're under attack, you can't learn because you're not curious. We know this and on many different levels. One, we know that if kids feel under stress, they don't do as well on tests. They don't learn as quickly.
We know that if two people are in a fight-- here's something you've never seen, one person's like, "You son of a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I hate you, dah, dah, dah and you're stupid, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." The other person says, "Oh, you know what? You're right. I get your point." We don't do that, because it's neurologically not possible. That's, let's say the extreme attack where we can never see somebody, ended up being curious or learning.
Then there's just more and more subtle forms of attack. The most subtle forms of attack are you just trying to push somebody into doing what you want them to do, be happy, stop crying, just do this task. The more that attack is there, the more you're trying to push somebody into something and be different than who they are, the less able they are to learn. That's just a simple one.
If you think about it this way, it's like, if you close your eyes and you visualize yourself running from a lion and you're running as fast as you can. It's like, you can hear the paws hitting the ground, it's catching up to you. It's going to pounce on you at any minute and it's a huge thing. You know you're dead and it's coming, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. Here's what you don't do. You don't go, "Oh, I wonder how much it weighs.”
If you actually do that exercise and you stop and you go, "How much does this weigh?" All the fear goes away, which is why wonder is such an important thing to point to. Because if you actually stop and say, "What am I curious about, what do I have actual deep wonder for?", then the fear that you have dissipates. If you're trying to push somebody into something, that's because you're in fear. That's what creates the drama of our life, is our incapacity to love people as they are. We're scared of something and so we start trying to push them around.
Brett: This lion example, it brings up a good point. That fear is actually useful. Because if you did stop running from the lion to think about how much it weighs, then you would get eaten. Fear is helpful. It's just a lot of times in our lives, we end up having a stress response that doesn't match the actual moment. It seems like you're pointing to with the VIEW– is really cultivating a lower homeostatic set point for stress from which open-ended questions can emerge naturally and curiosity can exist.
Joe: Yes. That's exactly it. That's all together true. Then there's also a practical thing, which is we are not going to be as open, we're not going to learn as much, we are not going to want to hang out with as much people, who are scared in their conversation with us and therefore trying to control us.
Brett: We'll trust them less.
Joe: We'll trust them less. That's right. Because they're trusting themselves less. They think that they have to control something to be safe, and people who actually deeply trust themselves don't think that that's true. They know that they're safe no matter what, unless a lion is chasing them.
Brett: Yes. As mammals, we can detect that in other people a mile away. We naturally do that when we walk into a room and we find out who is the one that's the most stressed out and scared, and who's the one that's the most calm. Then subconsciously we put ourselves into pecking orders based on this.
Joe: That's right. That's exactly it. The predator smells it out and attacks the one that's-- exactly. That's it. That's that part of it. Then there's also another part of the science, is that there's-- we make decisions emotionally. If you took out our emotional centers of our brain, we stop making decisions. It would take us half an hour to decide what color pen to use. It would take us four hours to decide where to have lunch. There's a great book on this called Descartes' Error. We make decisions emotionally.
Do people pay $200 for Nike shoes because they think that it's a $200 worth of shoe? No, they're making an emotional decision. Do you buy this piece of software because you like the sales guy or the saleswoman? Do you buy this piece of software because it makes you feel safe? Do you buy this piece of software, because you beat it up and you feel like that they would have answers for it? The answer is that you are buying that piece of software based on an emotion.
You might use logic to figure out the most likely way that you would get that emotion. I don't want to be yelled at by my boss, so I'm making an emotional decision to not get yelled at and I'll use logic to figure out how to not get yelled at by my boss, but we're making emotional decisions. All the information in the world won't sell people stuff. If it was just pure information, then a Nike ad would be like, "Look at this shoe. It has 6 inches of leather siding and it has 8 holes on each side for the shoestrings." That would be, "Oh”, but it's not. You make the emotional buy.
If I'm hanging out with you, you're hanging out with me because of an emotional experience that we have when we're together. If I am buying the product, it's because I'm having an emotional experience around the product. If I am wanting intimacy with you, if I would want to call you when I'm having a problem, if I want to come home and see my parents, if I don't get offended when you tell me that you need space, all those things are based on emotions. They're not based on facts. That's really a main thing about VIEW because we're acknowledging, owning, and addressing the emotional part of a conversation.
Brett: Well, when we're making a decision, there's only so much logic you can actually do, given the time constraints and there's so much more to consider. I think what you're saying is that the emotions are a way that we make a probabilistic inference based on everything that's happened in our lives with just a feeling in our body that helps shape which questions we even ask with logic to figure out the final details and then make a decision.
Joe: Yes, there's that aspect of it and there's also the aspect of it, like, “How many decisions have you made so that you don't feel like, let's say weak. How many decisions have you made to feel loved?” Whole swaths of decisions are made over this kind of thing. A VIEW conversation allows people to have all those emotions, feel safe in them and to feel actually accepted and wanted and appreciated in that experience for who they are, which we all want.
Brett: Yes, it's important to just remember that everybody that you're in a conversation with, even in a stuffy business environment, everybody's making emotional decisions based on the things you just spoke to.
Joe: That's right, absolutely.
Brett: Tell me more about the payoff and the benefits of practicing VIEW.
Joe: This is a common story in my world. I will go into a team of people, typically it's Silicon Valley teams that I go into. It's not only Silicon Valley, but typically it is. You're talking about really smart programmers or really smart business people, and they're not getting along. I remember this one particular example, the team had like an ex-Navy seal on it and a MIT triple graduate, that kind of a team of just super intense people. They weren't getting along. They weren't being productive.
Half-day into a two-day workshop, the people who hadn't been able to get along were crying with each other because of all the pain and all that resistance in their system they could let go when they realized, the person across from me doesn't hate me, isn't trying to kill me, and isn't trying to destroy my thing. We're just not communicating with each other clearly.
It was so amazingly beautiful. That team who had not hit their performance metrics, and I think it had been three years, hit their performance metrics that quarter. That's a payoff. You get a tremendous amount of cohesion, not just between the team but between you and the people around you. We all know that when we feel deeply connected with somebody that we will go to the ends of the earth to support them and they will go to their ends of the earth to support us. That's really what we want from friends. If it's a true support, it's not dysfunctional support. It's really what we want. It's what we want in our teams. That's one benefit.
Another benefit is that most people right now are like, “Conflict, how do I avoid that?” Or, “Conflict, I'll just get through it. I'm just going to push, go get in conflict so I can get on the other side of it.” When you really understand this frame of mind, conflict is an amazing thing, because what happens every time is that conflict gives you better solutions than you had before. You start looking for conflict.
Not looking for conflict like, "Ah, here's a way I can pick a fight", but like, "Oh, there's a tension. Let's go explore it." Because I know if I explore it from this frame of mind, all of a sudden I'm going to have better solutions, better answers, and better paths forward.
It's also really a lovely state to be in. It's really quite pleasant. If you are in wonder, it's a more open and spacious feeling, than if you think you know everything all the time. Think about the people you know in your life who know everything all the time. They don't look like they're enjoying themselves.
If you think about people who are empathetic, not in somebody, but they're just like, “Oh, I can be here with you in your state, that's just a more open state.” It's just a really lovely place to be. There's the efficiency that I mentioned, like with the 10-minute sessions. The other thing is that what I noticed is, when people really get into this conversation and they start practicing it, the sense of loneliness just dissolves.
There's so many people in our society who feel very lonely and very insecure. Not insecure like I'm not good enough, but insecure like, "Oh my God, I might lose my job." When they see this technique at work and they use it and that frame of mind becomes a steady state place, what happens is, they don't have that deep experience of loneliness. They know what it is to be alone, but they're not, "Oh my God, I'm all alone and nobody loves me." That's not happening.
It's not only that the loneliness starts to dissolve, but also this sense of security shows up. The sense of security is there, because you realize that no matter what your boss says, no matter what happens, you're able to have this conversation with them that actually benefits you and them consistently.
There's a deep level of security in that, because we're not really scared of losing our job and not being able to make money. What we're really scared of is that we're not going to be of value, that we're not going to be heard and that we're not going to be able to be seen for what our value is. We're worried about losing our job, but if we know that every time we have a conversation it's valuable to ourselves and the other people around us, whenever we want that, that's a deep form of security.
Brett: Right. If we're worried about losing our, job because that would mean to us that we are not valuable anywhere, it doesn't matter if you lose your job if you know you're valuable somewhere else and you could go do something that you're valuable at.
Joe: Yes, that's right. If you think about it this way, it's like, if you have a conversation with the person and at the end of that conversation, they feel they understand themselves better, they understand their business better, they want to continue to have conversations with you. That's how it works. The thing is, you don't have to know shit to do that. You just have to ask really good questions and be vulnerable in it, to be empathetic in it, to be impartial in it and to be full of wonder in it. It doesn't even require that you have skills. It just requires that you are having a conversation with them that allows the best of them to come up.
Brett: To that, I've noticed that VIEW, it seems to be like, this magical ingredient, this special sauce. You can just pour on a workplace and it transforms relationships and teams. How do you account for this?
Joe: Yes. It's like I was saying it happened in that one company. I've seen it so consistently happen and it feels like magic. I think partially because often revenue increases, because team cohesion increases, because sales methodology improves, because the products are more connected with the customer. Product development conversations are better. There's all sorts of things that happen when people feel more connected and they're actually more in wonder. They're wondering what the right question is, they're wondering what the customer wants, and when they're willing to be vulnerable about maybe that product sucks.
There's all sorts of cool things but really, when people are met with this level of openness, when they're met with this level of care and nurturing, when they're met with this level of support, they really know it. That is what relaxes something in them. It allows them to perform at their best. Like we said at the beginning, if you know you're being judged by a team, if you know that the people in your team are not open to you, you're not going to be at your peak performance.
But if you know that that's there, if you know that you can be accepted and the boundaries will be held and you feel safe in that environment, you're going to be incredibly effective. Even if the outside world is like, man, you've got two months to solve this and you better solve it, if you've got your team there with you, that's going to get you your best performance. It's going to get you your best performance in a marriage as well. If I know that my wife deeply supports me, deeply cares about me, is open to my truth, is in deep wonder about my experiences, is vulnerably sharing with me, that's what allows me to be the best husband and vice versa.
That's really the magic of it. The magic of it isn't some technique or some state of mind. The magic of it is that it allows all of us, it creates the environment where all of us can be the best, where all of us can live in our truth. That's what's the magic. It's just like a really good soil. Then the seed of who we are gets to sprout in who we are is frickin amazing.
Brett: VIEW, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder. This has been a great episode. Joe, thank you very much.
Joe: My pleasure, Brett. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe & rate us in your podcast app. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.