#813 - Joe Hudson - The Art Of Mastering Your Emotions

27:35So if you like, but keep your eyes open and look like and we're having the conversation, you still understand everything I'm saying, but you just have this question. No, what's looking at? Yeah, I say I see the smiley. Yeah, it's just like what like that? Just that thing can create the peace in the moment and it doesn't even require you to like go off and sit down and blah blah blah blah. Like There's these little tricks like that, paying attention to your inner ear when you're listening to somebody. It creates like this presence in the conversation. And a lot of the work that I do is how do you have something like meditation relationally?

28:16Like how is it that like when we're in a conversation, when we're connecting with people and we're parenting or being a boss or whatever we're doing, how does that become our practice? rather than our practice is something that we do and then we try to maintain it during life. It doesn't fucking work. It didn't work for me. It works for some, it doesn't work for me. Yeah, taking meditation off the cushion, as it's called, has been a bit of a difficulty for me. I almost feel like I'm Bruce Wayne and Batman with who I am on a morning, when I'm sat down, a journal, breathwork, meditate, read, get up and go about my day.

28:50And there's that me. and then there's the sort of dopamine caffeine, neutropic fueled version of me. Fides fires throughout the day and reads things, but reads them with a purpose of kind of bringing them back up and blah, blah, blah. It's very, very, very interesting. I want to come back to it. I want to get some more of your questions. But I got another one here. So letting go doesn't happen by telling yourself to let go. Letting go happens when it is ready. Yeah. Yeah. That's how to explain that one. I would say there's this thing that I do. I ask people to put their hands together like this and I say, okay, try to pull your pinkies apart.

29:38So go ahead and try. But that's doing it. I don't want you to do it. I want you to try to do it. Right? And then feel that whole feeling in your body, that feeling of trying, and then just feel the opposite of it.

30:00Yeah, so we think that we can get to where we want to go through effort. But there's another place that is like that but the idea of surrender or the idea of receiving whatever words work for you that allows for a whole secondary thing to get done and sometimes that's far more effective than effort and so I mean like so like when I'm lifting weights as I keep on using weights example because I know you're into it but like when you're really doing like a really good set of reps. There's the effort part of the rep and then there's the stretch part of the rep. If you try to apply effort to the stretch, you fuck the stretch.

30:46It's about the, you know, it's like that moment where the weight is hanging and it's like stretching out the arms, ripping the muscles. And it's a similar thing that there's something that has to be received into or surrendered into for it to be effective and work. And so what I notice is a lot of people try to let go and it doesn't work. Well, that was you right finding this peak experience in meditation and then gripping tightly onto the desire which immediately creates this success failure. And the entire, it was your first one, first meditation, first one, right? First time meditation. First time meditation.

31:24You had no, yeah, blah, blah, blah. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And then a thousand other times, you know, like the too much effort, a thousand other times. Yeah. I mean, that's fueled by the critical voice in the head, right? Dude, I think about this all the time. So there's basically no scenario in life that I've ever looked at, or at least for maybe like the last 10 years, where I haven't thought more effort will not make this better. Everything single thing that is put in front of me, if I just work harder, apply more cognitive horsepower, focus better, if I just lean in, if I grip more tightly, this thing will work.

32:05I kind of have a... Okay, so can you show me then how that works with enjoyment? Fucking enjoy it. Fucking enjoy it, okay? You're going to enjoy this. It's like the sort of slightly outraged mother on a subpar holiday telling her children, we're having fun. Why are you smiling? We're all having fun. Why aren't you smiling? Yeah, yeah, yeah, smile. This is fun. Yeah, this is fun. This is fun. Exactly. But yeah, I mean, just thinking about that, that sort of gripping so tightly to things and assuming that that is the outcome that you're trying to achieve, assuming that that's the thing that on the other side of it, I've got to, it's not fully fleshed out.

32:48So I might, I might bumble this, but I'll see if I can get it across to you. I got the kind of, um, building out an idea about hard work and about why it's so seductive in the modern world. The way that I think is that most people, most advice is charitably given to people who probably do need to work harder. Many more people, perhaps on average, need tightening up and loosening off. Therefore, the advice that David Goggins, Jocka Willink, you know, stay hard, get up early and stop hitting snooze and doing all the rest of it, maybe does on average improve the lives of most people. But there is a very big cohort of people for whom that gripping, more tightly mentality pushes them further into the exact thing that they need to stop doing, that they're already trying to control all of the outcomes.

33:36They're gripping so tightly to all of the things that they're doing. And I think the reason that hard work is so seductive is that it reliably makes most things a bit better, but can actually for a very big number of people over the longer term make it way worse. Yes, I would put a slight spin on that. I don't disagree with what you're saying and then I would spin it a little bit. So I would say the thing that's seductive about, like let's work harder is, or let me inspire you to work harder is, one, it rhymes with the voice in the head. So it's like I believe. So if you think about the voice in the head as a tyrant, most of us relate to the voice in the head like we're, you know, like they're the absolute person who believes in them, right?

34:29So pick whatever political figure you like, think about the person that you hate on the other side. The person that, sorry, think about the political figure that you hate and then think about the person who buys into everything they say. that tyrant is the voice in our head and we are the person who believes everything they say. And so when somebody says, you need to work harder, they're like, yes, check. I knew I needed to work harder. I'm telling myself as a piece. That's so good. It's like a psychological confirmation bias, like an internal confirmation bias. So that's half of the thing. The other half is this feeling of empowerment.

35:03Most people in our society feel very disempowered. They feel like they're scared of the consequences of the actions that they want to take. They're scared of the consequences of following their truth. And so they feel very disempowered. And so this gives them a feeling of, oh, I can have empowerment. And so it's very sexy and very, and the empowerment side, I think, is absolutely right. Like that is actually you need to have that. There's about least one agency that you have agency over the outcomes. Yeah, but once you actually figured out that you actually have agency and empowerment Then the move is love then the move is learning to love yourself love others be unconditional in your love and and what you start to find out is that The unconditional love and empowerment they can't really exist without one another You can't really what what we call love that doesn't have empowerment is like codependence.

36:01It's like How do I make you happy so that I can feel safe? It's a fear -based action. And empowerment without love is actually just power and you'll never get enough of it and it can always be taken from you. And so it's really, it's like those two things become one eventually. So I would say that love would help anybody on that whole spectrum, but the sexy thing is, and the thing that they are going to go for is that you can be better, you can be empowered. Dude, you blow my mind. All of these are really, really great. All right, next one. The desire to be special can only exist if you don't know who you are.

36:43Wow, man. You've been on my Twitter. Picking all of the headlines today. Yeah. Yeah, fantastic.

36:55Yeah, so there's this idea that basically if you're trying to be special, then that comes from a place of low self -esteem or that comes from a place of wanting to improve, wanting to be better. And if you actually know who you are, like that, you just couldn't, you just couldn't, it's not a possibility. There's a great Tibetan saying, if you're, If you think somebody is better than you, then that's comparative mind, that's misery. If you think somebody is beneath you, that's comparative mind, that's misery. If you think somebody is equal to you, that's comparative mind, and that's mystery. Our society has fallen a little bit into the equality thing now, but if I'm not better, if I'm not worse and I'm not equal, then I'm special.

37:58And so then I know who I am. That would be me knowing who I am. As long as I'm in a comparative mind, I can't know who I am. That's basically what it's pointing to. Why would you be special if you're not better, was or equal? Well, that makes me, if I can't be better than anybody, you're worse than or you, I have to be unique. I have to be something that's not those things. So I read that. I read the desire to be special can only exist if you don't know who you are. I said maybe it maybe it does dovetail that basically the desire to be special is kind of a fruitless pursuit because by virtue of the fact that the chance of you being here is so infinitesimally fucking unlikely and that no one else will ever be born in the exact same space at the exact same time with your genetics and your experiences and that the most that you can ever hope to know of any other person even your best friend or wife that you've known for your entire life and shared everything with is one trillion daily of what you get to see of yourself the sort of specialness is imbued in your own experience the depth of experience you have of yourself is so asymmetric compared with that that you get from other people, that the desire to be special is chasing a thing which is already there.

39:26Yeah, it's not what I meant by it, but it's really beautiful. I can't disagree with that. I think the way that I would say it is more, like if you go back to Sam Harris, that in the process of understanding yourself, what some people would call wikening, you know, there's the moment of I am nothing and there's the moment of I am everything. And when you see yourself clearly in that way that you are the same as every, like you and God, you and nature, you and humanity, you are the same. And when you see that you're nothing, like how does the idea of not being special and or being special, like how can it even exist?

40:07That would be another way to say it. Why do you think people want to be special? Where do you think that drive comes from? They weren't loved as kids in a way that was deeply attuned.

40:20That they were told that they had to be of value, that they couldn't cry, that they couldn't get angry, that they, whatever, that who they were was needed to be managed. And so that they are looking for somebody to say, I love you. But then it never works out because even when you get it, you become the superstar. everybody loves you, but then it doesn't work out. And so it's the only way it really works out is when you learn to love all those parts of yourself and therefore love all those parts of other people. So I've got the word enough coming up as you say that the someone you are enough you as you are no more no augmentations no accolades no fanfare no nothing you as a child you as an adult you are enough is this thing.

41:12Even the idea of enoughness seems like it's limited in some way. I don't know how to explain it. There's this thing that it's similar to one of the teachings that they have. I think it's a mis -translation of, like, oh, accept your emotional experience. The idea is that you're supposed to accept yourself. And that doesn't, like, at least in my language, that doesn't really fulfill what fulfills this welcome. I can't wait to have the experience of being abandoned. I welcome it. I have a quote that's, joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome.

41:50And it's welcome. It's not accept where you accept her children. You know what I mean? Who are the children of joy? The family of emotion, so all of them. So, the more that people are willing to welcome the anger, the fear, the helplessness, the sadness, the grief, the excitement, which is also incredibly hard for people to feel, the more that you can welcome those and more joy just as a natural part of existence. One of my favorite stories, it's a doc story, but one of my favorite stories is about Tiger Woods and his father was very tyrannical, especially when he was a kid. So if this guy who just drove Tiger to be the best that he could, a golf.

42:39And there's a video of Tiger. I think he's maybe two and a half or three playing golf on some late night TV show. And his dad woods during coaching and training, he would racially abuse him on the golf course. He would say these white people are never going to let you net you play here. You're not, you're not performing well, like real, just heavy, heavy, heavy, but they had a safe word like you do during rough sex And he said just if you ever need me to stop just say the E word say the E word and it'll all be over and I'll stop doing it And he never once said it throughout all of childhood and the E word was enough

43:17Terrifying man and look at what came out look at what came out, you know, you have a guy Potentially one of the greatest golfers of all time But it's a broken human. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is the right. And then we tell the story that that's what's necessary to be the greatest of all time. And it's definitely counter examples of it. Who like? I mean, okay, so to say that no human has trauma, I wouldn't go that far. So there's always like levels of trauma. But there's not that level of trauma. Right. You've seen the golf course program. Exactly. So there's a guy I met recently. He's now like a, I'm sorry, I can't, I can't.

44:02He's a, he was with the Warriors. He was a really great player in the Warriors and he, but didn't start playing basketball. He's from Africa. And now he's a newscaster. I'm sorry, I can't remember his name. But I was at a party and I met him. and his story was like, I just wanted to go to college and I came from Africa and so I played basketball till my fingers bled so that I could get the scholarship. And he tells this story and he tells about like the love of his parents and how that pursued him, how that, and I don't know too much about like a LeBron James but my understanding that his mother and his relationship was definitely not Tiger Woods and his father's relationship.

44:39So there's definitely places where that level of trauma is not required to. Well, this question, sort of, I guess, the power of low self -esteem, or the power of this need is probably the thing that's obsessed me the most over the last few years, because when you look at someone like Tiger and you think, well, look at what he achieved, and you go, okay, but your definition of achievement is set, the art of achievement, the art of main, is that what you want for your life? And I'm watching tour de France unchained on Netflix at the moment. You've seen this? No, no, no, no, no. I highly recommend watching it.

45:24If you're obsessed with sort of human performance and the narrative, it's like a behind the scenes, kind of like that Formula One drive to survive series. Yeah. And you just see these guys that are sacrificing everything. A guy died in 20, last year on the Giro d 'Italia, like the the Italian one. He died because these guys are doing nearly 100 kilometers an hour downhill on wheels that are that thick, wearing Lycra. If they come off, at the very least, there's broken bones and the skin grafts that are needed and all sorts of stuff. And this guy died. The point being, if you want to become the absolute best within a narrowly defined pursuit, there are a lot of weird externalities and prices.

46:06And really what you're looking at is a game of who is prepared to sacrifice everything else in their life the most in order to be able to win at this one thing. Yeah, I think also, so I obviously work with a lot of incredibly high performing people in the business context. And so I think with athletics, I think we like to use that, like athletics and Navy like I think we like to use that place. And I think that's, it's true, but it's also only one example of greatness is physical greatness. And we're in a day, we're in a modern time where there's like your competing with seven billion people for that particular kind of greatness.

46:50And so I think, and there's only 5 % of the top 100 % that are ever going to be known for their greatness. And so I think that that's a particular thing, whereas something like business or art or, like, I'm not sure if that same kind of thing is required. Like, if I wanted to bet on an artist that would go to be succeed, and for me, it would be the person who would more likely enjoy their work. And when I work with super high -powered CEOs, my experience is that when they start learning to enjoy what they're doing, they become far more effective. What's interesting is I don't think that's, I think that if you're in certain bureaucratic positions, you might not rise to the ranks as quickly.

47:35You might just leave. But particularly the CEO position or the sea level position of a company that's doing more than 100 million in rev, those folks, when they turn that switch on, it totally, because they're not in there. They get to control a lot of their day and what they choose to do to be effective. So I think there's something about the physical performance in particular that's nuanced there that makes it. Well, it's that hard work thing again, right? It's that gripping tightly. It's the assumption that in a domain where performances are easy to quantify. There are established rules around working hard and game tape and diet and sort of thinking about it three three sixty five twenty four seven.

48:20but you're totally correct. Like if you were to look at, take podcasting. The best podcast is in the world and not the ones that live in breathe podcasting. They're the ones that have sufficiently interesting lives that they can actually talk about it on a podcast. There's work to be done, you know? Diction and networking and conversational skills. Wasn't there also like the best biathlete in the world if I have this right? I don't, I was told the story. I don't know if it's true, but some Norwegian guy and like he sits on the couch like six hours a day because he's like, like my body needs to rest if I'm going to be high performance.

48:50That wouldn't surprise me. The further that you get away from that into poetry, into art, into any creative endeavor, those things business, those things don't come about through sort of force of will. Even writing, I know that whatever inspiration is for amateur professionals to show up and do the work. That's true. I think for the fact that most writers maybe need tightening up not loosening off, but also, where does their inspiration come from? Their inspiration comes during the walk that they have or the nap that they needed in the middle of the afternoon. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, so it's an interesting balance of like how tight does a string need to be in your particular profession.

49:34But there's also the question of like you said, so I know plenty of people who woke up at 60 who were like, I'm a billionaire, I'm successful, and I'm absolutely fucking miserable. That's a nightmare. That's the future that everybody should feel. Yeah, and it's incredibly prevalent. I have another quote that's the problem with managing your life is that you have a life that you need to manage. And I just see that happen for folks is that they've managed themselves into this area and now to maintain it, they have to continue managing themselves. And then at some point they're like, that hurts, it sucks, I don't want that anymore.

50:21People who repress their emotional experience are fragile. They get stuck on decisions more easily and they are slower to heal from experiences. Why? Yeah. So we talked about the, at the beginning, we talked about the matrix and the golden algorithm. So the reason that I came came up with that is because I was looking for effective ways to get people out of patterns or habits that they were in. And so including myself. So what I noticed is that when people all of a sudden welcome, like in my case, the abandonment, then the pattern stops. And so the way that we, like if you have emotional stagnation, shame is one of the best forms of emotional stagnation guilt.

51:05another form of emotional stagnation, another form of emotional stagnation. When you don't have that emotional fluidity, then you're gonna start repeating these patterns over and over and over again. And so as far as the decision making one, which is slightly different. So there's a book 2012, book called DeCarte's Air by a neuroscientist, who basically, it's now become more nuanced, but I'm gonna do the un -newant version of it. which is basically the decision making part of our brain is the emotional center of our brain. If you take the emotional center of the brain out of your body, your IQ stays the same, but your life falls apart because it takes you a long time to decide what color pen it takes you.

51:48Oh, I've heard there was a guy, didn't you have to choose a date for an appointment and the interview or whatever, we're just looking at him and it took him 45 minutes because he has no value set. That's right. So we make emotional decisions. It's really easy to see in your own life, not that way, but like how many decisions did you make to not feel rejected or to feel loved or to feel like a success or to not feel abandoned or rejected. You know what I mean? There's, so we make all these decisions on an emotional basis. We don't make logical decisions. We use logic as a way to try to figure out how we'll feel based on a decision.

52:32And so I noticed that the proof is in the pudding. If somebody is having a hard time making a decision, we find out what they don't want to feel they feel that the decision gets made. I cannot tell you how many people who are slightly depressed and feel stuck when they get angry. They have absolute clarity on the other side of the anger just like boom. They've been black and white thinking, binary thinking for months on a subject. They get angry and then it's like 100 % clear. So what we're doing is we're trying to avoid an emotion in the decision that we make. And if we love all of the emotions, we have clarity in our decision making.

53:13Yeah, I'm okay with the fact that some people might hate me on that. I'm okay with the fact that I might be abandoned. I'm going to follow my truth and I'm going to be okay with the consequences, which is the real empowerment that we're talking about. And so that's why, and so if we, it doesn't matter if you're like, you know, a world leader or a billionaire with a massive thing, if you're trying to avoid certain emotional experiences, You're like, you're predictable. It's easy to beat you. And you're going to be stuck in that pattern. I get the sense as well that a lot of people that are high performers rely so much on their cognitive cerebral horsepower and it's proven in the past.

54:00Look at all the things it's got you. You know, great your models are. It's prime my models. I mean, you had if you access to my model, your life will be good as well. So you know, you have this very sterile approach to a decision making and to moving through life. And then you're told the exact thing that you're scared of doing, you have no experience in doing. Yes. You now need to stop being the fourth degree black belt in this particular modality. Go back to being worse than a white belt. like absolute beginner at this thing that you don't even have any evidence that it's going to be good. Oh, okay.

54:41All of this evidence from fourth degree black belt modality that says that look at how fucking impressive I am, the world loves me. Yeah, yeah. You're describing like my first meeting with a done client. Yeah, so the intellect is amazing and I love it and it's really, really, really useful and it's not your whole intelligence. So like if you my work really has an idea that there's like the mental intelligence loosely prefrontal cortex, human emotional intelligence, emotional fluidity, loosely mammalian, and the kind of the gut intelligence, which is more like in the reptilian side of things. And and if you really want to have change in change yourself, you work on all three.

55:28You don't work on one or the other, but most of us are highly developed in one, not very developed in the other. So you get a lot more transformation for the buck focused on the place that you suck. So it's not abandoning the models, but hey, learn to go from zero to one in emotions, and that's going to 10X your models as compared to go from 100 to 101 and your model. It's good, but eventually it's like the way I think about it is it's like three pencils with rubber bands and there's always tension between them. So if one's really low, but at some point it's just you're holding more and more tension.

56:10And so for me it's you have to work on all three if you want real transformation. The emotional experience is just the one that is mostly abandoned by our society. We've been told, be logical, don't make emotional decisions. And we've experienced emotions as something that was bad that made us feel out of control, that hurt our relationships. And so we immediately went to trying to manage them instead of learning how to harness them and instead of learning the beauty of them and how they actually work. Because they don't work rationally. How many people have I worked with who are like, Yeah, I'm angry, but it's not rational.

56:48It's like, yeah, that's a fucking emotions, man. They are none of them irrational, but they are incredibly wise if you know how to listen to them. I've been big into evolutionary psychology for the last four years or so and have had a lot of conversations about relationships, mating dynamics and stuff like that. And I've got a blog post brewing in me about how even evolutionary psychology that tries to be all encompassing when it comes to mating and mate selection misses the most important thing, which is the phenomenon of falling in love with somebody because it's not rational. And the way that I and all of my friends and colleagues have talked about this forever is in terms of mate value and exchanges and mate guarding and male parental uncertainty.

57:36And it's this amount for that, it's trading resources for safety and blood and so on and so forth. And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's nice. That's nice. And I can put it on a spreadsheet and all the rest of it. But what about the way it feels? And how many times I went through a breakup a couple of months ago, so I'm kind of slowly reintegrating myself back into the dating scene. And there's so many times I've found with friends that are dating and myself as well. And I'm like, dude, on paper, this chick's amazing. Like, so all of the tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, all of the different things.

58:09Why don't I feel like this is something that can continue? I don't I feel like this is something that works. And you go, well, because you don't get to choose that, you don't get to choose that. That's not so much. I'm going to argue there. I think you do, but it's not a short term choice. So there's two thought processes. One, I love what you're saying about evolutionary psychology. And I have this model that I use for emotional evolution, like how we evolve emotionally, and we can get into that because there's so little literature done on, there's like, this is how motions work, and this is what we can measure.

58:48But there's not like, here's how you develop cognitively. That is out there, PHA and 100 others, but there's no like, here's how we develop emotionally. But on that love thing. So here's what I noticed, is people fall in love with the folks who have the pattern that they need to heal in them. So you had a critical mom say, then there's a good chance you're going to fall in love with a critical woman. And that's where the heat's going to be. And I've listened to people have their first dates. And I'm like, you're just listing off what you're going to do to each other. Like it's an amazing experience if you're listening to it from that.

59:23But telling each other about themselves, but they're really saying like, this is how I'm going to relate with you. And this is how I'm going to read it. This is like, we're going to just paint this all forward. If you heal that stuff, then you're going to be attracted to other people. You're not going to be attracted to that anymore. And so my experience is like a good relationship is it starts with, here's my trauma. This is your trauma. They're well -mated. We have something to learn from each other. The exact thing we're here to learn. And we're both willing to do the work on ourselves to learn it.

59:55And you put those two things together and you have a long -term successful relationship. Without them, it's questionable. Yeah. A lander button says that on your first date, you should ask, there's one question that should always be asked, which is, in what ways are you crazy? I think that's a shoulder version. Exactly. You might kind of crazy. Yeah. Yeah, and I mean for me marriage was marriage and child raising where the most important spiritual practices of my life are self -development practices of my life. Like I like we were we were we tearing I just got really lucky and Tara was really the person who like when when I asked her to marry me she said yeah we're going to travel through Southeast Asia for six months together in backpacks if we can survive that we're going to see the We see a therapist and we're going to do a meditation retreat if we're going to get married.

1:00:52These were like the requirements. God, it's like you're Navy SEAL hell week, but just cracked it a little bit more. And it was just like this beautiful thing that set the course for our relationship as a way to understand ourselves, grow and to grow. And then that was always the purpose of our relationship. And the love was there and the love just is only deepened. And it's no longer like a, it's not like the kind of hot love of the first three to five months, but it's like so much better. Yeah, I even had that. I was on the bike this morning thinking about this idea for what evolutionary psychology gets wrong about relationships.

1:01:29And one of the things that came up was, you know, describing this transition from passionate to companion systems and blah, blah, blah. And he go, yeah, I know, but what does it feel like? Tell me what it feels like. Stop describing it in terms that can be written in a journal. And, you know, I guess this is maybe where, you know, the limits of science actually in some ways do and maybe you need to look elsewhere maybe you need to look to art and music and and and conversation and poetry and and things like that Experiences. All right next one if you can't say no Easily. Yeah, you can't be trusted.

1:02:03Why? So we have this experiment we run in some of our retreats where your job is to try to get someone to do something and And at the end of it will ask, you know, was there anybody who didn't get a no? And there's always somebody where someone said yes to them. So there have been impairs and somebody's like, well, you do this and they have to ask you to do something that you can do right there in the moment. We do a push up where you blah, blah, blah, blah. And somebody always doesn't say no. And you'll ask them, do you trust them? They're like, no. You can't trust somebody. like if they say no to you then you know they're in their truth otherwise you're like What's actually happening under there?

1:02:45What's actually what's actually going on for you? And so it's just as simple as that I thought the quote you were going to say was If you can't say nothing you can't find your yes Which is also something that I say and I think they're completely related. It's like if you're hanging out with somebody and your experience of them is that they're always there to please you. Then you can't trust them because you don't know them. You can't like because they don't even know themselves enough. They've like completely lost themselves in you. And anytime that that relationship happens, it always ends in resentment.

1:03:21There's no relationship where somebody loses themselves and somebody else and there's not resentment that follows. Neil Strauss, last year, the best quote of 2023, unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments. That's a good one. Fucking monster. That's a great quote. Why is it, you know, we're often told, especially as kids, but as we grow up as well about the dangers of being selfish and and and focusing on ourselves too much in that we must give so on and so forth. If that's the case, why do we find it so hard to make our own needs a priority? Why do we subjugate our desires and the things that we need in order to please other people?

1:04:03How do we hold these two things at the same time? Can you repeat that question? I think I heard you, but I want to make sure. Did you say we're told not to be selfish? Yeah, we're growing up, like stopping so selfish, you know, give the toy to your little brother. Yeah, yeah. Just to make them, you know, we're the solipsistic narcissists and all the rest of it. And yet, in the same sense, we're somehow often subjugating our needs. I desire is don't matter, I don't make myself a priority. Please, please, just like me, love me. It's because we learn from mimicry more than we learn from what we're told.

1:04:34And when a parent says to their kid, you're being selfish. It's the parent being selfish. But a parent never says to a kid, you're being selfish unless they're not doing what they want them to do. That's when you call a kid selfish. So verbally, they're saying don't be selfish. But the emotional system, the gut system, the guttural system is saying, be selfish like me right now. This is what adults do. We're selfish. We're so fucking selfish, we're gonna tell you, we're gonna shame you because you're not doing what I want. So we have that conflict inside of us. And then it just like goes everywhere in our life because we haven't actually resolved that internal conflict of, oh, I had a great example of this.

1:05:21So I had a friend who was Catholic and he had just a wonderful tradition of faith in him. But at one point he said to me, he said, Joe, I have a hard time knowing when I'm supposed to take care of myself or if I'm supposed to sacrifice for others and I don't know when I'm supposed to do that. And I said, oh, oh, I didn't know your God's a satan masochist. Set up a world where there's a difference between those two things. that it makes no fucking sense to me. And my experience is that when I'm truly doing what's best for me, I'm also being highly compassionate for other people. There's very little time, and I occasionally like in business deals where it's just not arbitrary about how much money is going to who, the principles of it have worked out.

1:06:11There's a couple places like that, but in almost all situations, if I'm really, really taking care of myself, It is also the compassionate thing to do for others. Not include saying no. Exactly. Almost most importantly, it is saying no. Because then I'm not breeding a relationship of resentment. So what typically people mistake for being compassionate is like, then I make the person uncomfortable. It might be nice. It's not compassionate at all. A compassionate act might make somebody really, really uncomfortable. And so usually when people are saying don't be selfish, they're saying like make me comfortable.

1:06:51And so, but being actually, when you're doing what's actually best for you, it's not always going to feel good. If you're doing what's actually best for other people, it's not going to feel good in the moment, long term it will, but in the moment it isn't. People don't want you to be perfect. What they want is to feel connected with you. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the weird part, right? So I don't know how many people get, they get so hung up around the axle being perfect. The first thing about perfection is there is no such thing. There's like your idea of perfection, my idea of perfection. So it's an unachievable place.

1:07:28And if you notice with the critical voice in your head, the idea of perfection, it's a moving target. Like, and typically if you really start listening closely to the voice in your head, It'll tell you contradictory things. It'll say, you really have to work hard if you're going to get your goals. And then it'll say you're abandoning your mom and dad because you're working too hard. Like there'll be all these, if you really write down all the shit it says and you look for the contradiction, it's amazing. Just like that politician we were talking about and the person's like, yeah, yeah, whatever you say, they're contradicting themselves all over the place as well.

1:08:05And so, and so that, so since you can't hit the target, you're never going to get there, but somehow we think if we get it right, then we'll be loved. But people actually want to feel connected. Great products, great podcasts, great friendships, great marriages, great businesses, all are built on connection. Great athletic performance is built on connection to yourself, to your body. There's no way someone's going to have athletic intelligence without a deep connection to their body. So, connection is the thing that actually, but somehow or another in our minds because of the voice in the head, we think that perfection is going to get us somewhere.

1:08:48It doesn't. And if you literally do that work of saying, okay, like how do I make this podcast more connected with me and with other people, it'll be a better podcast? So true. When I first started doing this six years ago, I thought that the job of a podcast was to be this sort of ruthless index of information that basically the goal was to kind of extract as much wisdom from the guest as possible and then put it on the internet like like a live version of Blinkist, I guess. And it took, I don't know, probably 400 episodes for me to realize that you're much closer to a vibe architect than you are to a synthesizer or a centralizer of information.

1:09:30And the more... That's one of the beautiful things about pursuits that are a little bit more artful, that there isn't perfect. And that's one of the problems again of using sport as a rubric. There's very tightly defined rules, right? We know what... 300 kilos on the bar. If you pick it up and I don't pick it up, you win in powerlifting. Okay, like, all right. That's... We know exactly what that is. But what does it mean to say that this was a better blog post? So this is a better piece of music. What does that even mean? And there's even sports stuff like bodybuilding in which it's not so much about the quantifiable metrics.

1:10:02It's about this sort of weird, like, ethereal way that it's all put together into an experience and there's the movement and there's the song choice and there's the, you know, the fucking color of the tiny pants, all of the different bits and pieces. But yeah, first off, that, I love that idea of perfection. And then the second one, I had this idea about reverse charisma. And there's this famous story about Winston Churchill's wife, I think, who gets to meet the two presidential candidates for America. And she says that she left the first dinner with the first one, feeling like he was the smartest person on the planet.

1:10:41And she left the second dinner with the other saying that she felt like she was the most interesting, smartest person on the planet. And I realized that what we think we want when it comes to charisma and being around a table, what we think that other people want from us is for us to be impressive and sharp and witty and cool and funny and all of the rest of it. But when I think about the people that I like having around my dinner table the most, it's not those people. It's ones that make me feel like I'm that person. And if you go, okay, well, if that's how, if that's what I want from other people, I can just be that to other people.

1:11:22And reverse charisma is way easier to achieve than actual charisma. Reverse charisma is just being interested in the other person. So yeah, I think so much from that people don't want you to be perfect what they want is to feel connected with you. Yeah. And that's the, that's the place where I talk about love. So like, if you learn to unconditionally love all the parts of yourself, it's really easy to unconditionally love the parts of others. And so all of that benefit of what you call reverse charisma comes with it, which is really quite sweet, but it also comes with it not from a place of like, oh look what I got.

1:11:57Which always falls apart. Like it's not like, oh I've accomplished a goal. It's just like life is a dream that I never thought possible coming true. It's a whole different thing. The thing about reaching a goal and having happiness there is only happiness because there's a moment where you don't have a goal that you're defining yourself by. That's why you get that happiness when you reach that goal. But there's this other kind of goal which is like, I don't define myself by what I do. I do shit. I do it well. I like it. I enjoy it. It's fantastic, but I'm not defined by that. And then some sort of joy comes from that back to that original prompt of How I forgot you had a quote that you used to mind but I can't remember what it was which one the the spiritual path for so many I'm not good enough.

1:12:49Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly back to that quote about Spiritual path being not good enough Yeah, one of the What my business partner in the productivity drink that I make James took some cello cyber and sat on a a cliff in Australia and this question came to him which was, does the world love you for who you are or for what you do? And then I told this to Mark Manson and he said, he's an even harder question, do you love you for who you are or for what you do? And that's really stuck with me. It's a very, very difficult question to answer, right? You know, you almost promise, you feel like you've been promised this value trade with the world.

1:13:30If only I can be sufficiently impressive. If only I can be smart or rich or sexy or successful or admirable or kind or giving or whatever the fuck it is, then dot dot dot. Then only half the people will hate me. Like, like, look at all those people, have the people hate them. Like, it's just yeah, the story that I have that's like that is um, was told to me by a guy who'd like started of these big retreat centers. His name escapes me, but he was talking about like this near death experience he had. And he had these two people walking towards him in the light. And he's like, oh, they're going to they're going to judge me.

1:14:09I'm here to be judged. I wonder if I'm good enough. And when they got there and they basically looked at him and said, so have you been good enough? And it's like, I remember how much chills it gave me at the time because it's like, right, yeah, this is, like, this is the moment isn't it's, there's no outside that's going to give you any kind of validation. There's, you know, like look at, look at the people of all the validation in the world. Like they're in, in horrific rap battles. They're trying to get a horse to lift its foot up. That's right. Yeah, so one of the big journeys that I've been doing for the last sort of seven or eight months now facilitated through therapy but required by the rest of my life was trying to feel feelings properly, trying to fully connect with emotions and tap into that.

1:15:13Just from a basic level, What is it about feeling feelings and emotions that caused so many of us to struggle to just get there? Yeah, so there's a couple of things to get in the way. So if you're a kid who was physically abused and I put a quarter in one hand and a key in another hand without telling you what's in what, you wouldn't be able to know because you've killed the sensations in your body enough because it was too intense for you to feel. So if you had enough physical violence, you can't feel your body the same way anymore. So it's the same thing with emotions. So like when I was a kid, as an example, when I was a kid, I would be made fun of every time I cried.

1:15:57And I was 20 -something years old and I was going through a photo album and there was a picture of me crying. And I remember I was like crying, my parents threw a pity party to make fun me they even took a picture and then they put it in the photo album to be like, you know, see that you don't want to be that? I was like, oh shit, that's probably why I haven't cried in like 16 years. So I took the photo from the photo album, I put it on my desk and I was like, I'm going to learn how to cry again. Six months, eight months later, I still hadn't learned how to cry. I was like, I didn't have any, you know, internet was just getting started.

1:16:33I didn't really have any resources. And so I would go, I lived in Los Angeles at the time, I'd go up to 10 ,000 feet and then I would hike on a trail and then I'd hike off trail. So, nobody's to me, and I'd practice crying. I would fake it. I'd be like, I'm an actor just trying to cry. And I did that for like three months, twice a week until finally, like it broke and I could actually have authentic tears. So the first one is that we just suffered some sort of abuse. And that abuse could be really outward like what happened to me. Make it also a bit of speed like every time you're sad and mom fed you.

1:17:11Every time you were boys don't cry, girls don't get angry, you got ignored, you got, you know, bribed out of them, whatever. So, so very few parents are just like, oh cool, I'm going to sit with you while you're having a big emotional experience and and be in loving attention of that and attuned to you. It's a very rare thing. Great. If your parent go to get a book called Listen, it's fantastic book on this and one of the greatest is the parenting. Yeah, yeah, for parenting. It's also really good for CEOs. Do you know who it's by? Yeah, Patty Whiffler. Yeah, she's a different. She's amazing. Yeah, the book is listening.

1:17:49The organization is called Hand in Hand Parenting and it'll, It's really great. Five tools super easy to use. Anyways, easy to use easy to understand hard to shit to use but This anyways, so that So that's one reason is that we were emotionally abused and so we cut off the feelings of the emotion and the second reason is that And I use emotional abuse because It doesn't no one else is gonna call it that but I use emotional abuse because I want to just like call it what it is which is like you are trying to aggressively change somebody else's emotions, whether it's passive aggressive or aggressive, you're like.

1:18:28And then the second reason is that all of us have this experience of losing control with an emotion at some point, right? Like I was jealous and I fucking couldn't help myself and therefore the woman left or I got so angry at this party and then I lost these friends. Like we all have this experience or just I'm 12 years old I want to fucking keep myself. I'm having some, you know, I feel so out of control. And so that's the second one. We have that experience in the, and the natural stage of development is like, okay, I need to learn how to control my emotions. Oftentimes, that second part only comes because of the first part, meaning like I have two daughters and they have incredible emotional control at 13 years old because their entire life we've been present with them and their emotional temper tantrums and everything.

1:19:19So there's no discipline required. There's no shame required. They know what it is to feel connected and to feel good and they want to feel that way. What does it look like to be present with a child or another person in their emotions? Yeah, I'll give you an example of that. So it's being with them without being in them. For a child, a great example. So my daughter was having this really bad time when she was three years old and we're at a whole foods and she's just like, oh, having this temper tantrum. I'm like, all right, here we go. And I like sit down. I'm containing her and making sure she doesn't hurt anybody not hurting the food.

1:19:54And I live in this like somewhat hippie town in this little hippie woman came over and she's like, are you okay, dear? And my daughter's like, ah, I'm just having my emotions. And so it's just being present with somebody and not judging them and not trying to fix them not trying to make them better. Oh, it's going to be okay. I'm going to smite like none of that crap. It's just like, oh, yeah, this is how you are. Fantastic. I can be with that. I can be with your fear or your anger or whatever it is without trying to change it. Without trying to change it. I mean, I will, depending on who I'm working with, but it's sometimes I don't like, I might say not at me, like, I don't want your fear at me.

1:20:33I don't want your anger at me. I don't want your sadness at me. But I'm happy to be here with it with the sadness or the anger. So that's what it's just letting them have the full emotional experience while sitting with them and being present and loving them as they are in that experience, which is the thing that very few of us got as kids. And if you don't get that, then there's these big moments of feeling completely lost of control under an emotion. And so then you're like, fuck, I've got to manage the fuck out of this. And so you start really trying to manage it. And then these fears arise, which is the third thing that makes it difficult.

1:21:09I'm scared that if I'm sad, I'll be sad forever. I'm scared if I get angry, I'll destroy everything. I love. I'm scared that if I'm fearful, I'm going to actually be helpless. If I feel the fear, I'm going to actually be not able to do anything. And those are kind of the three things that we have, those are the three fears are completely fucking wrong. But they're the things that we tell, the stories we tell about those emotions. Just go back through them again. Sadness is going to last forever. If I really open up this sadness, I'm going to be sad forever. I'm going to be depressed. If I'm angry, I'm going to like destroy everything I love or destroy things that are important to me.

1:21:46And if I'm scared, I'm going to be... If I allow myself to feel the fear, I'm going to be paralyzed, not going to be able to be competent. I'm going to be helpless. But it's not true. Like, we all know anybody who's cried knows that in the other side of a good cry, you feel fucking better. If you feel your anger, you become more determined. In the Tibetan philosophy, they talk about, I think it's the five poisons and the five virtues and everything like that. And then later on in the scripture, they talk about how they're the same thing. And my experience is that anger is like a hose. right? So you think about anger as a hose and this is the energy that's running through it and you can get this way and it's nice stress and you can get this way and it's you mother fucker and fucking blah blah blah.

1:22:39You can get another way it's like fine I'll be okay. You know like you can can get different ways when that hose is unkinked it's it's Martin Luther King it's it's Gandhi it's It's a clarity and determination and a boundary. And that's what Unkinked anger looks like. It is that clarity and determination. And so that's the virtue that's on the other side of the anger. To me, I call that all anger. And so because of these things that stop us, we never get to feel what happens when that emotion moves through us unresisted when we have what I call emotional fluidity. And so we don't get to that, like that kind of determination.

1:23:25We don't get to that, that kind of determination. There's other kinds, but we don't get to the joy and the excitement of life. I was going to say, so you mentioned a bunch of emotions that are negative. What I also think that people wish that they could feel more excitement or enjoyment or a relation. Yeah, that's another fallacy. It's an absolute fucking fallacy. They want to, like mentally, they're like, yeah, I want to feel that. But like, like, if you just, like, if I asked someone, like, if I'm in a retreat and I say to some people, okay, we're going to release some anger and let's move some anger.

1:24:0810, 15 minutes later, eight out of 10 of them are going to be going, they're going to still be releasing that emotion. If I say, okay, hey, let's release some excitement. Most people are done in three minutes. It is really scary because the really positive emotions, if you allow them to fully fill you up, it really dissipates the sense of self. The identity starts moving, like collapsing in on itself. And so they're They're actually very hard for, I mean, we want them, but if we feel them for too long, we're like, what the, like, it gets a little bit wonky for us for most people. And it's like anything, it's like learning to feel those emotions.

1:24:50It's like, it only really comes after you've learned how to feel the negative ones. And then there's the work of actually feeling and being in those really positive emotions. And it's why you can meet people who are like meditators for years and they piece they can feel, but they'll still be suffering with depression. That joy, that kind of like big heartfelt open joy, like that's a harder thing to feel than like a nice, Aquanimus piece. That's interesting. It's definitely less safe. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my god, this could be taken away from me. Oh my god, what the fuck's happening? Who am I in this?

1:25:26Because it's so big. It's so expansive. Those feelings that the idea of self just fucking can't compete. But there are still, so for all of me saying that people struggle to connect with their emotions, a lot of people listening to this show will be familiar with the cerebral horsepower, praying at the sort of altar of cognition thing. But there's also still a bunch of emotions that are just kind of less exciting and more dour that everybody is familiar with. Anxiety, You know, this sort of ambient sense of a little bit of fear that's going on. It's not full fear. It's not gripping you, but it's, you know, anxiety, worry, concern, insufficiency, shame.

1:26:10So we're connecting with some emotions, one subset of them. Is there a way, are you thinking about how they get alchemized or moved around? Is there a way that you think about this? Yeah, so if I think about emotional development, the end of emotional not end, but the more mature areas of emotional development is all those feelings, they become hard to distinguish between the two or between any of them. So that's an interesting piece to it. The other interesting piece is that a lot of what's happening is repressed emotions. So somebody has like chronic anxiety, like I worked with people say with OCD and oftentimes there's an event that started the OCD where they felt deeply out of control over a situation and unsupported, out of control and unsupported.

1:27:02If they can go and feel and they couldn't feel it at the time, it was not possible to feel because mom was dying, dad was dying, blah blah blah, something the parents were violent, whatever. There was some way they could not feel. If we can go back and feel that emotion that didn't get felt that OCD starts dissipating. As an example, I know people like oftentimes people super depressed, not super, not depressed like where they're having visions, but like a dysthymia level of depression where the negative self -talk is through the roof. If they really can feel the anger and that they weren't allowed to feel as kids that all went in words towards themselves, that depression starts subsiding.

1:27:42So oftentimes the emotional, those little emotions that we're living with every day that aren't joy is because an emotion is stuck because there's an emotion that wasn't welcome and so joy can't hang out there. When all the emotions are welcome, if we can go back and feel those feelings that were not allowed to be felt and we can welcome them, that's like the welcoming of abandonment, then the patterns change and then we can feel the joy. And that joy can be scary. I have not seen one person when that joy first fucking shows up that it's not scary for them. Because it's just alien. It's fucking big man.

1:28:21Joy is like, it's just big. Like that you're like, we know ourselves by our contrast. We know ourselves by what we compare ourselves to and enjoy like the comparison, the contrast starts going away. And so it's like, oh, you become like a like a speck of dust in the notion of joy. When it's really old. Yeah. It's a very unmooring feeling.

1:28:49Deep levels of joy. Yeah. It sounds great. Again, people can use their intellect and rationality as I am right now to go sound -stantastic feel feelings, yeah, understood, go back and hear the thing. But you know, this, what does it look like? What does integrating emotions, embracing them, feeling feelings? What does the process of going from cerebral performative artist to actually fully integrated human look like? Yeah. So, yeah. So, there's different levels depending on where exactly it got stuck. So, if you are, so we have a tool called emotional inquiry, which is basically, like you think about if you're like a little kid and you pick up a frog, you're like, what the hell is going on here?

1:29:47And you're like kind of really investigating it. You're investigating your emotional experience with that same level of wonder. So it's just this guided audio that we have. And we have a course in the decisions course because it's all about emotional understanding because that's what clarifies decision making. We ask people to do that once or twice a day. The transformation is like, well, can people go if they want to pick up this course? Well, the course is called it. Art of accomplishment is the course. I think we have a site for you called view .life, modern wisdom, slash modern wisdom, but it'll be in the links.

1:30:27I'll find it. I'll get it off you and I'll put it in the link. Yeah. Yeah. But it's called the great decisions course. But what that emotional inquiry thing we have for free, you can, you can, there's, we have it a podcast where you can look at and it tells you how to use it and then you can go and download it. So that's all free. And, but the, but with emotional, so emotional inquiry is one way to do it. Expression is really, really good and very critical to actually express your emotion. So for instance, when people think about expressing anger, it's such a weird thing. They're so scared of it that whenever we're scared, we think about things in a binary way.

1:31:00It's like this way or that way. So they're so scared of anger typically. It's like, I'm either going to hold my anger back or I'm going to get angry at somebody. And they never think, oh, I can just get angry and not at anybody. I can just like move my anger and not not get angry at anybody and not do it at somebody. Meaning that they're, you're getting the angry at somebody, but they're not in the room. They're not feeling that they don't have to know about it. And so, so you can actually just express the emotions that you have. And if you can't figure out how to express them, then you can fake it till you make it.

1:31:29It's a very slow way to do it. We have things in our courses that take you through it, but that we can't get for free because it's just, we want to make sure we're monitoring people as they go through it. So that's another thing that it looks like. The other thing that But it looks like is there's this thing that happens where your gut tightens. And I don't want to feel that and you push it away. So my example of this is like we got kicked out of a house at some point when our second was very young and every time I drove by the house which I had to do on a weekly basis I would feel like this punch in my gut.

1:32:05Like, pop back. And I was like, oh, so I started driving by the house and I'd sit there and I'd just feel the fuck out of that feeling, like, what is that? What's going on? And so there's that other thing, when you feel that thing, our immediate movement is like, oh, let's, let me move away from that. It's like, no, let's actually attend to that. Let's actually feel what that is. Just talk to me. I think that's a really lovely cue that people can probably quite quickly pick up on. Just take me through that step by step that someone has just like the echo of a a sensation that continues to come up when they see a person or whatever a situation that they're in, just walk me through, you feel that tension in you.

1:32:49So what are you looking for in the body, in the mind? What is the fantastic? So everybody will do it a little differently. Like I was so cerebral when I started doing this, I noticed the mental reactions to fear before I actually knew what it felt like in the body. But there's some great research that actually shows like through heat maps that there's There's very similar physical experiences we have with different emotions. Generally, the way that I talk about it is that emotions are held in the muscles. If I look at somebody, I can tell you pretty quickly. When I coach people, people go, how do you do that?

1:33:26Just by looking at somebody's face or whatever, I can tell what emotions are being held. I go, that's the critical parent hunch, that's the repressed anger, lying in the eye, whatever it is, you know, so you can see how people are holding their emotional experience. So it's all held in the muscles. So there's a physical sensation that comes along with an emotional experience. And the job is to get really curious about it. Why am I avoiding that? So, like, if you're lifting weights and you feel that burn and you try to avoid it, you're not going to lift weights for as long as if you're like, ooh, how do I really get into that burn?

1:33:59This is the exact same experience. So you get that cook and you go, okay, how big is that? How round is it? How thick is that? How dense is it? How is it moving? Like, what's going on here? And so you just put your attention on the somatic experience of the emotion that's happening. So that's like the most basic. That's like the most basic way to start getting into it. But at some point, the expression is really necessary because you can't un -hold the emotion that the musculature holding can't happen until un -happened until you've actually done some expression. So we do this weak -long workshop.

1:34:42It's off -record. It's very hard to get it. We only do 36 people a year. and it's in groups of 12 and they call it, like people feel like they've had a facelift. They literally, you can take shots before and after and their face looks different because the emotional holding has changed. And so I only coach people who've been through that experience because when they've been through that experience, I don't have to justify emotional awareness. They know the benefits of it. They've seen the other side of it. And so that's another thing. but expression is really important at some point. And if you're expressing fear, really important to have that with loving attention, to not do that alone.

1:35:25When you talk about expressing, what do you mean? So anger expresses usually with a lot of yell, anger, moving, particularly of the chest. So it's, you know, like it's, because it's closed. Held anger is held in shame. And so the opening of the chest is a really important part of the expression of it. Similarly, fear is done with shaking. So if you look at a deer that just has been captured by a mountain lion and then escapes, they do this like shake off thing. You can notice that like horses are kind of doing it dogs are kind of doing it consistently. Like they're getting that like low -level anxiety off of their system on a regular basis.

1:36:15So of the fear release process. Sadness and grief, different sadness, this tears with a lot of gut shaking, but grief can usually flows from all three. If you're in a full grief reliefs, I was in this funeral, for instance, with my friend who had passed and everybody was sad and sad and sad, and you could just feel like the energy was stagnant. It wasn't actually fully being grieved. And I was like, I'm fucking pissed and I got really angry and then other people got angry and then like you could see so much move, so much of the grief moved. And if you look at those kind of indigenous grief rituals, anger is often a part of it.

1:36:58You know, it's not just sobbing. It's like, it's like hitting the wall. There's like a, there's another part of it. So grief is like some sadness with some fear and some and some anger. But this is expressing it, it doesn't necessarily need to be to a person. If you're angry, does it need to be to the person that you're angry at? No, no, definitely not. I would highly recommend not. Angry at somebody else is an emotional abuse. It's like it's it's it's saying, I'm going to try to control you with my anger. It's horrible. Unless you have permission. So there would be moments like with Terran, I'm like, I really would like to express some anger, you know, and she'll give me permission or not.

1:37:39But the, but like with the kids, as an example with the kids. So I'm making my Sunday pancakes, the kids are, you know, knowing, oh, this is the time when dad is like most focused and so we're going to ask him like 20 questions and getting a fight, you know, like the whole thing. And I'm like, I don't know. And it's like perfect timing. And I stop everything. I jump up and down. I'm like, I'm angry. I'm angry. I'm angry. I'm angry. And my eight year old looks at me. she goes, that was some pretty good anger, dad. Cause she knew that I wasn't angry at her. Like I wasn't, I was angry, but I don't need to put it on her.

1:38:13I can just move that anger and then get back to to being a good parent, you know, and, and, and she wasn't scared of it. It wasn't like I was the 200 pound man who was like yelling at, like a two foot tall kid or three foot tall kid or whatever. However, how do you think about this sort of relationship between brain and emotions and body and sort of moving out of and between those? Is there a hierarchy? Is there an interplay? Is there a... They're all part of the same system. I make the distinction between head, heart, and gut and transformation just because it's a good way to figure out if you're holistically achieving it or not.

1:38:56But I haven't found anything that makes it so that you're, it's better to do one than the other first or anything like that. The, what I notice is that people who are more one way are going to start there. Like I was more head related. You know, I thought I'd, everything in my head because of the emotional abuse. I was high in my head. And so that's where I started. and the people, people who are like dancers who are like deeply in their body, the somatic work is usually like the first thing that they're gonna go to, but they're gonna believe their stories for a lot longer than I did. So it's just like, it's where your inclination is.

1:39:35People playing to the strengths almost. Typically. Yeah, and it's where they get the lace bang for the buck, but it's usually like that. Yeah, as you said, you're going from 100 to 100 and one as opposed to zero to one. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of people will be familiar with meditation. I guess probably everybody listening to this is tried it, or maybe is an experienced meditator. Yeah. Talk to me about the difference between, this is a new modality, I think, emotional work. It's not even something that I'd really heard of until pretty recently, and I'm deep in the personal development world.

1:40:10Stuff like what you guys do out of accomplishment, and Hoffman process. And then we've got sort of all of the therapy, talk therapy, it's sort of psychodynamic stuff, psychoanalysis, and then we've got mindfulness. What's the difference between, let's say, mindfulness, emotional work, and therapy, and stuff like that, how do these piece together and how are they similar and different? Yeah. So again, like some, most work kind of hits on all three levels, the nervous system level, the emotional level and the head level, but they usually have one that's like a strength to the others. And so one's going to emphasize one more than the other.

1:40:52And so the emotional work that we do is unique, but it's not the only thing we do, but it's what we're known for often because it's the hardest thing to find in the world, you know. So, but we're working on the mental and we're working on the nervous system as well. And so I would say each one of those things has a strength in there. But even you say like mindfulness, like there's mindfulness that, you know, like if you look at like the teravatin Buddhism out of Burma, that's like going to be a very somatic experience of like it's like moving your attention from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet.

1:41:29It's going to be very somatic oriented, whereas other forms of mindfulness are not going to be as somatically, you know. And that fits the job and that fits you. And so that's typically how you do it. And so, for instance, like when right now I'm doing the master class and so people will ask me questions and I'll assign experiments. And one of the ways that I decide the experiment that I would assign to the person is like how heavy where they, how emotionally aware where they and what they were doing. And so that's, you're just looking for that. It's very hard to describe how to know which one except for if you know you're really heady, go to the somatic if you know you're not like.

1:42:15The one that I think is actually more is just starting to come into the light is more of the nervous system stuff. I would say the best practice for nervous system is the gut is pleasure. It's knowing that you can find that pleasure or enjoyment anywhere at any time, that it's just watching the sensations of your body move, and that there's like, can be a deep enjoyment. And that part, I find, is like, oftentimes a place that will help people more than any other, because they're so dysregulated most of their life that they can't actually settle enough to make the other work useful. That's interesting.

1:43:02Do you consider it kind of a foundation that the other two sit on top of? of just not, no, I don't. I think they're all equally important. I think it's just for in today's society, it's one of like the on -off, so have you turned the thing on and off? I don't know, have I? Turn the thing like, okay, let's just relax the nervous system and then see if all the rest of the tools will work. And I've got that. Like that. I've got Johnny Miller coming on the show at some point soon. I know you've been on your guys' show. So that world of nervous system regulation, sort of somatic work, somatic therapy, something else one of my friends are in doing at the moment.

1:43:48Yeah, it's a whole new world. Yeah, so if I'm looking at you, it's deconstruction of the negative voice in the head. It's finding a place where you can cut this. But if I'm looking at you, it's the deconstructing the voice in the head would be the intellectual work and the nervous system work would be having a feeling of deep pleasure just in the existence of being alive. I would really want to strengthen that muscle. And then the emotional work is release probably fear would be the place I would start. Yeah, you're a good judge of character. Let's go back to the negative self talk stuff, because I think a critical harsh judging in a monologue is something that lots of people are all too familiar with.

1:44:46What is that to know about that? Where does it come from? Typically, it comes because we've learned that's how to talk to us, but we've learned it from our parents. That's typically or not just parents, but like caregivers teachers, etc. I remember I did a podcast on the voice in the head and my daughter listened to it. She's like, my voice in the head comes from this teacher and this grandmother.

1:45:08I think that that and she was like nine or something at the time and 10 maybe. And so typically that's what we've learned. Some of the stuff we've made up as a way to like we learned it to prevent a certain kind of experience, emotional experience that we're having. But I think that the part that's most useful to know about it is that you try to stop it and won't fucking work. You can't just be like, I'm going to stop that. You can kind of modify it that way. What's important is how you react to it. So if you come into my shop every day and I yell at you, you're going to treat me one way. And if you come into my shop every day and I'm like, oh my God, it's so good to see you, you're going to treat me another way.

1:45:52It's not any different with emotions. Or with the voice in the head, excuse me. And so the voice in the head comes in and does its thing. And if you react like, okay, you're right, I should do that. And you're going to get one thing. If you're like, oh, I really see that you're scared and I'm right here with you, you're going to get a different thing. If you sing it a musical, like, you know, or if you're like, wow, you're a shitty boss. Or like, there's a thousand reactions. And what But typically what we're doing is we're trying to control the voice in the head rather than think about all the different ways, running experiments about how we react to it.

1:46:30There's a lot of flexibility to go, this week I'm going to react to the voice in the head this way, this week I'm going to react to the voice in the head this way, this week I'm going to react to the voice in the head. And running those experiments starts to teach you how you want to relate to it, how it wants to be related to. and you'll notice that there is care in it. It does want you to succeed, it does want you to, like there's, it's quite sweet, it's just really incompetent. It's misguided. It's yeah, and so it's like, and so if you take it that way and you're like, oh, you have good intentions, you just don't know how to do it.

1:47:05Let me work with you. It's like a, that's, that it's gonna show up differently in your life. And then there is a point where just like most of it goes away. There's not a, there's not really repetitive negative self -talk. Wow. So in your experience, either with you or with your clients, you've been able to get them to a stage where that drops off. I think for very many people, it's such a staple part of the texture of their daily mind experience that that's like saying, oh, and what my heart would stop beating. Right. Yeah. So I would not say I get them to it, but I would say that that happens, that is an experience that happens for a lot of people in and around the work for sure.

1:47:48And the way I look at it, it's actually a natural stage of development. And that if you just take the things that have blocked development, it'll happen naturally. It's as natural as like tree growing a branch that allows it leaves to be at the sun. It's just it's an incredibly natural process. And it just, it's just that so many people get stunted that it doesn't happen naturally. I've kind of got this, got it in my head about this blending of ambition and peace that we've talked about where and this very typical trajectory that I see among a lot of my friends, high standards, desire for high standards, which leads to positive and ideal comparing myself to that ideal and inevitably falling short, fearing that if I don't reach the ideal that I'm not going to be accepted, safe, wanted, loved validated by the world.

1:48:41So critical self -voice comes in, which is the motivator that's the chariotia whipping you as you have a bridal in your mouth and you try and run along and run faster, faster, faster. But then there's another stage, which I certainly know intimately well, and I think a bunch of my friends do too, which is shame about being critical to yourself. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. God, how fucking pitiful, how stupid am I that I can't even have high standards without being critical and then thinking, oh my god, look at me, I'm being critical about me, being critical and it's just this infinite regress of self -castigation.

1:49:18Yeah, yeah, that's what the, I think the Zen talk about it. It's like asking the ego to get rid of the ego, is asking a thief to, is like asking a thief to take care of your house. It's never going to fucking work. and so it's a similar thing. It's like the negative self -talk starts becoming, starts working on itself and it just doesn't fucking work. And the antidote is loving attention. I mean, the amazing thing is just loving awareness can change so fucking much. Like just sit with it. Next time you're on a plane flight and you're sitting there and somebody just asked them a question and give them loving attention.

1:50:10And like you just like, un -fucking amounts of transformation can happen in an hour. I did that once and I literally like asked one question in an hour and just listened with loving attention. And like, hear my problems and then, oh wait, I hear some solutions to the problem and, oh, I hadn't thought about it that way. and they're like, and they just needed someone to just like be there in loving attention. Same thing goes for ourselves. Like loving attention can like solve a lot of shit. Oftentimes I see people have this recognition in our work where they'll whatever they'll pop through something.

1:50:43They'll be like, oh my god. And then the first thing they go is how do I keep it? That's the exact wrong question. How do I keep it is sane that I am scared that it's going to go away. It's like, and then like, how is that going to help you? Instead of like, oh, I'm so grateful for this moment. Let me land it in my body. Let me really feel this. What does this mean for my life? Let me absorb it. Let me digest it. How am I going to keep it? And it's back to me driving the thing. And we're instead of just being in loving attention of the thing itself. What else is there to say around shame? The emotional stagnation piece is really important.

1:51:27It is an emotion that stagnates like the rest of the emotions is the way that I see it. So, and it's also, this gets on a touchy subject, but you know, you have that podcast on morality recently, which kind of dovetails into it.

1:51:50So, let's distinguish guilt and shame guilt being. I've done something that I'm not proud of that doesn't feel right in my system and I don't want to do it again. And shame is there's something fucking wrong with me. I'm like, I'm bad as a human being. I'm broken. I'm flawed or something like that. Um,

1:52:10shame, when you feel like you're flawed, then how do you fix yourself? Like it's like, like there's, it really slows the entire process down and then you're ashamed of all the emotional experiences or some of the emotional experiences that you have so you don't, you can't let them move and therefore you can't get to clarity. And so it's a shame is that shame is, on the mental level, on the prefrontal cortex level, it's negative self -talk. On the heart level, it's a stagnation of emotion on a gut level. I'm not safe. And you're basically, if you're constantly being attacked in the head, then your nervous system never feels safe.

1:52:49You know, you fucking need to work harder. Does not make the human body feel safe. And therefore, you're never in that place of renewal where you can actually rest and recover and therefore grow and be all nourished and transformed. Like you know, with working out, you need both the effort and the rest. You don't work the same muscle group out every day because it doesn't work as well. And so it's the same thing you need that rest. And so that's what's happening on the shame. It's the those three things and that's how they hit in the different categories of the of the mind or however you want to call it.

1:53:27Yeah, it's very interesting that some of the people have got the most admirable lives, have the least admirable internal states, that people who are unbelievably successful in sort of worldly ways, if you were actually given the opportunity to trade and you knew the full price that you would have to pay in order to be them, it's probably one that you wouldn't put the bill for, even if the benefit was a billion dollars fortune. Yeah. And then we make a story that we need to be that neurotic and fucked up to be successful because some successful people are that. But it's, I definitely know a lot of successful people who aren't like that.

1:54:13So it's also, there's a false narrative that that's a price you have to pay typically. And it's just like a great way for the voice in the head to justify itself. How do you think about the tension or the relationship between self -improvement and finding out who you are? I think the tension isn't there. I think if you find out who self -realization leads just to evolution. There's no, like you can't not do that. When you see that the voice in the head is not you. when you see the thing that you see for a second when you ask what's looking out behind my eyes. When you see that, there's a lot of certain amount of fear is going to drop away, which is going to help you evolve in a more quicker, more enjoyable way as an example.

1:55:09There's no way, Sam Harris is not like he has not improved. and he's done all this self -awareness stuff. I'm sure we could say, how have all the ways your life gotten better and he could tell you what they are? So I don't think there's a dichotomy. I just think if it's like, if I'm playing music and I focus on, I wanna really impress people and be great at music, I am not gonna make as much progress in my music as if I say I wanna get lost in it or I want to be the best rapper Or if I have something that's beyond, like I have a goal beyond the music, right? The best people, the people who make the most, most successful businesses aren't doing it because they want to make money.

1:55:55They're doing it because they have a vision or they want to win or they want to be, like they want to compete. They have something that's beyond the money and the money is just a necessary aspect to their particular form of art. Same thing. If we want to be really successful at understanding ourselves or having more peace or joy or whatever the thing underneath self improvement is, you're going to get there quicker, not by saying, how do I improve my, wrong and how do I improve myself? You're going to get there quicker by how do I understand myself? You're going to get there quicker by how do I fall in love with myself?

1:56:32Those, there's just, just better approaches. You can, you can make some progress the other way. It don't get me wrong. It's just not as efficient. And your definition of efficiency, again, is return on energy, joy during the process. Yet it's interesting with the efficiency point. You know that eyes and how are matrix, you probably come across this. I don't. So it's a way that you can probably, you can look at tasks. So you have things that are important, not important, urgent and not urgent. Yeah, it's a matrix that you can come up with. And as far as I can tell, people are continually being pushed into the urgent more and more and more, which by design pushes you away from the important.

1:57:19That's not to say that urgent things can't also be important, but that they tend to, the urgent stuff tends to be urgent in and of itself, and it's like important, necessary, but not sufficient in order to be able to get yourself through. So... don't dopamine addiction is a huge part of that too. It's like that crazy. I see people do this all the time. It's like they want to press enter it so that the email is done enter, enter, enter, enter, enter. But everyone, every email, if you would have put a little more thought or consideration, not delegated the thought or whatever it is, you would have twice as few emails.

1:57:57But you're so into the enter, enter, enter, enter. Yeah, that's interesting that we almost create our renegent environment. Correct. In that way. Yeah, and go back to, I'm thinking a lot about this at the moment, sort of going slower to go fast. So I've had to put a ton of stuff on hold because the level of complexity that was happening kind of internally with the show and I've got this product that I'm trying to release and there's a live tour happening at the end of the year and there's a book happening next year and all of this stuff. It's like, I can continue to spin all of these plates, but they're likely one of them dropping and the pain that I go along the way.

1:58:34Okay, so I needed to kick the book another year down the road, paused a ton of stuff that I was working on. And I was like, I just want to really enjoy the show. I really want to have fun when I have these conversations. And I don't want to turn up having just been on five calls back to back and then this Slack thing and then I'll get a couple of emails in and then I'll read the guest's book and then I'll go and I'll do the episode. So then I'll get straight back out, because I've got that call to do that. It's like, this is not for this, not fucking, like it's not what I want to do. So that's required everything to basically stop that isn't just show and now rebuild all of the operations from the ground floor up so that everything runs nice and smoothly and that's important.

1:59:15It wasn't urgent. It was never going to be urgent, but eventually it would have been one of those things that some Fisher would have been cracked through and a huge fucking explosion and I would have had a mental breakdown. down and I still may. But yeah, thinking an awful lot about trying to prioritize the important over the urgent, and it feels like what you were talking about there, this sort of, you can brute force your way through this. You can grip really, really tightly. And sure, maybe you'll get some great outcomes, but they're going to be less efficient in terms of return on energy and enjoyment.

1:59:48They're going to be less effective, and you're probably going to be way more miserable the whole way. And like, what's the point? Like, just be in an enjoyable emotional state the whole time in any case. So the quicker route to doing all of those things is to just focus on the important stuff in any case. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the other cool thing about enjoyment is that if I, so I do this thing in enjoyment called the five star meeting. And so I ask all my executives to wreck every one of their meetings, one to five stars based on how much energy it gave them. And then once they've on that for a week, the job is to make sure that you have a week in the next month or two where all of your meetings are five -star meetings.

2:00:29The two things that it does is one, it usually halves the amount of meetings they have, which is fascinating. But the other things that it does is it shows them every single place that their company is having issues. Because that's the symptom. A bad meeting is the symptom of... So just in... So it's the same thing. It's like, oh, you could see in the future and say, oh, this isn't going to be enjoyable. This is, you know, so what do I have to do? And what you said was, oh, I have to make sure I've got a good foundation. And so you're actually building the capacity for a bigger, longer term, more sustainable success.

2:01:08And you don't, you get that from enjoyment. You get that from like, oh, was that an enjoyable, how will I make this enjoyable for me? Is there an equivalent of the five -star meeting experiment for people's personal lives? That's a great question. I mean, the 10 % better. I don't... No, I don't have one because it's like... So the thing about a company is that there's really only two things a company has. They have the relationships in the company and they have the ideas that come from the company. So the atomic structure is meetings and decision making. And it's those two things. If you get those two things right, your company's gonna be fine.

2:01:46But I don't know what that atomic structure would be for a personal life. That's a great question. I definitely think about it. Thank you for that question. It's great. You've mentioned a couple of times, so it danced around the word of accomplishment, but it's been interested in the title of art of accomplishment. Yeah. Is accomplishment an art?

2:02:10Yeah, there's this great saying that the peak of a businessman's career, he's a poet and the peak of a poet's career, he's a businessman, have you ever heard that? No. I love that. I don't know who to put that to. It's told to me by my friend, Steve. I love that quote. And so you can get things done in a lot of ways. You can build a house in a lot of ways. but if you do it in an artistic way, there's just a lot of joy and pleasure. The reason we titled it this way was because I really, I was really interested in teaching self -realization or self -development, whatever you want to call it. But I wanted it to be really applied, because that was my journey.

2:02:57Like I was, I sat for eight years in a room meditating. And at some point I like had no money. I'd gone into debt. I was like $40 ,000 in debt, living in the shithole and silver like Los Angeles. And I was like, I would time to have a family and was married. I'm like, okay, well I got it. And I knew that I would fail at whatever I did if it wasn't about self discovery. And so I became a venture capitalist and did that for 15 years and I ran this philanthropic organization and I needed to find how each of these things would help me become more self -aware. The business was a form of self -discovery that I needed that.

2:03:41And what I found out was that, I mean, the Tibetans call it skillful means, but what I found out is that I sold better if the person I was selling to or I fundraised better, if the two of us were like learning about ourselves in the process, there was connection instead of perfection. And if I had a connection, it worked better. And I found out if I connected to people better, there was like more better product that was created. And I all of a sudden I learned that like all these business tools, if you use them as a form of self discovery, become better business tools. And they also help you learn about yourself.

2:04:17And so it was incredibly rewarding for me. And so I wanted our organization to be practical. I wanted it, I wanted you to be able to walk away with tools that not only helped you understand yourself better, but helped you build businesses that were going to be more successful and create actually fulfillment instead of just a shit storm of bigger problems. Yeah, I really appreciate the fact that you guys get tactical with it. But I think there's a big transition happening at the moment with online content. I think we're out of kind of the first wave of personal development information on the internet.

2:04:58I think that maybe you could have said that sort of Tony Robbins and that kind of era, late, not early sort of teens. And then, but the real big wave, I think that hit a lot of people was more Jordan Peterson, and I landed a button from the School of Life. It was that kind of wave that really sort of opened people's eyes to, oh my God, there's, you know, sort of valid philosophical insights out there, which are imbued with meaning and seem to be timeless and evergreen, you know, like different people, different perspectives or whatever. But largely, pick your favorite fucking wisdom dispenser of choice.

2:05:33Like, there's someone said something over the last 10 years that's gone like, oh my God, that's how I see myself in the world. And that's great. but there's definitely been because lots of this stuff can sound fantastic, but never actually get stress tested in the real world. What it allows is for a lot of sort of fluffy aphorisms to sweep through and a cool insight that doesn't... Okay, that sounds great, but like, does this grow any fucking corn? Like, show me what this does and how do I make it do it to me? So I think we are... And this is happening in many, many areas, we're moving away from the Mr.

2:06:09Beastification of YouTube, I think there's much more strip back approach when it comes to vlogging, relatability, authenticity that people are trying to really tap into is all a huge revolution. It's a counter movement away from what we had before, which was more polished. It didn't feel quite as raw and it wasn't as spit and sodas. You couldn't sort of grab it with your hands. So the fact that you've got questions to ask yourself like that like you know How could this be 10 % more enjoyable like what a lovely you know? That's a tactical thing one of my favorite ones was I'm realizing that you never focus on the peripherals of your vision This is your inside of the ear you've given me the auditory equivalent of this that you're looking at stuff the entire time But if you just take a tiny little second and realize I've got all of this vision out here and it immediately down regular by like 10 or 20 It's crazy how much that opens up.

2:07:07And I was like, fuck, I love those practices. And those have been things. There were the things that were the most meaningful and impactful to me when I first started doing this. And I think that there's a huge gap. I think what you're doing, this blending of, you know, like robust evidence -backed insights about human nature with a little bit of art, but then just really getting straight into the tactical stuff. I think that's where things are moving. I think that's what people want, not platitudes. Yeah, I think that the one of the reasons it's effective, especially with like the experimental philosophy that we go for is at some point in the development of a human, it's really important to realize that you have a choice.

2:07:51As an example, I have a choice. It gives me a sense of empowerment and agency. At some point, it's really important to realize I don't have a choice. I can't even decide what fucking my next thought is. It's all been a fucking gift. It's all been a, I can't even, I wasn't in control of all of it. And this is just an amazing gift for me. One platitude's gonna hit one person. One platitude's gonna hit another person. But if you give them an experiment to run and you let them discover that for themselves, it's gonna land in their body, they're gonna see the thing, it's gonna be visceral and it's gonna actually move them through.

2:08:30Anything else is just like, it's like a short term of piphany. It's kind of the sugar of self -awareness instead of the, oh, I put this in my body, I've tried it. Neurishing meal. Exactly. Yeah. But it's really good for flipping through YouTube. Yeah, well dude, I've contributed my fair share of watch hours to that stuff. But I think that, you know, that is, there's only so many different modalities that you can do that are really impactful and that you can do for free on your own with it. Like there's not endless number of those, but there are a lot of insights that spoken at the right time in the right way will hit with somebody that's different.

2:09:14So, you know, I'm all for aphorism porn as as much as it needed. I'm, you know, I'm consciously making an effort myself to try and find tactical a tactical things to rely on. So it's gone through a few, in spirit of that, we've gone through a bunch of interesting questions today. What are some things that people can go away with in terms of little questions that they can ask themselves? We can recap some of the stuff that you've already said or anything that you think is a rely on an awful lot. What should people leave with? Yes, so just on the stuff that we've covered already, changed the way you responded of the voice in your head, do that experiment and change every week the way you respond to the voice in your head.

2:09:54That would just actually respond to the voice in your head. It's a really good one. And how do I enjoy things 10 % more? The best way to do that is there's an app called YAP and you set a reminder. I don't have any sound on my phone except for YAP. And so when I run an experiment with myself, I will use that as a reminder and be like, oh, and then I ask that question. So it's really good if you find a concrete way to remind yourself of the question. Other cool thing and then the other one that we did was just ask yourself who's looking out behind these eyes like on a regular basis like in the middle of conversation that's a really good one.

2:10:33Other experiments to run I literally have like a hundred. One of the ones that I find really effective is and we have a like we do a workshop on this and we have a podcast so it's really easy to have all free. And it's due a gratitude practice with a friend every day seven minutes. So it's saying out loud what you're grateful for back and forth. And but do it from the feeling of gratitude. You have to feel the gratitude and then speak from the gratitude rather than I'm going to think of something I'm grateful for and say it. So So it's an emotional experience and you move it that way. Particularly if there's people who are like having struggles with money, it's really effective to be grateful for all the physical stuff, like all the materialistic stuff you have in the world.

2:11:24The reason that this is such a great practice, one is usually we solve problems with what's wrong, how do we fix it, rather than what's right and how do I grow it? What's right, how do I grow it is half of the solution set. And so really, really effective way of approaching your life. Secondly, it changes who you think you are. So if I'm walking around constantly going, I don't have enough of this. I don't have enough of this. I'm not working hard enough. Then I walk around with a lack, which is why there's like many billionaires that you and I have spoken to that are walking around going, I still don't have enough because, but if you can actually define yourself as what, like, oh, I'm the person who has all this shit, then you change the way that you approach the world and you change who you think you are.

2:12:13Is it incredibly effective? If you actually have the felt sense of it rather than just the words, incredibly effective. I have been pretty sort of open about doing a lot of gratitude journaling, maybe, fucking hell, 12, 12, six month gratitude journals filled in in some house in you cuss or somewhere, but absolutely if I look back on that, so much of it is me just answering a question. It's like, okay, I've got to get up and here's the thing and I've got to do it. And one of my great -for -for today, I had a nice morning walk and I do the thing. And it's like, it's just another thing on the task to do as opposed to the actual goal, which is to fucking feel the gratitude.

2:12:51Exactly. The goal was not to write a list of three a day for like fucking six years. Like how exactly that is, like, a number of... And that wasn't the goal. And if you do it with somebody else, then you get the mirror neuron action of them feeling the gratitude, you feeling the gratitude is just nice. It's important to do in person rather than over the film. Zoom works really well. Okay. But you want to see the person. Yeah. You want to have the, you want to have the shared emotional experience and you want to like vibe off of each other. It's like the difference between playing tennis and playing against a wall.

2:13:23It's just, I'm going to guess that silence is okay. If you're not going to just be able to spontaneously feel and come up with stuff like bing bing bing thing, thing, thing. Yeah, silence is really important. Savoring the gratitude is really important. Taking your time is really important and feeling the gratitude before you speak. Those are all parts of the things. We have instructions on it that I think you can find in our website instructions for. But that's a really incredibly powerful one. Another one, if you find yourself like just at the beginning of the emotional stage, then And just being able to label the emotions that you're having five times a day.

2:14:04What's the emotional experience I'm having right now and checking in and just doing that process can be incredibly useful for folks. Just being able to label and the weird thing is that we've never had the same emotional experience twice, meaning like it's always nuanced, it's always different. And so some people will not even be able to, they can't identify how they feel. They're like, I don't know, I feel fine. I feel good. That's the thing. So a trick to that is you can make the sound. Like how do you feel? Like that's actually the feeling, a better representation of the feeling than I feel slightly disappointed with 10 % whatever.

2:14:47So but to actually like make a sound or label the emotion that you're having like five, 10 times a day is a great way to start the emotional awareness process just to like, oh, I, this thing is controlling me, at least I should be aware of what, what is controlling me. Um, so, or it's, it maybe controls not the right word, but you know, it's, it's, it's influencing me and I should know how it's influencing me. So that's another great experience. Go, go, go and go and stand next to a horse. Yes. Exactly. Realize that you have or baby, fucking irrational desire for the horse to like you.

2:15:27Joe, dude, let's let's bring this one into land. I really love your work. I think that what you're doing is genuinely novel. And I'm so glad that my friend Charlie introduced me to what it is that you guys do. Everyone's going to be interested to keep up to date with all of this stuff. You've got going on. Where should they go? Art of accomplishment .com or view .life slash modern wisdom. One word will be a great way for them to find out what we're doing. Oh, yeah. And there's all sorts of, just by the way, we have a podcast on a whole, we have like in a hundred episodes on different topics, we have a shit ton of experiments you can access.

2:16:01We have like we, we're really trying to give a tremendous amount of free stuff out there because we want it to be accessed by everybody, including five free workshops, one like on gratitude. So there's all sorts of ways that you can participate for no money. Hell yeah, well I'll I'm keen to bring you back on to talk about your view framework And there's probably like a million other things that we need to talk about as well But for now dude, I really appreciate you. Thank you so much. What a pleasure. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you very much Here we have the Lemo Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their core insurance and save hundreds with liberty mutual Fascinating.

2:16:42It's accompanied by his natural ally Doug. Uh, Lemoo? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual .com. Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and Affiliates excludes Massachusetts.