How embracing emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (executive coach, Art of Accomplishment)

25:14They're living in a story that describes an old version of themselves and it doesn't or they don't see themselves clearly enough to to be able to see the whole issue and so they're just kind of living with a story that's in the past. So that's a really common thing. So oftentimes if I do that in a coaching session, typically it's because they're showing me right there that it's not true. So somebody's like, I'm so scared I can't do anything. I'm like you just got in front of a hundred people to ask me a question. Clearly, you're not so scared that you can't do anything. So I'm not buying it. I don't do it quite like that.

25:51I do it with a lot more love than that. But yeah, so oftentimes I see that people's stories are culprit like how they describe themselves. And a great way that you can really see this in folks is that, knowing that at 10 times that you compliment somebody, I really appreciate this thing about you. They're going to go, ah, now or, well, my, uh, or the, well, my sister is even more, or like that. You know, if you knew me, they're going to do some sort of version like that. And it basically is one of the indicators that they can't actually feel who they are. They would rather, in effect, call you a liar.

26:34You're lying to me or you're wrong, then they would to actually accept the experience of being seen in that way. It does a couple of things. One of the things it does is it stops people from seeing themselves clearly. The other thing it does is it makes people forever want to be seen and complemented and acknowledged and validated because they're getting the food, but they can't digest it. Do you have any advice other than working with you and you telling them, hey, here's what's actually going on for someone to like maybe revisit. Maybe this is an actually problem to see what's actually going on.

27:08So we have a set of five, kind of what we think are foundational tools for transformation. And we do these free workshops on them. And one of them is question the assumption. And that's a really great way to have people start to see through their stories. So at the beginning, I said, nothing the critical voice in your head says is true. And this is how it applies. So typically, there's an assumption that you have to make for the problem to be real. If somebody says to you, for instance, if somebody comes to me and says, I am an asshole to my girlfriend. That's their problem. Right? So one, you have to assume that the girlfriend doesn't want you to be an asshole as an example.

27:56You have to assume that you know what being an asshole actually is. Right? It's not just what your mom told you an asshole was. Like, you know, three, there's some validation. There's another assumption. There's some clear thing that says this in the world, everyone's like, that's an asshole and that's not rather than what actually happens in the world, which is 50 % of the people think that this person's an asshole and 50 % think they're a hero, right? It's something like that. But also that it's another assumption there is that the problem is that you're an asshole instead of that you're resisting the fact that you are an asshole and therefore it comes outside ways instead of really clear.

28:32So there's so many assumptions in there. If you see through those assumptions, usually the problem starts fading away. It's like, oh, okay, what do I mean by asshole exactly? How do I define that? And the reason I, it seems like a silly thing, right, when I'm using this example of asshole, but I remember this moment in my own development. I was, I was in the DeGa Bay out of all places and I'm, it's a very good friend of mine at the time was like, Joe, you're an asshole. And I was like, no, I'm not. And he's like, why resist it? Just fall in love with the fact that you're an asshole. I mean, just allow yourself to be an asshole for just a minute, just one minute.

29:15And I stopped and I could like stopped and I thought of like I was doing venture capital the time and I could think of all the things that I had done that somebody would call an asshole and all the ways in which I was unattuned to people and I could oh yeah, okay, I can totally see that I'm an asshole. And in that scene and not only in the scene of it but in as the shame fell away. Oh, this is nothing I have to defend. This isn't something that like I'm a bad person because of I don't need to be a shame of it. This is just some actions that I took. And as that faded away then and then over the next couple weeks, lo and behold, I became less an asshole.

29:55So it's a strange thing when you really grok that, that it's often shame that holds bad habits in place. And so is the problem that I'm an asshole or is the problem that I'm ashamed of being an asshole? Is the problem that you're a Smoker is a problem that you're ashamed of being a smoker. And so, so typically, like there's so many assumptions built into everything that we call a problem. And if we look through those assumptions, the problems disappear as in this case, it disappears for me. Wow. Okay. There's a lot there. It connects to something I know you recently talked about, which is the emotion we want to avoid is the thing we end up experiencing a lot by trying to avoid it.

30:38Yeah, yeah, yeah, what's going on there? Okay. Yeah, so I Let's take a since since I'm a coach executives. Let's do an executive example. So a conflict of winning executive I don't want to feel The out of controlness that I do when people argue It's not I want to feel that level of out of control. So I am going to be conflict avoidant. I'm gonna avoid conflict Every way that we go to avoid a feeling becomes the way that that feeling gets invited towards us. We all know what it's like to work for a conflict avoidant CEO or boss. People get really fucking upset. Eventually, people get really upset.

31:26Decisions aren't being made. There's all this tension. It's never relieved. We never get. And then, wow, sure enough, the conflict avoidant CEO is dealing with a whole organization that's tense. and they feel completely out of control and the fact that they can't do anything about. So that's an example. Or when I was younger, you know, it was emotional abandonment, my dad was an alcoholic and I didn't want to feel that emotional abandonment again. And so I would get really hard when I felt like people were leaving me. I'd be like, what the, what the, which of course made them abandon me quicker.

32:01Or I would try to care -take people, which would build resentment, which would make people abandon me. So whatever emotion that you're trying to avoid, you are inviting into your life in exactly the way that you're trying to avoid it. What the hell, why would it? What is this? That doesn't sound right. Just a sense. Counterproductive. It is counterproductive. But I think the really cool thing about it is you can look at any issue that you're having in your life so you can say, oh, like one of the problems that I have in my life is that I am constantly in an argument with my girlfriend or boyfriend, let's say.

32:37Okay, so you're constantly in a, what is the thing that you don't want to feel in that argument? Oh, I don't want to feel ashamed. Okay, so you're getting in arguments because you don't want to feel ashamed and that's making you feel more ashamed. And okay, so what am I doing at that first time to not feel ashamed? Oh, I'm defending myself. Oh, and me defending myself is actually the thing that's starting to fight. So you can backward engineer it to oh, I don't want to feel ashamed there for I'm going to defend myself Which creates the fight which makes me feel more ashamed So any problem that you're having you can actually backwards engineer it and see oh I can solve that problem by just Being okay with that feeling God dammit you didn't take out the the trash.

33:22Oh, that's the shame. I don't want to feel I'm not going to defend myself I'm going to feel that shame. Oh So, yeah, and then maybe I'm going to say, I'm sorry, I didn't take out the trash, or I'm going to say, I don't feel ashamed, I don't want to take out the trash. But I have to defend myself to get in the fight, and then I'm going to feel ashamed. You can reverse engineer all your problems this way. It's like it's such a cool hack, but it's very hard for somehow or another. It's very simple, but very hard for people to utilize. This is amazing. So the advice is basically feel the thing and just kind of come to terms with this is the emotion I'm feeling and maybe this is like an example of the asshole maybe maybe have an asshole and just yeah, it's to What's required for you to love and accept yourself would be and Love and accept the the emotion that you're having in the moment instead of resist it You know, there's that saying what we resist persists.

34:18It's how do you? How do you fall in love with and stop resisting? the reality on the ground and in doing so it changes the reality on the ground Okay, but in this argument with your supposed girlfriend say you disagree about her perspective on what's going on I guess that's not the riddishy here. It's like it's your feeling right well. Oh yeah, hey sweetheart I really hear you want me to take out the trash and and I you know that's not my truth That's gonna be very different than and defending that shame. The defending the shame is gonna be like, wow, you know, no, it's not my job to take out the chat.

35:01The thing, you're trying not to feel the experience which is what's gonna do it. So it doesn't really, the response isn't the important thing. It's really where the response comes from. It's so interesting because people are constantly, this is something we teach in the connection courses is that it's really not about the conversation, it's about where you're at in the conversation. So for instance, when my friend said to me, hey, you're a dick, here's what he didn't do. He's like, you didn't go, you're a dick. You asshole, like you're being an asshole, you're being a dick, fucking stop it. He was like, yeah, you're a dick, so what?

35:39What's the problem? He was coming from a place of love for me, and so I could not be defended in my response to him. And so it's really where you come from. It's the emotionally where you come from. That's the important part, not as much what you say. And you can see this, the perfect example of this is this happens all the time in my work. So let's say there's a person who has a CEO and the person is scared of their CEO. Let's say this is the CMO and they're, I'm scared of the CEO, I can't say much of you. They're always getting upset. They're gonna yell blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

36:15And I'll say, yeah, there's one person who says it, though, right? The answer's always yes. There's that person has that CEO has one person who they don't yell at, who they listen to, who they who they'll they'll they'll take the objection from that they don't get angry with. It's because there's somebody who doesn't approach them in fear. It's because somebody approaches them a different way, not with judgment, but like, hey, look, this is what we have to pay attention to. And so it's really about how you're coming at it and not what you're saying typically. This episode is brought to you by Coda.

36:54I use Coda every day to coordinate my podcasting and newsletter workflows. From collecting questions for guests to storing all my research, to managing my newsletter content calendar, Coda is my go -to app and has been for years. Coda combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps to help you get more done. Encoda can help your team to stay aligned and ship faster by managing your planning cycle in just one location, set and measure OCRs with full visibility across teams and stakeholders, map dependencies, create progress visualizations, and identify risk areas. You can also access hundreds of pressure tested templates for everything from roadmap strategy to final decision making frameworks.

37:34See for yourself by companies like DoorDash, BigMah, and Qualtrics. Run Encoda. Take advantage of this special limited time offer just for startups. Head over to coda .io slash Lenny and sign up to get six free months of the team plan. That's coda .io slash Lenny to sign up and get six months of the team plan. Coda .io slash Lenny. This is amazing Joe. I'm very happy with what advice we've already shared and there's more I want to tap into. You keep using the word advice and I just want to like so for anybody who's listening do not take my advice, do not test it, experiment, set up an experiment, try it out, see if it's true for you.

38:19It's one, I just made this shit up, somebody else could make up something different. It's like Jeff Bezos made up Amazon, we make stuff up, but we're humans. But two, is if you, instead of just listen to it as a sound bite, if you actually do it and and make an experiment out of it, you get to learn, like it's in your bones, you get to see what's actually real for you. And what's real for you in this moment might not be real for you what's in the next moment. So for instance, like I could give the advice that says, hey, every, you can't even control your thoughts. You can't even decide what thought you are gonna have next is.

38:59It's just gonna fucking happen. So you're completely out of control. And so it's all a gift. Can you look at life as all a gift? And that would go, wow, that could be really useful for one person, but the other person, they feel so disempowered that they're like, I can't even control my own thoughts, man, I am totally trapped. And they might really need at that moment to learn that, oh, I have empowerment, I have choice. And that's the advice that they need to hear. And so do the experiment, find out what's true for you in this moment. That's my, if there's a piece of advice, that's the one I want to give.

39:39Okay, so let's share more experiments people can on. Okay. Another is this thread that I feel comes up a lot in your work is you're just really big on helping people feel joy. It feels like that's the core of what you're trying to help people. It's feel more joy. Why is that so important? Why is joy so important? So powerful. So I definitely would not want anyone to feel joy. I wouldn't want to push somebody into or like, hey, you should feel joy. But what I would say that's a close cousin to that is that enjoyment is such an important tool for productivity. Enjoyment is such an important tool for living a meaningful life.

40:23if in short, like so enjoyment is like an amazing tool. So as an example, let's say you drive a Ferrari, you're not going to say, hey, that's an efficient car. That's a super efficient car. And you're going to say, no, that's a fast car. But somehow in our own lives, if we get something done quickly, we're efficient. But that's not efficient. You can go and get something done quickly and then you're so exhausted. What's efficient is, if at the end of whatever you did, Did you feel like you have more energy, like you're stoked, like, oh, I can't wait to do this again tomorrow. That's efficiency.

41:00You've actually used the least amount of energy to get something done. So if you say, oh, I'm going to figure out how to enjoy what I do 10 % more than you succeed, you are 10 % more efficient. Not only that, usually the quality is going to get a lot better too. If you enjoy running, you're probably going to run more than if you don't enjoy running. If you enjoy doing a podcast, you're probably going to make a better podcast and you're going to do it for longer if you enjoy doing it. So there's something really, really important about enjoyment because it's not only a measure of efficiency. It also has a strong correlation with higher and most things has a strong correlation with how long you're going to do it, your stain power, the quality of what you're going to do, all of that.

41:48So that's one of the reasons that I think enjoyment is really great. The other thing is that if you enjoy things, they feel different. And it doesn't require that I think one of the things that people do is they say this, they say, I want to join my life more so I'm going to do less things like take out the trash and I'm going to do more things like go on vacation. But that's not how enjoyment works. And like you can enjoy taking out the trash or you can hate taking out the trash. That's a choice. And right now, somebody listening to this is an experiment that they can run is like, okay, you're going to stay listening to this for the next minute.

42:28How do you enjoy it? 10 % more. And typically, what will happen is somebody will take a deeper breath. They'll settle into their body a little bit more. They'll relax a little bit more. They might physically get more comfortable. There's a thousand things that they might do to just enjoy the experience 10 % more. And in that, they're becoming more efficient in that. The quality is getting better in that. They're hearing what I'm saying differently. And so that it's just a really powerful tool. What I know the problem to be is that some people will go, okay, now I have to enjoy life. I'm going to like disregard all these negative emotions so that I'm in enjoyment.

43:09And that doesn't work. It's horrendous. You know, it's just a recipe for shits, too. Along these lines, how much of the work is learning to enjoy the thing you're doing more versus finding something that you would lately enjoy? Which one's more powerful, I guess, which do you point people to? Which experiments do you find people should run more? In our society, typically, it's how to enjoy what you're doing more. What happens typically is that if you find a way to enjoy the thing that you're doing more, you're more likely to do the things that you enjoy. So it's just like a, it's just an order of operations thing.

43:51As compared to, there's people, you know, a lot of the people in my circles because of who I coach and everything, they're billionaires and they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try to arrange life that they enjoy and it doesn't fucking work. So they actually have more power to make everything that they're doing exactly what they want to do. But it doesn't work. It doesn't, you know, applying the jet or buying the island or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, doesn't do it. So whereas if you really learn to enjoy what's in front of you, all of a sudden, one thing that happens is that you're not as scared of enjoyment.

44:32Like you start saying, oh, wow, enjoyment makes me really effective. And so I'm going to do the things that I enjoy. and so you're more likely to do the things that you enjoy. Instead of having this story, I have to do X, Y, and Z so that at one point in the future, I can do what I enjoy. And so that, it's just an order of operations things. If you learn to do the thing, if you learn to enjoy the things that you're doing, you're going to naturally start doing the things you enjoy. If you only do the things you enjoy, you will not learn how to enjoy what you're doing very well. So you show this tip of how can I enjoy this 10 % more?

45:06or just like ask yourself, how can I enjoy this 10 % more? Is there anything else that you find helpful for helping, oh yeah, right now, how can I enjoy this 10 % more? So it's not about changing anything. In the external world. Got it, like internally, what can I do? What can I change about the way I'm experiencing this? Yeah, just, or I like to ask it as how do you enjoy a 10 % more? Because if it's, what can I change, then there's trying, trying is usually not more enjoyment. It's actually usually letting go of trying creates more enjoyment. So the phrasing is can really make or break the question.

45:41I know, I enjoy 10 % more. So say someone sitting in a boring meeting that's like really sucking their soul. They should ask themselves this question. How can I enjoy this 10 % more? Yeah, that would, what should they can? They get to. It's a great experiment. It's an experiment. Okay, it's perfect. Yeah, the reason I do the should thing is that as soon as you say you should and then you don't, then you can fail. And if you fail, then you're less likely to try it again. That's why the should just it ends up usually in stagnation. Should like if you think about the way it feels in your body when you say, I should do something.

46:21There's like a stagnation. There's a, where is it? If you say something like, oh, I want to do it. Here's an experiment I can do. Here's what I enjoy. There's less stagnation. There's more movement. This touches on something else that you talk a lot about. We've kind of been circling around this idea of authenticity versus improvement, where you help people realize that you are good as you are. You don't need to necessarily improve. We've talked a lot about these sorts of things already, but just what else can you share there just how to help people learn this? Yeah, I mean, my favorite metaphor on this one is like at what time in the journey of an oak tree or is it perfect?

46:57Is it like when it's an acorn, when it's a sprout, when it's 20 years old, 40 years old, 150 years old, 200 years old, depending on the oak tree, now I'm perfect. The idea is ridiculous. So it's a similar thing for us. So the idea that I need to improve myself, it really disturbs the natural process that's at hand, which is we evolve. We as human beings evolve. And if it's like, oh, I'm evolving and I can enjoy it and I'm acting from my authenticity, then that's a very, that has a lot of alacrity. That moves quick. If it's, I need to improve. There's something wrong with me. I need to improve.

47:47I should do it. And that all goes really fucking slow, right? Because there's a lot of emotional stagnation in that. There's a lot of should shame. There's a lot of stagnation in that. So you don't actually get that natural flow of life. And so the Taoist talk about this is kind of like a river always finds its way. It doesn't need like it just always goes in that direction. And so that's we are naturally evolving, like that is our nature. And then to put a whole bunch of sheds and shit in the way, just slows the process down. The other thing about authenticity that I think is really important to is that if you're success, if you are one of the few people, I'd say 10, 15%, who can say, I should be this way, this way, and this way.

48:40And then you do it, which is very few people can actually do that. What most people do is they say, I should do this, should do that, and then a decade later, they're still saying they should do the same things. But let's say you're one of those really successful people, then you have a life for not you. Then you have a life of who you think you should be, not for who you actually are. And so if you move from authenticity, naturally certain things aren't going to work, certain things are going to work. Certain people are going to work, certain people aren't going to work, certain jobs are going to work.

49:11But the ones that you end up with over time are going to be the ones that are right for you, not right for who you think you should be. Right? So if you, the most obvious of this is you meet a woman and you're like, oh, this is how I should be for them to love me. And you're, you just do it. You just do everything that you think you should do to, and then you get married. And then they love not you. They love who you think you should be. They don't love who you are. And so what kind of marriage is that? As opposed to this is who I am, and I'm gonna be as genuine. I'm gonna show you all my parts.

49:50I'm gonna be as genuine as I can with you. Then if you do get married, you're married to the right person. You're married to the person who actually sees all that and loves that and wants that. How do you hold that idea with? I also wanna get better. I wanna develop myself. I want to feel my emotions more of those sorts of things. I love that I want to. The better part is kind of just gets a little bit in the way. So yeah, we all want to, like, a little kid wants to run faster. But, and they might want to get be a better runner. But the part that they miss, the reason that they develop so fucking quickly is because they don't think they're going to be a better person if they run faster.

50:32It's the idea is like, yeah, you have this natural want. That want is the thing that moves evolution. Like a plant is like, oh, there's sun. I want to move in that direction as compared to like I should. Both of them are human concepts, but the want is like, it's the thing that it's what allows us to know that's our evolutionary path. I have this want to be closer to people. I have this want for great sex. I have this want for or being able to have a business that supports me. These are great wants, and they kind of show where the growth is occurring or wants to occur. It's like that's our natural evolution, it's great.

51:17What makes it need to be better? What I want to be better, it just slows it down instead of, it's like saying that what I am is broken and therefore the whole thing slows down. So we try to word everything as more in the experimental framework, but also we try to word everything as self -awareness, self -experimentation, self -discovery instead of self -improvement. Because if you understand the problem, then the problem goes away. So just explore it. like just understand it as compared to making a list of things that you should do to get better, that you will eventually fail, and then you'll just be stuck in this should loop where you beat yourself up and where most people hang out a lot.

52:09So the experiment here that I'm taking away is think more about your want versus the should, and then things you think you need. Yeah. Right? It's okay. Yeah. Because typically when you say I want to improve, it means that the subtext in that is once I do X, Y, and Z, then I'm lovable. Once I do X, Y, and Z, then I'm okay. Once I do X, Y, and Z, I'll be worthy. Once I do X, Y, and Z, I'll be enlightened. Whatever the fuck the thing is. And it's, but that's just not how it works. works. You know, what works is the person who loves themselves has loving relationships. It's not the person who's done x, y, and z so that they can be lovable has loving relationships.

52:52The people who do x, y, and z so they can be lovable have relationships where people are critical and constantly trying to telling them that they have to be better. Coming back, you just said this interesting quote that you also shared at the beginning this idea once we understand the problem and goes away. Yeah. Let's make sure people understand what that means. is related to this idea once you feel like I'm an asshole, okay. And then like, okay, and then it starts to kind of fade away. Is that is up the court? I just mean it practically. You know, it's like, can you really fully understand a problem if you don't understand the solution to it?

53:22I don't. You're right? So if there's a principle and I can't remember the name of it, like it's Drickland principle or something, but it's something that you, that this CFO that I used to work with said. And he would say like, Problems get solved if you spend time on them. Like if you just give attention, enough attention to a problem, the problems will solve. Like that's the way it works. In business, an unsolvable problem obviously, it's not gonna work that way, but the reason that that works is because the more you spend time on a problem, the more you understand it. And another way, I love him or hate him, you know, one of the things that Elon Musk has said that I find that I found a very valuable in my time is that if you really want to interview somebody and they claim that they've done something, you ask them, it's like kind of six levels down.

54:19So you improve sales, how did you do that exactly? While we improved the pipeline, okay, how did you do that exactly? Oh, well, we made the pipeline more measurable by having things that could be, okay, yeah. And so how did you know what were the seven stages of the pipeline and what made you pick them? You go six levels down and you can really understand if somebody was the person who solved the problem or if they are the person who is claiming that they solved the problem. So it's the same thing. It's the same thing. It's if we just explore a problem enough, the solution is apparent. If we understand the problem enough, the solution is apparent.

54:56And so typically, if we come to a problem with a kid's mind wonder, if we come to it like, what could I learn here? What's exciting? What are the experiments I can run? Then typically, that's the most efficient way, enjoyable way to solve a problem as compared to, I have to get to this problem by so low at this time and we're going to do it this way and do do do do do do do. Like usually that doesn't work. And I could geek out on why that likes democracies. Win over atocracies because they're far more experimental by nature and it's not one person saying how things are going. But it's just generally that it just were more efficient when we're exploring.

55:39And so we're more efficient when we're exploring ourselves and understanding ourselves and trying to improve ourselves. There's a couple more experiments I want to help people try to run. One is, you have some really good advice around decision making and how emotions and getting better at understanding and working with your emotions helps you make better decisions. Can you talk about that? That's similar to what I said before, which is if you learn to fall in love with the emotional experiences, then you have more solution sets. So let's say I want to have like all human beings. I want to be a part of a great team.

56:16There's no nobody has ever like raised their hand and said I'd like to be a part of a shitty team and yet Grand majority of people at their work right now have shitty teams or not a teams not great teams Even though nobody wants that if one of the things you're unwilling to feel is That kind of that conflict that tensions as we talked about if you're conflict avoidin You're you're not gonna be able to make an a team because there's nothing that is a live doesn't require tension, a cell requires tension, breathing requires tension, playing pickleball requires tension, a good team requires tension.

56:56So if you're gonna avoid that experience, you're not gonna be as easily if at all be able to create a quality team. So to be able to look forward to any emotional experience, creates more and more solution sets for it's more and more optionality. So in creating a great team, for instance, you need to be good with people hating you. You need to be good with drawing boundaries and having people upset. You need to be able to have high expectations even if somebody's just, you have to be okay with somebody being disappointed with themselves. You have to be okay, being disappointed with yourself. All these emotional experiences have to be available to you if you're going to find the solutions to make an A -quality team.

57:41And so the more you can fall in love with each emotional experience, the more you have, and then the clearer the decision making gets. So that's one thing for making great decisions. The other one that I find really, really useful and very hard to execute onto you, really understand it is creating a set of principles to live by. So we all have a set of principles to live by that we're doing it, right? So for a lot of people, those principles are, you know, what do I have to do to get likes on Facebook? What do I have to do to like, I'm going to do whatever it, I'm going to make a decision based on getting likes on Facebook.

58:26I'm going to make decisions based on whatever it is. It's pretending that I want to get wealthy. You're trying to get wealthy or there's a series of things. But if you really take a look at what it is you're making your decisions on and then really think about well what would be the Five or six things that if I may decisions with these principles, I'm guaranteed success and Then experiment with them and then refine those principles and then experiment with them and then there'll be these moments where you're You don't want to do it, but those are your principles so you're gonna go and do it. So as an example for this One of the principles that I live by is embrace intensity.

59:11So it's not create intensity, it's embrace intensity. It means that right now, any moment in my body, for instance, there's going to be a sensation that's more intense. How do I welcome that sensation? At any moment, and running my business, there's going to be something that we don't want to talk about. How do I, how do we lean in and talk about that? I don't, you know, and so we start all of our meetings with what are you scared to say in our business? What are you scared to say is not all of our meetings, but some of our meetings are started with what? What are you scared to say because we want to embrace that intensity because we know that if we lean into the thing that we're trying to avoid our life is going to get better our business is going to get better and so if you can make like if you can see what those principles are for you and then run experiments to see if they work and then refine them every once in a while and so Because of that because that that embrace intensity If somebody comes to me and says You're fucking of this business.

1:00:16You're doing it all wrong. I Don't have to think about what I'm gonna do I'm like, oh cool. Tell me what I'm missing. It's gonna. It's gonna be immediate because because I live this way. Whether I don't, maybe I don't want to hear it. Maybe I'm like, I'm having a bad day, whatever it is. Maybe I'll say, hey, I want to hear you, give me, I'm not able to, give me a day and I'll come back to you. But all of a sudden, my decisions get made automatically if I live by a set of principles. And that I find very effective living by a set of principles. For someone that wants to create their own set of principles, do they have a guide you have?

1:00:55of his already advice for how to actually go about starting this list, putting it together. We have a decisions course, which is like a large part of it is about how to do that. It's a difficult one to explain because there's a lot of nuance in it. Just as a, for instance, one of the nuances is defining the principles, not just by what it is, but what it isn't, is a really significant, very minor thing, but it ends up being incredibly major. But if you're going to do your set of principles and you want to do them on your own, the main thing I would say is keep it to five. I wouldn't even do six.

1:01:29I don't do six, but I keep it to five. And I would test each one of them for like five days. So make your principle and then see if it works for you for like five days and then do then, you know, keep on experimenting until you find five. And when you look at those five and you say, if I do that, if I live by the end of the by those principles, I am just almost 100, if not 100 % confident that that's gonna create the life I want. If I live by those principles, then you have a really good start. And make them simple. They're like minor things like embrace intensity or connection first or everything's in iteration.

1:02:13All these things that I, if as soon as I live by them, things work. Company works. It works. Amazing. And we'll point folks to that course if they want to take it themselves. Cool. It's only once a year, so it's a real one. Oh, wow. One is the next one. January. Okay. Not too far away for folks to want to wait. So again, the two pieces of advice you shared and ask our experiments that we can run to help become better decision makers. One is create a list of life principles and there's a course that we'll point people to to take that. The other is the thing you keep coming back to over and over and over.

1:02:47this idea of falling in love with your emotions, embracing your emotions, welcoming your emotions. Yeah. There's also, I know you do a lot of work with teams. I imagine there's very similar advice for how to help your team be more effective. Principles, I imagine, is a part of it falling in love. We've run principles for teams, yeah. Yeah. That's one of them. Teams be more effective. We have a lot of, I mean, I think I have like, at this point, I have 12 things that I'll go into a company and and do with a company. So typically the way I like to do it is I will go in and I will talk to some, like I'll talk to the leader typically and they'll say this is what I want and then I really want to assess.

1:03:30Typically, if the person who is a big part of creating the problem has a hard time seeing the way through the problem or they wouldn't have been created generally. And we all, this is not demeaning any leader. We all have these issues. So usually what I like to do is I like to go in and I like to talk to three or four people, see what, you know, their perspective, not just the leader's perspective. And then I like to sit in an meeting or two and just see actually what the dynamic is. And one of the things I like to say about how to change a company is that the atomic structure of a company is the meetings and the decisions.

1:04:12So it's particularly true in Silicon Valley. But it's really true in all businesses that all we are as a company is a group of people's relationships and ideas. It's it, like, especially like Amazon, like what you got a couple buildings and some servers. There's not, you know, there's like not a lot of hardware there and they wouldn't be useful without the people anyways. is anybody, whether you're running a farm or a shoe factory or anybody's successful is going to tell you, it's all about the people. And so the atomic structure is what are our meetings like and what are, how do we make decisions?

1:04:53And so I'll just really pay attention to a meeting. And one of the things we do is we talk about what we call five star meetings, which is how do you make every meeting enjoyable? It's literally like, how is it that everybody, when they walk out of a meeting, they're like, ah, fuck, I love that was great. And as it turns out, we've all been in meetings that are like hardest shit, and we've walked out and got, oh, those are great meetings. And we've all been in meetings where like nothing happens and we're like, oh, god, fuck, another one of like just drive a nail through my head. I don't wanna sit there.

1:05:28So what's required to make every one of your meetings five stars? And if you do that, that's one of the things things will do inside of a company is like work with them to figure that out. If you do that, every single problem with your company will come to the surface. Every single one of them. I had 10 five star meetings, but these two meetings sucked. That tells me exactly where we need to focus as a company. That tells me exactly where to look for the problem that's happening. And so it's like this, and it's the same thing with decisions. If you really start unpacking how the decisions are made, where people are frustrated in the decision -making process, you're going to find exactly the problems in the company.

1:06:09An example of this, I was working with a friend and he's a content person and we were just talking about how do you make every one of your meetings, a five -star meeting? He's like, okay, great. I'm gonna say, he's like, yeah, I'm never gonna do this. I was like, really, tell me why is my YouTube meetings fucking suck. You know, he, it's not where he makes most of his money, but he's like, there's YouTube meetings suck there. Never gonna get better. And luckily there's a couple other people around at the time and everyone's like, no, wait, I love my YouTube meetings. What do you mean? Like, how could this not work for you?

1:06:45And, and so he, he noticed like, oh, I, like the team didn't, the content, none of it was working for him. None of it was him. He was just like, ugh. And so he changed it. He was like, okay, I'm going to commit to that. I'm going to see what it's like for me to just say, every one of my YouTube meetings have to be something that's super enjoyable to me. And when he did it, like his YouTube numbers went off the charts and like a very short period of time. It's just that common, like wherever the meeting is, that sucks. It means there's something else that's a problem that needs to be worked on.

1:07:20So that's typically how. So I can just look at usually sitting in any team meeting and see at least three or four of the major problems that are happening in the company. Such a cool way of thinking about where to focus decision making meetings. And I love that the story comes back to something you shared earlier with the more you enjoy something, the more you enjoy, there is the better it's going to go anyway. And so the more you can find those moments and make things enjoyable, the better. And the other cool thing is most of the executives or the CEOs that I've worked with when they get to a point and usually takes them like we always have the goal of a month.

1:07:56They usually takes two months to make sure every one of their meetings is five star meetings. And once they've done that then it's like how do you make sure all of your teams have five star meetings. But if you usually it's like within two months and they usually have half the amount of meetings at at the end of it. Half the amount of meetings in their companies are more effective. It's an incredible tool. Yeah, I could see why people enjoy that if you were meeting it as well. Is there anything more longs lines before we start to close out our conversation either around teams or decision making?

1:08:30I'll say for anybody who's running a team, Harvard's got a couple of these, but we used to do these tiny pulses. This is a VC. One of the strategies that was really effective that I saw very few VCs doing was I would want these like pulse. I would like to read the pulse of teams by with these like short surveys and stuff. And it was the most effective way of not very happy to when I come to work on Monday. They weren't going to make their numbers like the likelihood of them making their numbers is like going down. So there was this interesting thing that just about how, you know, Drecker, I think, set up first and then the Virgin guy, Branson, Branson, said it.

1:09:17He's like culture eats strategy for breakfast or some such. But if that's true, then it's measurable and it can be a leading indicator. And it, it absolutely is. Like if you really, if you really pay attention to the culture on a team by team basis. It's an amazing, very effective way to drive results, but also a very effective way to know when bad results are coming. And what's interesting to me is most people feel like they can't control the culture. Like most people feel like most people I notice they feel like, you know, it's more likely for me to hear from a CEO. God damn it, like everybody agrees when I get out of the table, when I get off the table, everyone's like, like, yeah, we're gonna do it and then they don't do it.

1:10:03Why aren't they fucking doing it? Is more, I'm gonna hear that more often than I'm gonna hear a CEO say, oh wow, I really noticed that the way the email system was working in our company, we were disempowering people by not requiring an action after every, you know, like, I'm gonna hear more complaints about why shit isn't working than I'm gonna hear about strategies, like very gentle simple strategies to change the culture. And so it's an amazing thing to me that it's so powerful and yet people feel so out of control with it. To give people something they can do, say today or tomorrow, to work on a lot of these things we've been talking about, is there just like one thing you recommend that basically everyone should try to experiment with.

1:10:51I think the next day, a couple of days or weeks, just to help them be better and more successful and happier. So I would do seven minutes, not no less than seven minutes. You can do more than seven minutes, but seven minutes of gratitude with another person every day. But it can't be, I'm grateful for this, I'm grateful for this, I'm grateful for this. It has to be feeling the gratitude and then seeing what comes out of your mouth when you're coming from the felt sense of gratitude and doing it back and forth. And so you're savoring the experience of gratitude and you're going back and forth with another human being.

1:11:35So, call up mom, dad, sister, brother, business partner, friend, and every day just express gratitude back and forth for seven minutes, coming from the feeling, not from the thought. And if you have a full body sensation of gratitude and you experience that for seven minutes a day, it'll change your life dramatically really quickly, really, really quickly. Wow. I already feel it. And the practice is you are expressing gratitude to the person you're with. It can be gratitude for anything in your life. It doesn't matter. As a matter of fact, I would say do it for a couple of weeks and then do it on the places where you feel lack.

1:12:16That's like the, that's where the superpower comes in. So, you know, I was in my own personal life, I was meditating for, like I spent like seven, eight hours a day meditating for like years. And as a person, you can imagine I didn't have a lot of money. So I was like, I was, so the way I'm the joke I used to make is I would meditate and worry about money most of my day. And I mean, truth to it's funny, but it's truth.

1:12:47And one day I was like thinking about money and thinking I was driving in my car and I was thinking about this billionaire I knew. And I was thinking about how I didn't have enough and then I thought, oh, this billionaire doesn't think they have enough either. I know, well enough, I'm like, oh, I have the experience of a billionaire right now. That was my as I can. He's probably driving in a car somewhere thinking he doesn't have enough and I'm driving in a car somewhere thinking I don't have enough. This is great. Like I'm a billionaire. And it tickled me, the idea tickled me. And then I was like, well, what happens if I start focusing on everything I do have instead of focusing on what I don't have, which is where the gratitude practice came from.

1:13:31So my wife and I would sit every day and just be grateful for all the physical stuff that we had. You know, we were living in a hobble, we were living 15 -year -old -year cars. We were like, we had no money. We had us in debt. I was in like $40 ,000 in credit card debt or some crazy shit. And we just did it. And literally, it was a three -months later. My credit card was debt was gone six months later I had $60 ,000 in the bank. I like, entire life changed because I no longer defined myself by somebody who didn't have, I defined myself as somebody who did have. And so all of a sudden, I could look out the window and it wasn't, oh shit, I can't have that, I can't have that, I can't have that.

1:14:18Look out the window and say, somebody made money on that, somebody made money on that. Every fucking thing I looked at, somebody made money on. The 20 people, 20 companies made money on the fucking lamppost versus who installed at the energy company, the rubber company, like there's just a holy crap, it's all over the place. And then in that definition, all of a sudden it became really clear. Oh, and so it doesn't matter if the thing that you feel like you lack is time or the thing that you feel like you lack is love or the thing that you feel like you lack is money.

1:14:53If There's a superpower in that one. It changes everything. Do you still do this? I do gratitude. Yes. Do I do gratitude on stuff I lack? I don't really have an experience of lack. That's not really. Well, you still do this gratitude, seven minutes. Yes. That's like asking if I still have sex. Why would I give that up? It feels great. Okay. So just to be clear, you find someone seven minutes every morning, probably think about things you're grateful for and share back. focus not on your intellectual thing, your grateful for, but just like what's coming out of your emotional box. Yeah, feel the gratitude, let the gratitude, let the feeling of gratitude speak rather than your mind.

1:15:33Wow. Yeah. Joe, you get the felt sense of it. Yeah. Joe, I'm incredibly grateful for you. I really appreciate you sharing so many experiments for people to run. I think this is going to make a real impact on a lot of people's lives. Two final questions. Where can folks find your courses, I know you have a podcast, where can folks find the stuff they do online, and then how can listeners be useful to you? First of all, art of accomplishment, the podcast, it's art of accomplishment with Brett Kessler and Joe Hudson, I think, and then art of accomplishment. The website will show you where all the courses are.

1:16:07It'll give you a whole bunch of experiments. You can run. There's all sorts of really great information there. The other thing that we just mentioned also is just that we really want you to make sure, we really want to make sure that you think that the courses are for you, that the courses are, the way we do courses is that it's a very felt experience thing. It's not intellectual at all. It's really in your body and what the way we like doing it is that you bring real problems that you're having and you use the tools that we teach you for the, and the foundational course for that is called the connection course.

1:16:41So if you want to get into it, go to the connection course to find out if it's right for you if you're not already know that it's right for you. Do we do these little hour and a half free workshops and then it'll give you a taste of what it is that we do because it's unlike anything that's going on out there that it's, it's, people doing their like, what the hell was that? It's just a completely different thing. It's not like learning in the normal way. you literally sit down with another person and run experiments face to face with how you're being in the moment. And so you learn all this stuff through direct experimentation.

1:17:18And so if you find out it's right for you, you can do it through these workshops. And I'm sure there'll be a place where they can find out where to go for that. And that's what coming up in September. Yeah, the connection course is coming up in September. And so that would be, it's a great place to start. It's foundational for everything else we do. Oh, and then how can listeners be useful to you? I want my children to grow up in a fantastic world. And the best way that that can happen is that if the people listening to this discover who they are and their nature and the truth of how they operate, not for them but for their children and their children's children.

1:18:02So you want to do me a favor and make my daughter's world a better place. Wow. Yeah, I also just had a son and so I totally resonate with that. Yeah. Joe, thank you so much for being here. I'm an amazing podcast episode this end that are being as I expected. Pleasure. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it, Lenny. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'sPodcast .com.

1:18:43See you in the next episode!