Did You Know Being Humble Can Be a Bad Thing? | Joe Hudson

0:00So from our earliest days, we're taught to be humble. Humility is good, we're told. But what if it wasn't? Or what if humility had its place, but it also came with a potential dark side, one that potentially caused both us and those around us harm? This is one of the rich topics that I explore in today's conversation with Joe Hudson, a co-founder of the Art of Accomplishment, sought-after teacher, and a legendary coach to CEOs and top leaders at companies like OpenAI, Alphabet, Apple, and so many others. Joe has this extraordinary ability to help you see what's been invisible in your life, to break free from self-limiting patterns, and live with greater freedom and fulfillment.

0:43It's kind of like he's that one friend who sees past the shields, even the ones you don't realize that you put up, then helps you lower them, see what's real, and walk back into a life that feels so much more connected and alive. In this thought-provoking conversation, we drop into a profoundly liberating perspective on humility and authenticity, one that just might challenge us to let go of the need to think less of ourselves and instead think of ourselves less, fully occupying our place in the world without having to shrink to make others feel comfortable or conform to some dysfunctional norms.

1:22And Joe also shares some eye-opening insights on allowing and even welcoming difficult emotions without resistance on holding goals lightly to remain open to life's surprising solutions and the transformative shift of self-improvement to radical self-discovery. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

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4:16it's fun to be hanging out with a new friend um you and i spent some time in the mountains yesterday yeah hiking around really enjoying ourselves and um as we were talking we're kind of going along and chatting a little bit about what we might chat about today and you teed up something that's been on your mind for a while now that i know you haven't really shared a whole lot about yeah recently it's this sort of like thoughts around the notion of humility and before i try I didn't even describe what we were diving into. I'm going to turn it over to you because it's not what I expected within the first 30 seconds or so of you speaking.

4:54Joe Hudson: Right. And we're going to dive into this. So take me there. I think the original thought process and humility for people and for me and my experiences, humility is thinking less of yourself. and and then somewhere along the line there's this idea that came into my that it's not thinking less of myself but it's thinking of myself less like just literally less thoughts about myself and now in my journey what's happening is this uh phrase was taught to me and i think it's from the i think it's from the jewish tradition that humility is, I think the quote is, taking your God-given place in the world.

5:42Joe Hudson: And that's been really hitting me deeply right now in my own journey of there's a calling and you follow the calling, even if it takes you somewhere big or small, significant or insignificant. And to actually have the moment of recognition that you hear the call, and if you don't follow it, that it ends in pain. And if you do follow it, even if it's not particularly the thing that you want to be doing, that it always ends up in some place where you needed to go, some place that other people need you to go. Needs is not quite the right word, but something like that. So, I mean, there's so many curiosities around this.

6:31One, so when most people think about humility, Me included. Yeah. Right. The thing that comes to mind is almost the exact opposite of something like a calling of rising up, of saying, I'm here to do this thing. And it's also, I own it.

6:46Joe Hudson: Right. Yeah. Like there's some ownership of the process, the experience and the outcome. You know, this steps into a place where when most people think of humility or at least me. Yeah. I think of the opposite. I think of the pulling back, the, oh, well, you know, it wasn't me. It was something channeling through me with everyone who came before me. So it's a bit of a contrarian take on the concept. yeah i think that it the reason i i said it in the order i did is because i do think it is a order of operations thing i think that there's a really important time to recognize that you're not responsible so for instance the way we think about ego typically is somebody who's like i can do anything that's like big ego right you've got a big ego but the way i think about ego is ego is anything that you use to define yourself in a limited way and so a lot of people can take an insult better than they can take a compliment so you can say to somebody oh you didn't do that right there okay well what can i do about it but if you say wow you just changed my life like yeah no that's okay it wasn't just me there's this i'm raising my hand over here yeah 100 and if you actually let that through if you actually let a compliment through and you don't call the other person a liar, which is basically what you're doing when you're saying, no, no, no, it wasn't, that's not true.

8:10Joe Hudson: If you actually let that all the way through, it's in our coursework, I see it all the time is that, that it dissolves people's ego. It opens up so much energy for their system, but there is a recognition of doing both things. So for instance, this morning I was on a call with some of the people I've been working with for a long time, and we were doing this exercise of letting compliments in. And we were looking at different ways to block the compliments. And one of them was deflection. One of the ways to block a compliment was deflection. So somebody gave me the compliment. My job was to deflect.

8:47Joe Hudson: And they're like, your work has changed my life. And my deflection was, it wasn't just me. It was like all the teachers before me. And as soon as he heard that, he saw, oh, that can be both a recognition of something greater than you, which is lovely, but it can also be a deflection. For instance, if I look at any thought that I've ever had, I didn't choose any of them. I never said, I'm going to choose to have this thought, and then I had the thought, yet I call them mine. I don't call them gifts. I don't call them something beyond my control. And the recognition that they are is a really important recognition because it allows you to not be so in control or so responsible there's also a really important moment where you realize oh i have choice i can control my destiny and i can choose to not have those kinds of thoughts you know so both of them are really necessary the way that i think about it is the hand is always like this our hand is always like this for those who are listening joe just started with a close his and then an open palm yeah both of them if they're always like that they're cripple and so you really want that flexibility and so there is a way to deflect humility there's a way to not be humble in the it was all me and there's a way of not being humble in the it really had nothing to do with me because if you actually allow it in that it does have something to do with you there's a heartbreak a love that has to be accepted there's a an ego destruction that has to be allowed if you're going to really let it in i mean it's interesting also right because when you deflect you're essentially denying the person who might be offering you some praise some compliment you know maybe thanks yeah you're denying them the feeling of it landing yeah like and that's a gift for someone i mean like adam grant talks about this there's all this research on the what's commonly called the giver's glow right yeah You know, like we actually get a hit when we're generous, when we're kind, whether we say something, we give something, whatever it may be.

10:59And when you deflect and you don't allow that to land, it's almost like we're unintentionally doing like a little bit of micro harm to the person who's trying to be kind to us.

11:08Joe Hudson: yeah so while we were doing this exercise with the five forms of resisting the compliment right there we had these five forms and while we were doing it i noticed i wanted to start giving back into compliments i wanted to start like not giving compliments because what's happening there is like there's people who really want to be seen really want to be appreciated and they're not getting it but every time they get it they don't let it in they're deflecting it so people don't want to continue to give it to them. And so it's, it's beyond just hurting them. It's hurting yourself because you're setting up an ecosystem where people aren't going to see you or acknowledge you or how I give you those compliments.

11:50Joe Hudson: And so it's a, it's a double harm that happens and it makes people a little pissed, you know, Hey, I just gave you a compliment and you're just, and you're spitting on it and a gentle spit, but it's a spit, you know? yeah i mean we're wired in such weird ways around this stuff because there's like a social code yeah that says well we're not we're kind of like supposed to answer that way in a way like that's you know like and in especially in different cultures you know australians tall poppy syndrome you know it's like they're sort of it changes by culture too right and even family culture you know local culture whatever it may be it's gonna change and and then as you're describing this i'm remembering i think it was snoop dogg who was like receiving like uh maybe a grammy or something like that and he got up and maybe it was like mtv music whatever it may have been yeah i was like i would like to thank me i mean it goes through all the reasons why he wants to thank like his younger self effectively for not giving up for not listening to this and all this stuff and for and yeah and it's like the exact opposite it's it's just like not only am going to let it land i'm going to give it to myself and then let it land um yeah but your similar point about there's a difference between having it given to you and and receiving it is key and i meditate every morning and towards the very end i'll just do like a little micro version of a meta meditation like yeah yeah i'll say yeah um yeah like may you live with ease may be safe may you be healthy yeah um may you feel loved and the reason i don't say may you be loved is because you may be loved yeah but if you're not allowing it to land it kind of doesn't matter yeah so yeah two things on that so the the first one that hits me is you are being loved like this if you actually just pay attention my experience of reality now is that like the whole universe is trying to love me and waiting for me to let my heart crack open enough to to acknowledge that that's what's happening and when i really look at you know now working with tens of thousands of people i can almost boil it all down to like so much pain is just the fact that people aren't letting the love in.

14:15Joe Hudson: So that's one aspect. The other aspect that happens is one of the things our mind says, if we let in the compliment or if we're, if we're letting ourselves be the tall poppy, one of the things is that we're scared that we're going to use that power to hurt people. And so part of my job is to work with really powerful people. And what I notice is that if a really powerful person hasn't let in the fact that they have done this, that they are powerful, that they are capable to really actually fully let it in, then they're far more likely to get dangerous. Taking a deeper into that. Yeah. So, you know, you could take, you know, a famous person who's incredibly rich, really successful and yet they're lying about video games about like how good they are in video games as an example so like what what is that what's going on there and it's because they're trying to feed a hungry ghost that they're enough that they're capable that they're deserving of love they're trying to fill that ghost but every time they're fed they're not digesting it they're chewing it and spitting it out because they're not receiving the compliment.

15:33Joe Hudson: They're not actually acknowledging God's intended place for them. And so they'll think that it's a better place maybe to protect themselves, or they'll think they haven't done enough yet. They're still catching up at 40. There's all sorts of ways in which the, you know, the mind plays a game, but all of it is not actually the acknowledgement of this is what's up. This is what's real. i have created a billion dollar business i am creating a technology that'll change the world and not very many people could do it and meanwhile from the outside looking in everything is astonishing but the ghost is getting hungrier and hungrier and hungrier and so exactly so they have to do more and more to prove to themselves that they're valuable or that they have control or that they have influence and it becomes incredibly destructive And it's very, it's hard for a lot of my clients because most clients who want to work with me aren't, you know, in the part of their cycle where they're saying, you know, I'm not good now.

16:32I got to drive like da da da.

16:34Joe Hudson: They're in the people saying, oh, I got to be really humble to protect not becoming that other person that I see. and then for them to realize oh this is part of doing the actual humble thing is to acknowledge it in a way that breaks your heart and that's the thing is it you can acknowledge it with a deflection yeah i'm a i'm a world-class teacher nobody can coach as good as me or i am one of the top one percent coaches and that's all like the way i'm doing that is deflection because i'm not letting it break my heart. I'm not acknowledging that there is also a gift in this that is not within my control.

17:11Joe Hudson: And so it's really both of those two things. It's allowing both the personal and the non-personal and at the same time, which creates real humility. Because if you can dismiss it all, your ghost is still hungry. If you can't dismiss any of it, if you can't say, it is all a gift and i am incredibly fortunate or that life is a dream come true that i never thought possible both of those things are necessary for the heartbreak which is the disintegration of the ego so take me into the heartbreak side of this how do we allow it to break our hearts yeah so first just most people resist this idea of heartbreak like oh i don't want my heart to be broken my experience is we run from that experience we don't want to feel all the time right what we're actually so it's heart break is heartbreaking open and so what it's it's literally saying okay i have to expand my my ability to love has to expand to include this thing right i should work out more i'm chubby can i love that how much does my heart have to break open to expand to love that to love both the fact that i'm chubby and also to expand to love the thing that's saying that i'm chubby and that requires just a like a crack in your system to do it as a matter of fact i'm sure somebody's listening to that like i can't i can't love that voice what do you mean i'm sure a lot of people are listening to this and say like dude now you just told me they lost me right yes it's like literally a voice has been in my head and i've been doing everything i can for all the waking hours of my life to try and snuff it out yeah i've been going to therapy to change its mind i've been trying to extinguish it because that is the voice of harm is the way a lot of people absolutely that yeah and it is they're not wrong about it however that which you resist persists and all of what you just described is resistance and it absolutely some of it might be necessary actually because again this is an order of operations thing and and i'll go into that in a second but at the end of the day yeah you've been doing all that year all that stuff for 20 years and guess what it's still there so you're just doing the crazy thing by repeating something that doesn't work um my experience is that so i mean we have this week-long thing that we do which is all about changing the negative voice in your head and we get like a standard deviation change and in the positive direction less negative self-talk and we have looked at lots and lots of exercises and experiments that one can run my experience is curiosity far more powerful than management what makes it say it that way what's how does it feel in my system what's the somatic response what's its really good intention behind it what makes it manage me like an idiot what makes it manage me good and sometimes and not good you know there's so many questions and to really actually be attuned and listening to it that's that's one thing that really helps at some point you have to get really angry at it because it's really hard to love something that you feel dominates you or that you feels oppresses you if you have the feeling that something oppresses you, then it's really hard to learn to love that.

20:38Joe Hudson: But once you realize like, oh, you have choice, you can dominate and not pay attention to it, then there's this space for love to occur. But the biggest trick is just how you respond to it. And so I'll give you a simple, we could do this right now if you want, but if somebody just closes their eyes and listens to the negative self-talk, and every time it says something that's mean or that you wouldn't say to somebody else or that you wouldn't say to somebody you love and your response is ouch just sit there sit there for 20 minutes and just say ouch every time it says something and what you'll notice is it just gets quieter and quieter and quieter or you can say things like oh i see that you're really scared and i'm right here with you i'm not leaving you every time the voice says something so there's a thousand experiments that you can run about how am i going to respond to the voice in the head and what you notice is the way that you respond to it just like the way i respond to you creates a different relationship if i yell at you every time we're you know we're on a podcast you're we're having a different relationship than if i'm and so it's the same thing with the negative self-talk so so if you have a thought that comes into your head let's relate it back to humility somebody's like like you did an incredible job with this project that you're working on yeah Right.

22:02My immediate response to them is, well, it was just the team. I literally just did what I needed to do. And then the self-talk that's going on in my head immediately is, you're really incompetent. You're riding on the coattails of everybody else who made this happen. Right. And you have no business being here. Right. Yeah. And that's a voice that a lot of people have. So your invitations are, what if you just sat there, let the voice in, and every time it said that to you, ouch, that hurts. Give me some other ways to respond to curiosity.

22:36Joe Hudson: I see how scared you are, and I'm right here with you. You're absolutely right. You're totally, totally. I cannot deny that I'm riding on the coattails of others, and I don't belong to be here. that it's all a gift. I'm with you. Or, hey, how would it be to manage me a little bit differently? Or, go fuck yourself. I don't care. The modality is, on Monday, I'm going to try to respond to it, and I'm going to try this experiment. I'm going to respond to it in this way and see how it reacts. It's all about wonder still. On Tuesday, I'm going to react to it this way. I'm just running experiments with it.

23:16Joe Hudson: I'm learning to understand it. The thing about negative self-talk generally, it does self-improvement rather than self-awareness, self-discovery. And self-improvement is a lot less effective than self-discovery. So we've all been telling ourselves we should be doing something for a decade that we haven't been doing it. We've all been telling ourselves, here's all the things that I have to do to improve that haven't improved rather than being in self-discovery actually trying to understand ourselves deeply and when you really understand yourself deeply it just changes the same way that once I understand how to talk into a microphone I speak into a microphone differently the way that once I understand a camera I don't need to tell myself be a better cameraman you know I just understand the camera and it's the same thing with ourselves.

24:10We think that self-abuse is the way to have a better relationship with ourselves,

24:15Joe Hudson: but it's actually self-understanding. And we have all these fears of, oh, if I give up the self-abuse, I'm just going to lie on the couch and drink beer and I'm not going to do anything. But what actually happens is you have all this freedom, all this free energy, because you're not working against yourself all the time. You look at a three-year-old, they do not have negative of self-talk and yet that doesn't usually happen until seven or eight and yet they do all sorts of stuff they learn all sorts of stuff they learn so much more in a year than we ever learn because they're not fighting against themselves and we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor good life project is sponsored by minted so a few weeks ago i was going through my closet and kind of realized how much was in there that I hadn't touched in honestly years.

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28:11So this is just part of my everyday routine now. It's not just a workout thing. And right now, Drip Drop is offering our podcast listeners 20 % off your first order. Go to dripdrop.com and use the promo code GOODLIFE. That's dripdrop.com, promo code GOODLIFE for 20 % off. Stock up now at dripdrop.com. Use that promo code GOODLIFE. I mean, the notion of elevating self-discovery over self-improvement intuitively lands with me. yeah it's also it's more interesting to me in a weird way totally like i feel like we've like so many of us have spent our waking hours trying to like in the process of fixing everything that

28:54Joe Hudson: we perceive has been wrong yeah entire lives yeah that's right yeah some people and you know profoundly different levels and um but it's almost like the entirety of our lives it's like just just incremental pursuit of improvement towards some sort of end where like oh like we quote made it we finally feel good with ourselves we got x y or z you know yeah um rather than you know your invitation which is like what if you kind of let go of that and and maybe if somebody's watching listening to this like yeah no like they got there's things i want to work towards there's things I want to change about myself.

29:34There's things I want to accomplish or achieve, right? Okay. Maybe if we say suspended, just for a window. Like what would happen using your approach, which is so sad. I mean, we've talked about it. We both are true believers in experimenting your way to things rather than trying to think them through. You know, what if just an experiment? You didn't let go of that for life, but for a moment, for a little window.

30:03Joe Hudson: how about like right now because that so for instance the idea is there's something wrong with you but if you take this moment and you don't go into the past for evidence and you don't go into the future for evidence i can only find evidence in this moment right now what is essentially wrong with you and i'm asking you but i'm asking anybody who's listening like if you do not go to the past or the future if there's something wrong with you it would be wrong right now and yet if you look at what's essentially what is essentially wrong with you right now there's never an answer but what if there is give me an example um what if somebody um is sitting here now and they've just heard this question they're asking themselves okay so um what like in this moment not in the past not the future like what what is wrong with me in this moment well um i have incredible back pain yeah and how does that make you essentially wrong so it's it's essentially okay so yes there's discomfort in this moment for sure so let's tease that out a little bit more yeah because i think that can get confusing yeah you have back pain, but that's not you.

31:28Joe Hudson: You is the thing that you've been ever since the moment you came into existence until now. If it's not that, it's not you. If it hasn't existed through the whole thing, right? I have a thought. It comes and goes. That's not me. That's a thought. I could cut off my arm. I'm still here. So it's not my arm. It's like, what are you essentially is the question. so yes i can have a sensation you know i could even say hey the problem is right now i want to kill myself and i would say that's future and that's something like what's right now

32:12so take me deeper into how this helps because there's going to be a thought bubble her listening into this and also say okay so interesting experiment yeah um maybe even interesting more broadly to say like what if i just spent time really discovering yeah then trying to fix yeah um but if i do believe that there's something broken or if i'm dealing with a struggle or a circumstance that i do want to be different yeah how does reallocating my energy to discovery rather than change make me feel the way I want to feel.

32:48Joe Hudson: Yeah. So there's a whole bunch in that. There's a whole bunch in that. So the first piece is

32:58Joe Hudson: evolution happens whether you're telling yourself you have to improve or not. An oak tree evolves. When is it perfect? When is an oak tree good enough? When it's an acorn or when it's a sapling? or when it's 100 years old or when it's 200 years old when is it good enough but yet evolution continues so in the question there's this assumption that i have to tell myself i have to improve for evolution to occur rather than evolution just occurs a three-year-old doesn't have to tell themselves i gotta i gotta improve i gotta improve and yet lo and behold evolution occurs so that's the first piece of it second piece is how do i feel the way i want to feel is another big postulate in there, which is my question and response is, how do you enjoy feeling whatever you're feeling?

33:51Joe Hudson: So I once sat with one of my teachers. His name was Adi Ashanti. His name is Adi Ashanti. He doesn't teach anymore. And I was telling him what we were doing in our work, what's happening. We hadn't seen each other in years, and we were having dinner somewhere, and his wife and my wife, and and i said he said like what's your work is a lot of our work is going from emotional management to emotional clarity which is the loving acceptance of your emotional experiences without the resistance and so we're talking about one of those things which is to allow the compliment that feeling of joy in but it's feeling of anger and he said and he was a meditation a non-dual meditation teacher and he said that's 90 % of the questions I get how do I feel this way how do I stop feeling this way and that never leads anywhere good instead it's like oh how how how can I be excited to feel sad how can I be excited to feel heartbreak how can I be excited to feel angry that doesn't mean that I am taken over by it it doesn't mean that I've lost myself in it but it's it's that so your question was if i want to feel a certain way and you're going to feel all sorts of ways in a day in the in the in this podcast if you're listening in our conversation we both have had a hundred feelings whatever it is will come and go those emotional experiences will come and go so i can't say that but as far as evolution as far as us continuing to evolve that happens the other thing that's a supposition in the question is that there's something wrong that somehow i have to be better to be good enough to be lovable to rather than oh i'm perfect as an acorn perfect as a sapling yeah and and i wonder partly there's a there's a part of the supposition there also is that to live a good life we need to feel a certain set of feelings right not feel a certain set of feelings or at least maximize a certain set yeah and minimize or try and extinguish a certain set rather than saying you know what if a good life is allowing ourselves to feel the full sweep of emotion yeah and um just letting it all in yeah i was asked recently somebody was in a conversation and people were asking you like how do you define mental health i mean such a loaded question so many days or yeah boy so how do you answer that in a way you just don't step it in some way shape um but then it came to me right away was just you know for me and again like i'm not going to postulate that this is right for everybody i said for me i think the way i would define it is the the capacity to feel everything but not grasp to anything you know it's too like to cry yeah like when i'm when i'm heartbroken and to like not try and stifle it or feel it to um like laugh out loud around friends and to just to let love land to feel that gratitude like to yeah you know to feel grief to feel really sad when hard things happen and not to allow it all in, to let it all in.

37:22And also not to spend my entire life in any of it. But we have this Western overlay that says, no, no, no, that's not the aspiration. The aspiration is as much good as possible and as little quote bad feelings as possible which is not possible yeah yeah there's all there's a

37:45Joe Hudson: whole bunch of weird things in that so the first one is just a neurological thing neurologically speaking a grand majority of our decision making happens in the emotional center of our brain so it's not so therefore clear decision making isn't being logical we're using logic to decide what emotion we're going to feel. So when a person who has that part of their brain damaged, their IQ stays the same, but it takes them like half an hour to decide what color pen to use. So if you think about just the clarity of decision-making, it comes from I'm happy to feel one way or another way, and therefore I'll make a decision that's actually good for me rather than to feel one way or another way.

38:32Joe Hudson: Because so many of our decisions are made to not feel like a failure or to feel loved or to feel at peace or to not feel like a loser. And so, so if you are happy to feel all that stuff, then you make really great decisions as it turns out. second thing is none of the feelings are actually negative or are really actually that uncomfortable the resistance to them is ungodly uncomfortable but if you are whoa i so enjoy feeling sad sadness changes it's like there's a pipe and let's say let's use anger and so there's this channel of anger and if it's kinked one way it's nice shirt right and if it's kinked another way it's you son of a blah blah blah i hate you blah blah blah if it's kinked another way it's if you love me you would those are all kinks in the hose but when that hose is not resistant when you're fully allowing yourself to feel that anger that anger comes out like gandhi or martin luther king it comes out with boundary and clarity and dignity and so it's the resistance that's uncomfortable on these all the emotions it's the resistance that's uncomfortable including the resistance to the compliment the appreciation if you actually let it in it's really pleasant it tickles but we're like no it's not me it was my teacher it's not me it's the team i have a quote that sums it up really well which is joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome and that's my experience is that when you fully accept all the emotions and love them and can't look forward to them welcome them then joy just happens a lot more often and your ability to feel the joy becomes a lot deeper which begs the question like how do you how do you unkink the hose there you know like the and i guess maybe that cycles back to a stance of curiosity wonder is huge yeah yeah i make a distinction between curiosity and wonder it's arbitrary but curiosity i just define as looking for an answer wonder is just being a little kid about it and i find wonders more effective than curiosity and yes lots of wonder expression your emotions live in your body they live in your muscles right now if i said to you stop feeling you have to constrict a muscle if you're going to completely stop feeling you're going to constrict a lot of them that's why resisting emotions hurts that's why that's the uncomfortable piece yeah there's like a little somatic connection there exactly it's like everything's just tightening up so there is an expression that's necessary and a lot of wonder to really understand the emotional in emotional system because we've been trained most of us have been trained our whole life not to feel what's that about don't cry it's because our parents didn't want to feel it and their parents and their parents and their parents like oh if i feel that i'm going to open up a bag of whoop ass on my life so i'm just going to push that down into this little corner of my body where it will slowly become cancer some version of you know um or i'm going to push down the anger and be passive aggressive there's it always ends up getting leaking out but it creates a lot of tension in the system and and the fear is that if i am really allow myself to be sad it'll last forever if i really allow myself to be angry it's going to destroy everything i love if i really allow myself to be scared i'm going to be incapable but it turns out if you really let yourself cry you feel better if you really let yourself get angry not at anybody meaning not not to control anybody but just have an experience out in the woods getting angry you feel more love you feel less like destroying your world and if you really allow that sensation of fear through your system you feel very capable but our brains will tell us that the opposite because our brains don't get emotions emotions aren't logical our brains aren't supposed to get them.

43:08I'm thinking also like the opposite is true too, because a lot of times the story we tell us about quote, positive emotions or the opposite, like if I really allow myself to be happy, that's going to end. And then I'm going to be miserable. If I really allow myself to love and be loved, they're going to leave me. I'm something's going to happen. And then it going to be devastated. It's like when we look at the quote aspirational emotions, we tell the opposite story.

43:33Joe Hudson: That's right. That's right. Totally. And, and so, so well seen. And And that's why typically what I notice when people are in the journey of emotional fluidity, which is what my description for what you just said about allowing yourself to feel all the emotions and not be ruled by them, is it's usually anger, sadness first. some depending like men in middle class america anger is more accessible than their sadness and vice versa but um and you do that and then the fear and then the peace bliss joy love that it actually happens in that order typically you can't just jump to the positive things and actually have a full sensation of them.

44:19Joe Hudson: So it's like, do you have to, there's, there's almost like a pecking order. Yeah. Yeah. There's foundation that has to be laid in, but it also invites us to step into the stuff that we probably struggle with the most. And it's because, oh my God, if I really let the love in, I will be hurt. I will be just stomped on. And the answer is, yeah. And I can't wait to be stomped on because I have felt that before. I know how much freedom is on the other side of that. I know how much clarity is on the other side of that. If you can find a part of me that gets triggered, I am stoked. Like, great, fantastic.

44:54Joe Hudson: Because that's exactly something I can't see about myself. That's exactly the place that wants to evolve. So yeah, I'm very excited about it. I'm excited to get triggered by somebody because it is more freedom for me. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

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47:56I wanted to even into that, but there's something I don't want to let go of before we just take that step, which is if so much of this conditioning that says basically don't feel has been handed down through generations, often by parents or whoever it may be, who you want to have a sense of belonging with so you can conform to whatever the norms were that were taught to you, the family norms, the local culture norms.

48:23Part of then saying, okay, so what if I actually start to allow myself to feel? What if I allow us then to wander around all this stuff, all the feels? Embedded in that, wouldn't there also be a potential, and maybe this is one of the restrictions that stops us from doing it, is that we're effectively rejecting the safety, the container of belonging that's been passed down to us through our family or whoever it was. Yeah, that's right. where we want to feel safe and want to belong and want to be accepted you want to be seen and part of that was buying into this notion that okay so like you only feel a certain way or you don't feel that's how that's how we belong to each other right yeah so yeah part of like saying okay joe like i buy into this i'll run the experiments yeah is also saying okay joe i buy into this maybe i'm gonna actually reject or be rejected by those people who i really care about in they're still in my life.

49:26Yeah, that is true.

49:29Joe Hudson: There's no doubt about it, but you're already rejected by them. Tell me more. If I get sad, they will reject me means they're rejecting you for who you are, whether you're showing them or not showing them. You're already living in a relationship where the love is conditional. You can pretend to be something that you're not by not crying, but then you're not loved. The thing you're pretending to be is loved, which is why you feel so unloved in your life not you particularly but you know what i mean but i mean probably me at certain points and probably almost everybody yeah that's certain points and probably a lot of folks right now yeah um joining us in this conversation you know and it's it's it that was me for a lot of my life i i learned that i could be really good at being a chameleon yeah i could walk into a room and and a pretty good social awareness and understand like the culture yeah of a room and maybe that's also a family right or a group of friends or kids or a clique yeah you know and i could kind of scan the environment and sort of notice like this is how i would need to be yeah to quote fit in but in my mind it was to belong yes and i would i would sort of like form myself yeah into that person and then that that person like that i'm thinking to myself, I'm sweet.

50:51I'm literally, I can walk into any of these groups, you know, like this group, this group, this group, this group, and it's all good. And meanwhile, I'm still lonely. Right. Because as you're describing, I'm not actually in any of those rooms. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

51:11Joe Hudson: There's something, there's something else about it that I find my experience is very similar to you. I used to even dress in a way that I could blend in to as many. I was like just neutral enough that I could flip into any situation in my twenties. It was a really similar situation. I think that the, the other thing about you're saying that, oh, if I feel a certain way, then I'm going to be rejected in, in the society or in this. I have a story about that. My, first of all, if you have a young kid and you're really interested in this, there's Patty Wiffler has a book called listen, and the organization is called hand in and parenting it's so valuable it's just amazing work and i'm doing this which is basically being with your child as they're having an emotion and loving attention without trying to get them out of the emotion but this time it happens at a whole foods so i'm at a whole foods i got my two and a half year old just raging about wanting potato chips or some such thing i can't remember i'm containing her every parent is like immediately transferring to some public place where they're to that time right so but i am committed i am committed to allowing her to have her emotions and i'm going to be in loving attention of them so she is having the full thing on the floor i'm on the floor of this whole foods i'm just like i got you right here with you i really hear you want the potato chips and we live in this little hippie town in northern california and uh used to be a hippie town and and and this little old lady hippie comes by she goes are you okay to my daughter and my daughter's like i'm just having my emotions and then she went like right back into it and so and yeah well like i didn't disintegrate i didn't get expelled from my town She didn't get expelled from her town.

53:07Joe Hudson: But the other thing that happens is as emotional fluidity comes, as you welcome all of it, there's a short time where if you're allowing anger for the first time, you're going to get angry more often. You're going to get tears more often. But that arc starts going down. All of a sudden, oh, I feel anger. And instead of yelling, oh, I have a boundary. okay here's my boundary because i feel that i got that little bit of anger and i didn't repress it i didn't think i was bad i didn't wonder what did i do wrong because i'm angry i didn't wonder what did they do wrong because they're angry it's oh anger oh boundary oh hey could we not do this this way oh sadness oh that's a longing can i i'll express my longing oh fear there's something i'm not taking care of myself so these things become signals and so you're not rolled over by the emotions.

54:03Joe Hudson: And then it, and then, and you can get angry and you don't have to get angry at anybody. You can go into the woods and get angry. You can get angry in a safe place. And it's weird because we're so scared of our emotions. One of the things fear does to the brain is it makes us into binary thinkers. And so we're scared of our emotions and it's either we are going to hold it back or we are going to be taken by it. We are either going to hurt somebody with it, or we are going to hold it back instead of, oh, I can just express it in a way that's not shame-based and not bad for anybody.

54:44Easier said than done.

54:45Joe Hudson: Yep. No doubt. I belong here all I want. Well, yeah. And then life happens. And it's funny also right because i think um early days of meditation sort of studying eastern thought eastern philosophy you know i i think i interpret a lot of teachings as you know not grasping lack of desire sort of like you know like the ultimate the aspiration yeah there's an aspiration is to basically um not attached to anything which i translated to not feel anything yeah yeah most people i started meditating i meditated for whatever seven years in a room most of well most of my time and somewhere along the line, I realized I'm not meditating.

55:33Joe Hudson: I am managing myself. I'm not, I'm not being with what is I am trying to create what is total pain, suffering. I mean, I thought I was meditating. I was just torturing myself. No. I mean, so the invitation is, is really just like, what if we let it all in? What if instead of, and I guess part of the curiosity for me, hear is like do we have to let go of the aspiration to at some future point want to feel different or want to let's to be different or want something to like be changed in some meaningful way do we have to let go of that yeah and and just focus on like what if i just allowed it all in right now in the moment and and sat there in the place of wonder and said okay um whatever it is i'm experiencing huh yeah huh um can we hold both of those simultaneously or does the future aspiration somehow stop us from doing the work of opening to sensation and feeling now that will maybe at some point actually get us the place you want to be right so you don't have to do anything so that that but that's typically the way it works is we tell ourselves oh so now i see i've heard that so I have to do this.

56:54Joe Hudson: And in saying I have to do it, you're guaranteeing that it's not going to happen or not going to happen easily. Yeah, exactly. So you're in fear, you're acting from fear, you learn slower. That's part of it. There is a nature, part of the way that we evolve is because our nature is to evolve. And so of course we're going to have thoughts of evolution. i'm i'm most mostly suggesting that the way to it is through wonder rather than through self-abuse or drive i i don't know how to let go of the call which is the call to evolve and like i haven't tried don't have a particular want to try i don't see that it's it's painful or bad um i often however don't have a specific outcome in mind or i'll i'll have the goal but it'll be very very loosely held because my experience is my goals suck compared to what happens like i i did not in my 20s say this is what i want my life to be like i had a very different vision of my life.

58:13Joe Hudson: I am so grateful that that vision did not happen. That this vision is so much better than I could have imagined. That the solution set that you can come up with from the place that you are now is not even close to the solution set that you can come up with with a place where you have learned to love yourself a little bit more or felt more emotional fluidity or any number of things. So I hold the goal because there's a directionality to it, but I don't really hold on to that it's going to look the way that I want it to look because life has a way of looking a lot better than my preconceived notions.

58:52I mean, it's funny. There's, as you're describing that, what came to mind for me is I've had plenty of conversations with founders, entrepreneurs, really. This is exactly what I'm going to build. This is what I want to make happen. I have a very clear goal and there's all this mythology. If you don't know what the target is, you're just never going to do anything that will get you there. You have to be crystal clear about what the end point is.

59:19I've often said, and there's data that shows, okay, so if you do have clarity around that thing, you probably are more likely to actually achieve that thing. And there are different modalities to get there and different methodologies. But the point that you're making, I think, is just so prescient, which is, A, is that thing worth wanting? And B, what about the universe of a bazillion other possibilities that you're excluding without realizing it by saying this and only this, rather than what if I just allow myself to be really intentional about being and observing and being in a state of wonder and evolving and letting things in.

1:00:00and let that direct me like how you know i tend to look forward and there's i'm a maker like i just love to make stuff yeah but i do it largely i'm a weirdo in that like i'll write a book i'll spend two years writing a book my publisher shifts me a case of books like the first thing it's like you know like a case of like 24 hardcover books yeah and i'll just let it sit there in the box and open for a couple weeks and whoever's like dude what meanwhile everyone's doing unboxings online and stuff like this. And I'm like, it was never about the, like the thing. Yeah. For me, it was just about the experience of like, how cool is it that I'm growing and unfolding and learning?

1:00:41Like, okay. So like now there's a thing at the end of it. Awesome. Yeah. You know, and, but, but the whole, the whole idea of being really rigid about exactly how you want your life to unfold and they're working towards the things you want. and the things you want to extinguish from it. Yeah. And that may actually get you closer to those things faster. But even if it does,

1:01:13is that the way you're going to want to be living when you get there? What have you completely ignored along the way by having the blinders on?

1:01:20Joe Hudson: Yeah. And I mean, if you've spoken to that many entrepreneurs and I work with them, how many hit 45? and they're like, I got everything I wanted, but I'm fucking miserable. Happens all the time. I think that there is also a huge amount of wisdom to holding a goal. Meaning, let's say I have a goal of reaching a million people. Not my goal, by the way. Or I have a goal of a thousand people. Well, I'm going to ask different questions. How do I reach a thousand people? I can go door to door and knock on a thousand doors. But if I'm trying to reach a million, I'm going to have it different. so I think that holding that goal is and having clarity on it is really what makes visionaries and the fact that um I I define a visionary as somebody who's living in a world as if it already exists Gandhi existed as if he was a free man he existed as if India was free when they walked under the salt mines and it was a half a million indians and 20 security guards or whatever it was 100 security guards and they just walked and got beaten down four at a time that they were acting like free people they weren't acting like like subjects and and and so that if you can't see the reality you can't live as if that reality already exists and so i think that's the power of it you also can't catch the beauty if you're attached to it so it's like having it having that vision having that clarity but also being okay with the fact that life is going to serve up something a lot better if you're if you're paying attention yeah and there's the tension right it's sort of like okay get crystal clear about that thing the vision of like how you want to be or what you want to participate in making happen yeah and at the same time you know you gotta hold it lightly to a certain extent yeah exactly yeah you know um to allow serendipity to enter the experience yeah and wonder yeah and that's where the humility actually is because if if it's not you doing it there's no vision and if it's not a huge gift then you're not actually you're not seeing the serendipity and so the to actually take your god-given place in the world in that it requires you to both see the serendipity which is a humility of this is beyond me and walk into it which is a humility of this is personal and i and it's me doing it

1:04:07it's almost like um this shall be and who knows right yeah totally totally which is and i agree with you i think a lot of people who do astonishing things in the world somehow hold like find a way to hold on

1:04:25Joe Hudson: to both of those and to like go of all of it at the same time yeah which sounds bizarre like if you're listening and you're like, my head is spinning right now. I don't get this. And you and I love conversations like this, but I think sometimes people listen to it and they're like, but what do I do? Okay. So I get this. I'm kind of nodding along. Some of these things really make sense to me. But what do we do with this? Yeah. So the first thing in that question is, it's pretty ineffective. The question, what do I do? Not entirely, but often ineffective because what it's doing is it's cutting off the understanding.

1:05:06Joe Hudson: Oh, I have this epiphany. If you're listening to this, there's some moment where you're like, oh, yeah, what do I do about it? And so you're not letting, oh, yeah, actually register in your entire system. And again, so it's the idea is that your doing is going to be more important than your understanding. So that's one of the things. And so to actually allow the understanding to wash over you is one of the best things. The second thing, and these are things you can do, the other thing you can do is just have gratitude for recognition. Like really allow yourself time to be deeply grateful for recognition that you have when you have it.

1:05:48Joe Hudson: because that like deepens that washing over and deepens the understanding as far as the humility goes well there is the the art the how to talk how to react to the negative self-talk that's some very good action that you can take another great one is to allow yourself to feel a whole bunch of emotions we have something called emotional inquiry that we can give you a link to if you're interested and that's a really great way to feel into emotions with a lot of wonder um so that that's a great thing that can be done um the other thing that can be done is to let me think of a way to put this which is um you can notice that you are not you can literally one way to do it is to notice that no thought you've ever had is yours and literally spend an hour noticing like I'm not deciding to have any of these thoughts but the thoughts are arising.

1:06:56Joe Hudson: The other way to do it is somatically go back to where the source of the thought is. Describe that for me. What do you mean by that? It is not a good way to describe it but if you sit down in a chair and you just watch your thought come up, go back to where it came from. so we can just do that for a minute we all have tons of thoughts so if we're silent a thought will come up in 30 seconds

1:07:26Joe Hudson: and you just somatically go to where that thought arose from we say somatically are you saying where do I feel it in my body yeah the physical sensation of where that thought came from and how does that help me

1:07:44Joe Hudson: do it for a long time yeah i think it's great i think it's great my and my response would be do it and find out because here's one of the things that i've learned is that when i discover something so my i had huge authority issues when i was younger and because i have authority issues i didn't believe any teacher i couldn't really allow for teachers in my system for a long time but I really wanted to learn. So I would listen and then I would say, Hey, let's test it out. Let's see if they're right. So I would test everything. And in that process of testing everything, what I realized is I would do something, I'd do an experiment and it would quote unquote work.

1:08:23Joe Hudson: Oh my gosh. If I loved my emotions, wow, they changed. The resistance was gone and oh my gosh. But then I started loving my emotions to get rid of them and it stopped working. so what you discover is that oftentimes when in self-discovery if you're doing something to change your emotional experience it stops working or if you do something to get you somewhere it stops working if you're meditating to get somewhere it is far less effective than if you're meditating just to enjoy the hell out of meditation and so if i give like the destination of this thing what i'm scared will happen is that somebody will hold that destination in their head and not discover what happens naturally.

1:09:09Which kind of defeats the whole point of it. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's a certain amount of faith that comes with this invitation.

1:09:18Joe Hudson: Certain humility. Yeah. Yeah. Early in the conversation, you also brought up this notion of calling in this context, in the context of humility. Tell me more about the relationship.

1:09:35Joe Hudson: And at some point there was a recognition that if I didn't follow the calling, it was really painful. It's very hard for me to describe what exactly calling is. So if this is frustrating for somebody, I totally understand. but there's a knowing that oh this is what I'm meant to do I might not want to do it I might rail against it but there's a knowing this is the thing that I'm supposed to do and I realize if I didn't do it because I don't want to do that it always got more and more uncomfortable until I did it and when you realize that then there's a choicelessness in it you don't get the choice of doing this thing or not doing this thing you get a choice of having to be more and more uncomfortable or not having to be more and more uncomfortable and there's really no choice there's really no choice in that and when you recognize that then that's a deep form of humility because it's it's a choiceless life folks aren't gonna like that well they sure aren't and and i think it's like and for good determinism in a lot of ways yeah it's not quite it's not quite the same way meaning that's a great great thought process so that it's not quite the same way because you can't get to the place of calling until you realize you do have choice so until you realize until you realize like oh i can shape the world into what i want to shape the world into at least somewhat that i can say no to my boss that i can not accept this abuse from my husband that i can not live in a societal standard that I'm supposed to live in, that I don't have to follow this career path and I don't have to have 16 kids or two kids and 2.5 kids at this age and live in this kind of a house until you realize that you actually have the freedom to do what you want.

1:11:32Joe Hudson: You can't actually, you're not even, you can't even be aware of the calling. And then there's a place where it's, oh, it's all a gift. It's also necessary to get to, to, to get to the place where it's like oh this is a calling so when the calling comes and you see it and you understand it it includes all of that it includes oh i'm being called to go and take action and do something in the world which is going to require my determination and it's going to require my my showing up in a way that's uncomfortable for me sometimes sometimes it doesn't and it's also going to require the recognition that it's you're not responsible for this that it is a gift and all of that requires a humility to get to the place of i have a choice but i don't really have a choice that the oak tree doesn't really have a choice the dog doesn't really have a choice and i get we do have choice so it's like whole again it's holding the dichotomy both at the same time it is holding the the empowerment of choice and it's holding the faith of non-choice and if we can't do both of them then we're still our little personalities are entrenched and digging in and which is not the humility Do you feel like we all, if we allow this space, if we acknowledge that in so many ways we do have choice, we have agency, which sort of seeds the possibility of something resembling what we might call calling to emerge.

1:13:19yeah and as you said like if we can't even get to the fact that like we have any sense of agency or choice yeah then there's no space correct and understanding calling to emerge like we can't

1:13:30Joe Hudson: because that would imply agency yeah that's really well said you know um do you believe that we all have that thing inside of us because i think a lot of people are probably saying themselves because i don't know what it is i've never known what it is i'm in the 40s 50s 60s 70s whatever it maybe you're younger. Maybe I just don't have, maybe that's for other people. Then you wouldn't walk.

1:13:59Joe Hudson: That's the first calling, one of the first callings, reaching, understanding where your hands are. These are all the calling. This is like the natural tug of evolution. It is the thing that allows the birds to know where their migratory paths are. it's the thing that allows an oak tree i get emotional thinking about it that it is the thing that allows the oak the the oak tree the acorn to know how to become an oak tree and respond to the light it is it is our birthright

1:14:35Joe Hudson: we just have to create a ton of resistance to stop it which is where most which is what we do It's how we live. And it sounds like the way you're describing also is you don't necessarily, you're not really describing from, tell me if I'm getting this right. Like we're all born with one singular calling and like, it's this one thing and that's it. It's like, no, there could be a myriad of ways that we're called in different contexts, different seasons, different ways, different parts of our lives. That's right. And like, it's not just this one universal thing. It's just like it literally we're being whispered to all the time.

1:15:15Yeah. All day, every day for the entirety of our lives. And part of the work is to create the space to hear the whispers.

1:15:21Joe Hudson: Right. And you can only hear it now. Sometimes I get an idea where it's headed, but it's generally like this right now, this thing is clear. I have to do this thing right now. And so I see people get lost a lot looking for their purpose or their calling as if it's an abstract thing. and then I'll know what to do from this point forward. It doesn't work like that. You know what to do this point forward because you took the next step on the path. I don't know what to do at the fork until I get to the fork. I love that. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well in this conversation.

1:16:00So in this container of a good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

1:16:09Joe Hudson: Be yourself. the authenticity of you is a good life. Thank you. You're welcome. Pleasure to be with you. Been well. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you'll also love the conversation we had with Brene Brown about vulnerability, courage, and leadership transformation. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsay Fox, and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young. Christopher Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too.

1:16:53If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you're still listening here. Do me a personal favor, a second favor, share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share it with more, that's awesome too, but just one person even, then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered, to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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