Joe Hudson: How your Emotions Drive your Success & Fulfillment

people who are just like I'm just in it for the money they're never hyper successful and they're never long-term successful they might get the money no doubt but their process of getting to that money is incredibly hard what you're about to hear is an interview that I've just wrapped with the incredible Joe Hudson now Joe is a former venture capitalist turned philanthropist who is now the executive coach to some of silicon Valley's most famous and Rich Executives and CEOs the search for purpose assumes that you weren't born with it and so it chases it away so emotional decision making is it's actually what drives us we're all having emotions all the time there is no waking moment where an emotion isn't happening the question is are we conscious of the emotion so in the conversation we talk about the relationship between success money fulfillment we turn into talking about emotions and how to feel emotions and emotional fluidity we do a little bit of kind of therapy for me around like my fear of reading negative reviews of my book and seeing negative comments and what that says about feelings and emotions and ego and all that fun stuff we talk a little about parenting which is kind of interesting and we end with some thoughts about what are the key differences between people who are successful and happy versus people who are successful and unhappy we only get triggered at the stuff that we actually think is true about ourselves oh yeah being able to take an attack and learn to keep an open heart destroys the ego Joe Hudson welcome to the podcast how are you doing I'm doing well good to see you again likewise thank you so much for coming on yeah of course um for people who might not know who you are how how how do you describe what you do for work that's an incredibly challenging question for when you really get into it but the short answer is that I coach some of the most famous CEOs in Silicon Valley and Executives and across the country yeah nice so what does that mean for for someone who doesn't know what coach means like how would you describe how you how you work with them and what what sort of companies are these what sort of CEOs yeah so the the the way that I do the work is that well I was a venture capitalist for years and so I will work on business things with them but often times the thing that's holding them back from business is holding them back in other parts of their life and so we're going to dig into what that is and solve the underlying problems not just the top level problems of the business got it so typically if I can see somebody who is having a problem in one part of their business you can usually find something in their personal life that corresponds to it something that happened in their childhood that corresponds to it and when you can tie that pattern together and undo it then the business frees up and then they free up and they're more fulfilled happier how how how does that link work because you would assume let's let's say someone like Elon Musk maybe he's got problems in his personal life but his businesses are flourishing so like how how do problems in a CEO's personal life end up manifesting in the business oh I mean there's every dozens of ways and so yeah so you can be absolutely miserable and have a successful uh career for sure uh but what typically happens and there's some you know hyper successful people where this is slightly different but what typically happens is that at some point they wake up at like 40 years old they're like oh I have a billion dollars and I'm [ __ ] miserable and I'm getting divorced and it's very public and I'm getting lots of money taken from me from my wife or or I'm like losing half my fortune and blah blah blah blah blah and the board doesn't like me and now they're trying to find another CEO and all that stuff kind of falls apart for them that's clearly not for all of them but that's a typical thing where they have gotten this success and then they realize they got everything they wanted but they didn't actually get what they needed yeah okay so one of the things that I wanted to talk about in this episode was how do you get worldly success but at the same time while also being emotionally and spiritually and like personally and relationally fulfilled yeah and it sounds like that's the sort of thing you kind of help these like ridiculously Rich massive company CEOs with that's correct or in some cases I help people grow massively successful companies so it's some of them I've worked with when they're smaller and then they've grown into something amazing and sometimes it's I'm working with somebody who's already doing something amazing okay um so so generally I think about it like this in like the 1970s you could either be a businessman or you could be an environmentalist and you couldn't be both and somewhere in the '90s they like Walmart as an example said oh hey we can actually help the environment and still be like a great successful company and Lee Scott who was a CEO of the time said when he did it it was like sweeping thousand bills off the floor and so an example that he gave which I loved was he we asked the employees hey how do we help the environment some kid in a break room said hey I have an idea why don't you take the lights out of the coke machines in the break rooms of Walmart savings to Walmart was $1.5 million a year at the time with electricity prices is probably more like 3 million now so J that's an example of where where that transition happened where you can either be a businessman or an environmentalist to where we you can actually be both and I think the same transition is happening in our society now you can be a successful businessman and not be fulfilled and you know do things that just feel horrible to you but at least you have the success that you think is going to make you happy or you can do both and if you're going to do both what you find out is it actually makes you more successful it's like sweeping thousand bills off the floor oh so it's the exact same thing when you really figure it out so an example of this is if you focus say on your own enjoyment in a company where you say oh how do I sell not just to be effective but so that I can enjoy it and be effective then you're going to be a better salesperson and then if you're just thinking about being effective yeah and so it's an amazing thing where you know I I'm thinking of one in particular right now where it's it's this beautiful thought process he's like I don't know can you be happy and run a company and I was like you thought it was possible to real build like a 10 billion dollar company and you can't like conceive of the fact that you can do it while you're happy which is really more about their upbringing typically than it is about what reality is yeah yeah so I I love this concept of you know the there was a line you threw out at this Retreat a couple couple of days ago which is enjoyment is efficiency yes and I thought that was super interest so so so my book is literally called Feelgood productivity and it's about this exact thing about how actually by focusing on enjoying the process uh and finding ways to to have fun you actually become more productive more creative less stressed and we dove into some of the research around that correct but even as someone who literally has it on my I literally have an iPhone wallpaper that says what would this look like if it were fun I still don't take the idea itself that seriously because in my mind there's always the sense of like well I could do the thing that's fun or I could do the thing that makes money right and that often takes me in like a weird puts me in this weird like fork in the road where I then have to think okay so if I I I I have to be okay with leaving money on the table then in order to enjoy my YouTube channel and yeah I guess I'm okay with a couple million a year in profit but like if I grow the business then it's going to make things less fun for me and I have all this narrative around surely success and like worldly success and money can't actually come from enjoyment even though I've literally like written the book about it and I'm like this it's kind of weird so a couple things to think think about the metaphor I love is that I had a girlfriend in college and she used to play tennis and she would serve and hit you very well and the coach put out the basket that you collect balls in and she said serve and hit it and so she would serve and hit it and she'd hit it four out of five times and then he took the basket away he put a quarter in the middle and he said servant hit it and she didn't hit the quarter once but if you put the basket on top of it she would have hit it five out of five times and so highly successful people none of them are in it to make a billion dollars none of them are in it to make a billion dollars they're in it maybe to prove that they're smarter than everybody to win a game to save the world to better the world to to get to space whatever it is they have some Vision about how they're going to do something that's really that isn't about the money and the money is like the the pigment uh that a painter would use or an instrument that a that a a a guitar player would use it's it is the means to an end and so if you think about that for a second that people who are just like I'm just in it for the money they're never hyper successful and they're never long-term successful they might get the money no doubt but but their process of getting to that money is incredibly hard and so if you just look like Bill Gates it wasn't like I want to be the richest guy in the world it was I wanted to build this I wanted to win blah blah blah so it's a similar deal with enjoyment if you have a goal that's beyond the making of money that is how you actually become hypers successful that is the quarter in the middle of the basket so that when you serve you hit it because typically the way that humans work is when they get to the goal they have this feel they feel good for a moment they don't feel good because they hit their goal they feel good because there's nothing that they have to want for a moment so they can just actually enjoy the moment they're like oh okay and then immediately this this new goal comes in and so getting to goal actually creates a lot of anxiety for people so oh my I got to get to a goal I got to get to a goal there's anxiety that and then it's like and so you can if you ever play like a sport like tennis or anything like that it's like game point all of a sudden there's more pressure and you don't play quite as well you get in your head it's that same thing so if you create the goal Beyond money and it's actually your true goal then the money kind of is part of getting to the actual goal Which is far beyond and you don't have that anxiety of like oh my God the money's going to go away oh my God I got to have the money that pushes money away just like if if I was with you if I was like oh my God you're going to go away oh my God I I don't know what if I have to keep you here like what do I have to say all of a sudden you don't want to be around me that would just [ __ ] suck like so it's the same same thing in our life okay so let's say someone's listening to this and you know we have a lot of let's say people in their uh mid to late 20s who are maybe kind of fairly early on in their career and they realized that they hat they hate their job and therefore they they discover Ali abdal on YouTube or the Deep di podcast and they're like oh there's this path that you can start a business to make money and then you can quit your job one day which was sort of what I did in a somewhat roundabout way with medicine yes and a lot of content on YouTube is focused on the money goal how to make your first 10,000 a month a lot of the videos that we title because we AB test titles and we realize that when you put how to make $10,000 a month as the title people click on it yes whereas if you put how to build a business you enjoy no one's going to click on that like we actually tried that we we like we we tried a video which was all about how to have a business you enjoy and absolutely tanked and we just changed the title to how to make your first 10K and boom suddenly it went viral right right so a lot of people are focused on the goal of making money which is why a lot of people are poor oh tell me more well it's just that like if you really want to be rich go read birkshire Hathaway books and study how the people became very wealthy became wealthy like that's how like a a 10,000 how to make $10,000 in video like in general what that means is I want to want to be rich I don't actually want to be rich I I am I'm identified with the wanting to be rich oh one day I'll be able to make it one day I'll get my dad's love one day I'll be able to feel safe but it's you're actually identified in the in the grasping of it you're not identified in the having of it but if I don't have the thing how can I identify in the having of the thing without yeah so this is a great great example so one of the tricks that I will teach people about getting a like stuff in their life that that is so they're like I don't have stuff I'm poor I need stuff that's what they're thinking they are and then that's what they are whereas if they do gratitude every day for all the crap that they do have like look at everything that I mean wow I can go out and eat I can get a cup of coffee I have like the ability to go to the school or I I have blah blah blah and you start identifying yourself as somebody who has stuff and if you do that on a regular basis like a deep gratitude practice ice where you emotionally feel it everybody I've ever seen who does that with some discipline they start accumulating wealth because they identify as the person with something instead of as the person who doesn't have something yeah yeah one of the things I've often heard from um kind of successful entrepreneurs on this podcast is that if you focus on being of service and providing value to others the money just sort of takes care of itself yes and people who haven't been through that process just will think that that's total yes corre because we still have this Narrative of like I can either do good or I can make money right that's the quarter in the middle of the basket for them being of service is a great quarter it feels really good it allows you to feel like fulfilled for most people it makes them feel fulfilled but some people their quarter is just winning or their quarter is going to space or whatever it is but the money just takes care of itself when you have a focus Beyond making the money okay yeah so how how would you go about identifying what that true goal is yeah so that's a really interesting thing the search for purpose which is something that happens for a lot of people in their 20s particularly like 27 to like 30 there's like this crazy search for purpose that happens um the search for purpose assumes that you weren't born with it yep and so it chases it away it's like being a jealous lover right if I'm a jealous lover one thing I'm like I want you I want you I want you I'm also pushing you away because I'm being a dick right so like this is the movement is the same movement when trying to find a purpose if you're like oh I have to search for a purpose you're actually pushing it away rather than saying oh I'm living my purpose naturally if you just naturally look with the books you read if you just naturally look at the things that turn you on that excite you purpose is kind of someone thinks purpose is like a career often but purpose is how you do stuff as much as what you do I can find purpose in a lot of things anything where I feel like I'm contributing to humans feeling um getting to know themselves understanding themselves becoming more authentic is incredibly fulfilling for me and so I can do that working at the post office or I can do that doing what I do obviously I'm going to be more fulfilled doing what I do because I get to do more of it but you can find your purpose just in any interaction like what's the interaction how are you doing this interaction what's important to you about the interaction that's in your purpose but to go out and search for it it basically has no faith in it and it pushes it away one thing I've heard from a from a lot of people is you know around this idea of hey you know one approach to the purpose thing is like oh let me go out there and find it the other approach is sort of maybe what you're talking about is you know what are the things I find myself naturally drawn to and naturally doing that feel fulfilling yes some sometimes sometimes I'll I'll say this because i' I've heard other people say and I'll say in like a video or a Q&A or something and the response will be something like but what if I'm 25 I've got my job I hate my job and all I do in the evenings is watch Netflix and like I don't I don't feel like I have the thing that all these other people seem to have that draws them towards this purpose I would say oh so when you were 15 years old all you had was parents that you didn't like that you didn't want to have to deal with and all you had was Netflix and you're just recreating that with your job that's what I would say to them I would say that typically when somebody's like oh I hate my job I or I hate Authority or I hate the fact that I'm you know oppressed by this economic blah blah blah typically that is a reflection of the relationship with their parents okay so as an example for me my personal story in this I remember I was a venture capitalist and I wasn't particularly successful at the moment I was young in my career and I was reading this story about a guy who is like a peer of mine who'd become a billionaire off of a single like the The Venture Capital company didn't want to make the investment he made the investment it was one of the most successful things ever to hit Silicon Valley became a billionaire 2 years later boom and I felt like a kick in my stomach just cool and I was like what what is that so I felt it and then I just let my body tell me when the first time I felt that was and I was like oh that's the feeling I had like trying to obtain my dad's love which I wasn't able to do and and I was like oh my relationship with my with money is a lot like my relationship with dad like it's like I just transplanted a relationship because my dad wasn't around anymore I was like boom we're just going to put money onto that thing and so oftentimes money for me it was Dad but oftentimes money is a projection of something that happened in your childhood something that you needed that you had to like there's some people like in like a lot of investment bankers it was like if I perform then I will get love and so it's like if I perform then I will get money and then there's the people like I can't do anything to get the love I can't do anything to get the money some people it's like I'm oppressed by that person's love and so I'm oppressed by the money and so a lot of times money is just the projection that we put on to it it's not actually what we think it is yeah because I guess you know a few a few years ago if i' if I'd have known the the financial position I'd be in now I would be like oh my goodness like you never have to work again you're so rich and stuff but now I'm I'm now I'm thinking well how do we grow our business from 5 million to 10 million yeah and there's part of me that feels the part of me that's like the reason I want to do that is just just for fun because I enjoy the game of Entrepreneurship but there is a part of me that's like oh but I feel like I still don't quite have enough and I kind of still feel like I need a bit more but then I speak to people who have like 250 million in the back and they also feel that thing that they need a bit more what's what's going on there yeah so so my my story was somewhat similar I was like interacting with a couple billionaires at this time and I was driving a car and I I I wasn't interacting them as a coach it was like very early in my life and I was driving a car and I was thinking about all the [ __ ] that I didn't have and how much more I needed and I was like you know the billionaires I know they think the same way huh I'm having the same experience as a billionaire yeah and I was like this moment where I kind of saw through the veil for a minute of like oh there's no way that this satisfies me there's no way that this can satisfy me and when I recognized that that's actually when money started flooding into my world now there's a lot of ways to get money to flood into your world but it flooded into my world in a way that was like incredibly enjoyable and not something like I was striving to get so that one day I could be happy and that's the that I think that's the main thing is that it's a carrot on a stick that never actually fulfills yeah but being fulfilled actually gets you money yeah because people want to be around people who are fulfilled yeah like oh you come you let's say You're A salesperson and you feel fulfilled you like the people around who are you're selling to are like oh I want to be around that person because he feels fulfilled or whatever it is you're doing so it's actually a superpower and it helps you make money instead of the reverse which is one day once I get it I can yeah yeah this is what often doesn't sit right with me about some of the content I see on YouTube around how to make money which is like hey you know it's 2024 AI is a thing so like do an AI whatever or it's 2021 start a social media marketing agency right yeah and I'm always like the the the goal like for for people who like I I see this a lot in people who try starting YouTube channels for the money it's never going to work if you start a YouTube channel for the money but weirdly if you start a YouTube channel to share a passion of yours that can add value to other people's lives the money is more likely to follow and you can't guarantee how much money it is but you know AEL I often give to people is if you make a video every week for 2 years enjoy the process along the way and try and get a little bit better each time I guarantee it'll change your life yes I can't put numbers on it but trust me it's going to change your life and I do not know a single person who has actually done that for two years whose life hasn't been changed right exactly but then it's like because the I guess because it's uncertain and isn't a clear cause and effect like direct relationship especially for people who you know like I grew up in a very sort of academic chasing kind of environment where it's like I should only do a thing if it's good for the CV right and then that approach it's like you can't see directly how focusing on enjoyment or focusing on building a business you love is going to translate to financial success therefore you think it's not possible okay so so let's just and so there's a lot of myth there so I want to dispel like a couple ways to dispel that myth the first one is if you go to a high-end real estate agent and you say who are your clientele they're going to tell you the same thing that the economist is going to tell you it's like 15% of them are doctors lawyers high paid people working for somebody yep CEOs Executives something like that the rest of them are entrepreneurs so CVS it's like right best case scenario you're going to be like a lawyer who's going to make less than you make as a YouTuber so the the entrepreneurs are the wealth creators I mean even The Inheritance it's like that inheritance worldwide is something like 15% or 10% and the rest of it is entrepreneurs and so it does like the whole CV thing it's just a a a like how do I stay safe it's just a freaking question of like can I stay safe can my kid be safe is everybody safe like that's all that really is a question of it's not and especially in the world of a I would call it just the opposite which is like how many lawyers are going to be needed in when AI develops by five or doctors or right so we there it's like stocks and bonds stocks feel like they're scary because they go up and down quickly bonds don't feel scary but then they just crash and you get like a massive recession so I feel like it's that it's just a way of looking at risk but the other piece that I would say is like you can look out any window anywhere and you can see thousands of ways that people made money the window itself the Argon gas inside the window the the the glass making company the fuel that made the glass the electricity that you're seeing out the road sign the every one of those things somebody made money doing and most of them multiple people made money there was a person who installed the roads sign there was the person who made the steel there was the person who painted the roadside there's all those companies so the idea that money is scarce is ridiculous it is all over the place it is it is just the thinking that is constricted it is not like a some shortage of it and so how to make money when somebody says to me here's how you make money doing this specific thing nine times out of 10 they're making money on me by training me to do that specific thing it's not actually and and there may be a way to make money doing that and they might have done it and they might actually want to share but there's also a way for them to be making money doing it yeah but there is a way to make money doing anything in the world and so money is doing Business and Entrepreneurship for me is far more of an art form than it is um than is so if you're playing I we talked about this for a second but if you're playing music then you have to have notes if you're you can do anything you can plant trees as an entrepreneur you can cut them down as an entrepreneur you can take guns off the street as an entrepreneur you can manufacture guns as an entrepreneur anything you want to do you get to do it's an expression of who you are and when you align that when you say oh making money isn't something I have to do to be me making money is an expression of me then things smooth out considerably oh nice nice That's good um so you've got an 18-year-old daughter who's just going off to college very shortly yeah yeah yeah um how are you thinking about the whole balance between you know let's say she wanted to study I don't know history a lot of parents would be like well you can't do anything with a history degree other than be a history teacher and like yeah she wants oh not history but she Liars college so how do you how do you think about this balance between I want my daughter to have a financial safety net assuming you weren't rich and like I want her to follow her passion yeah kind of thing it's a great great question so uh my daughter uh this is a great story and I give it to any entrepreneur I'm going to tell it in a long waye uh the first one is I had a I had a barber and the the the barber was a painter and he was not able to sell his paintings and I said what's the problem goes I don't like getting rejected I said tell you what I'll give you $22,000 if you can get rejected 50 times in 6 months and now I'm the only person who hair he cuts because he sells paintings and it was just switching the idea that rejection was bad to rejection is good so I was sitting with my daughter one day she was a junior in high school she's now a senior just about to graduate and I said hey I noticed that you're really avoiding rejection and she said yeah I am I don't like the feeling I was like great so I'll give you $2,000 if you get 50 rejections she's like rejection of what I'm like I don't know what do you want to do she's like I want to go to Panama this summer or I want to go to some place speaking Spanish this summer and I want to study science I'm like cool like somewhere in the environment so I'm like cool so that's what I'll do you get 50 rejections so she started writing letters she wrote other letters and everything happened and she got this job in Panama on an island she got an apartment not like she made the job and by getting rejected tons of times and she was going to go out for like two months and except for the paper workk didn't come through and she's like I don't know what I'm going to do I'm like how many rejections have you had and she's like oh I've only had you know whatever was 30 I was like well you're not you didn't make the $2,000 and she like thought about it for a minute and so she ended up going to Sacramento sitting on the steps of like the capol building or one of the buildings there though she needed the paperwork and asked every person with a suit if they could help her get the paperwork done she got the rejections and she also got the signature that she needed and she ended up in Panama so what do I think about what college she goes to I don't think it matters at all that's what matters what matters is that she is willing to face that and be in herself while she faces rejection and goes after what she wants that's what's going to be successful it's not going to be a resume and I can how many entrepreneurs who didn't finish college Bill Gates Zuckerberg I mean Matt Mullen Wick there's just tons of them nice that's a great story I love that yeah we're just GNA take a little break from this conversation to talk about brilliant who are very kindly sponsoring this episode brilliant is an interactive platform where you learn by doing they've got thousands of lessons on maths data analysis programming and AI I've been using brilliant for The Last 5 Years and the thing I love most about brilliant is that they really focus on learning by doing in a very interactive sense rather than just consuming the content they've got a first 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don't really get the whole emotions thing and I don't I don't even know what I mean by that but okay what I think I mean by that is that there are some people in my life um who seem to feel a lot of things yes and then there's me and a small number of other people in my life who don't seem to not really feel things and when someone asks me how I'm feeling yes I kind of go a bit blank and I'm like I don't know fine I guess yeah and I did one of these like positive negative affect score thingies and I basically scored zero on propensity to feel prop propensity to feel negative emotions but I also scored fairly low on propensity to feel positive emotions yeah and this was in um the book that opro co-wrote with Arthur Brooks I think and it was sort of they called it the the judge archetype someone who has like low negative effect but also low positive lowish positive effect and so pretty tranquil most of the time Good Vibes yeah what am I missing about like what people are feeling with emotions and is it possible for someone who doesn't feel emotions very strongly to start then feeling emotions yeah so there's a lot of stuff and I want to transition with a story about money and emotions which I which I look um so my wife and I we do these um really intense executive Retreats for like 12 people it is really intense a lot of emotional movement uh we say no to a lot of people because of the intensity of it and when we're doing that we're working from 7:30 in the in the morning till about 10:30 at night 7 days it's exhausting people are crying getting angry all this stuff's happening and we're at the end of it we're tired and my wife and I were talking about how there was this trade that we could have made 10 years back that would have basically amounted for like $70 million and we were like oh What would life have been like we're just kind of contemplating it for a minute and we're like oh that would have been bad like we would have we would have stayed married I'm sure of it because like our dedication there but we might not have started this business like the coaching and the and the trainings and the facilitation and the classes and everything and so um and I asked her I said hey if somebody offered us a billion dollars for this business right now and the only caveat was that we couldn't compete we couldn't do anything in this field anymore would you take it and we both thought about it and then we both went and then we both looked at each other like yeah no we wouldn't we wouldn't do it came home told my youngest daughter about the Story 3 days later she comes over to me she's like I've been thinking about my billion dooll idea I'm like oh cool you want to make a billion dollars she's like no no no I want an idea so good that I wouldn't sell it for a billion dollars oh man that's good that's good I couldn't that's not a head decision that's an emotional decision that feeling of like oh my gosh like my head was like no of course sell it for a billion dollars right the emotion and so the reality is neurologic Ally speaking that if I took the emotional Center out of your brain you would like almost cease to make emotions your IQ would stay the same you could take an IQ test it'd be great but to it would take you a long time to decide what color pen to use it would take you a long time to decide where to have lunch to the point where your life would completely fall apart so we actually don't make logical decisions we use logic to decide what we think the emotional response of this situation will be we we use logic to decide what we think the emotional respons yeah like if we do this are we going to feel happy if we do this are we going to feel sad so think about like how much have you done to feel safe how much have you done to feel loved how much have you done not to feel like a failure how much have you done not to guilt your mom how much right how many right exactly so that's actually how we make decisions and logic is just being used to determine what how we're going to feel so and the way to think about this is like hey I'm going to tell you you're going to be homeless as it turns out you're going to be homeless the good news is you're going to [ __ ] love it it's going to feel so good every day you're going to be like this is the most amazing experience of my entire life I'm so grateful all of a sudden homeless doesn't sound so scary that sounds pretty good so so we're we're we're avoiding the emotional experience we're trying not to have and we're deciding to get to an emotional experience that's how our neurology works it's how our system works and so so emotional decision- making is it's actually what drives us so we're all having emotions all the time there is no waking moment where an emotion isn't happening the question is are we conscious of the emotion or are we not conscious of the emotion in my case I think I'm very not conscious of a lot of these emotions right cuz when you phrased it that way it's like oh yeah of course I started my first business to feel more safe and of course the YouTube channel was an out Outlet of that and of course there's some aspect of it some aspect of feeling loved that I get from uh nice comments and people coming up to me saying you changed my life and it's like all all of these are feelings that I'm I'm like the the feeling is almost the goal right and the thing that I do to get to the feeling happens to be the YouTube channel or the podcast or the whatever thing is exactly so when you think about it that way so if you take a kid and you've been physically abused as as an adult you put a quarter in one hand and a key in another hand they won't be able to tell you which one is which even though you and I would because we haven't been physically beaten so the way it works is that we stop feeling the stuff that hurts too much right that's that's the way the neurology goes and so if it was really hard to feel emotions if emotions weren't safe if you were if love was removed if you were ostracized for emotions we just stopped feeling them and we started to contain them it requires musculature holding it requires different things to happen to the body it's uncomfortable and so there is a natural progress of like how do we start to learn to feel our emotions again and then how do we express those emotions and then how do we get to fluidity with those emot emotions and that process is amazingly useful in life it's like a big part of everything that I do when I'm coaching folks is to have them help them get through that process nice so as an example somebody gets super overwhelmed oh my God I'm overwhelmed because I got so much busy blah blah blah blah blah blah blah it's like that's just a stuck emotion that's a stuck emotion stuck emotion what do you mean by stuck emotion like like it means they have an emotion that is too intense for them so they're compartmentalizing it okay they're saying no I can't feel right now because if I feel that everything's going to go crazy so they try to compact it push it down and then that's the overwhelm and so whether they slow down enough to like be able to integrate it or they express it which is a far quicker way to get there so I've seen people like in this I can't solve the problem I don't know what to do they have like a an expression of anger and then boom Clarity I know what to do now and so logic works like this it goes a plus b equals c and then therefore a minus C equals B and emotions work like this oh oh I got it okay so what are the what's the road map here if like I would like to get to emotional fluidity whatever the hell that means like from my starting point right now like what are what's what's the road map and I guess what are some some of the starting steps yeah that I or someone listening to this who feels in that position where they're like yeah I don't really feel my emotions particularly well like right how do we how do we do that so so emotions are so emotions come in where we have them and we go oh that's uncomfortable or that's comfortable I want it or I don't want it and so you're kind of making these decisions the end of emotional fluidity is I I love having every emotional experience and they move through me with ease but I don't feel controlled by them oh okay yeah nice so that that's basically how it works what typically happens somewhere in the middle is somebody has an experience of someone who's really angry or really sad guilt tripping them are scared all the time and they feel oppressed by that emotional experience and they're like I'm not going to do that I'm going to control the emotion which is kind of the middle of the journey yep so the first part of the journey is okay I have these emotions they're relatively fluid except for they cause me pain in some way and so I start trying to manage repress compartmentalize push down these emotional experiences because that's how I'm going to be happy that's like then at some point you're like oh wait a second this isn't working this is giving me cancer or this is making me depressed because I haven't released my anger or whatever it is and then once you you're there then you're like okay I'm going to start to learn how to feel and express these feelings the feeling the feeling part is is is can be done in a lot of ways meditation can be a way to do it meditation can also be a way to repress emotions so you can use it either way breath work is a great way to start feeling some of the emotions um I did it a horrible way so like so my personal story on this was I was um when I was young my parents thought me crying meant they were bad parents so what they did was they made fun of me when I cried so that I wouldn't cry so they wouldn't have to feel that stuff and so they took pictures of me crying and then they put the photograph in an album and when I was like 24 years old I was flipping through an album that for those younger that we used to take photographs and put them in albums and and I I was like oh oh [ __ ] like that's probably why I haven't cried in so long so I took it out put it on my desk I I'm going to learn how to cry 6 months later three months later whatever it was I hadn't cried I was like oh [ __ ] so I guess I'm going to have to fake it that's what this was my thinking I had no guide on this so I lived in Los Angeles I went up to like 10,000 feet and I took a trail and then I went off Trail so that nobody could hear me crying because it was so shameful and I would fake crying once or twice a week and then one day I just started crying and it was actual tears and I actually cried and I cried for 4 days I could have stopped but I didn't want to CRI for four days four days four days are just and holy crap was my life so much better after crying for four days so like like just the weight just like for anybody who's listening to this here's an experience you can do stop feeling right now take yeah know you don't think you have an emotion but there's some emotion do anything you can to stop feeling right now you have to constrict a muscle you your eyes literally when you go back right that takes [ __ ] energy yeah and if you do that habitually you're constantly in that PL and so to actually feel the emotion releases all that stuff because you don't have to hold back to do it and you get a lot of clarity because it used to be I would do stuff to avoid sadness so I would make a business decision to avoid sadness now I'm like sadness is great I love sadness I cry I feel better this is fantastic why would I ever avoid feeling sad and now I have a business decision oh there's 50% chance sad but it's the right thing to do I'm going to take it yeah before 50% [ __ ] sad it's the right thing to do I'm not going to take it okay nice so this is reminding me of a podcast episode I did with my brother like four years ago um and so my brother and I and like outside of this podcast we have another one that we just chat every now and then yeah and I had discovered that week that there was a forum read on some celebrity gossip Forum about me where people were saying mean things about me oh and so I I'm so sorry that sucks yeah oh well so it was it it was it was interesting cuz I thought hey what a perfect chance for me to practice my stos ISM chops and started reading through this threat yes and in the and and I was so excited by this that in this podcast episode I was like I said to my brother hey tame you know let's let's go through some of these comments and we started reading some of the comments and he was like how do you feel right now and I was like no you know I feel fine and he was like because you literally look like you're about to cry and I was like hm well fine I will grant that I'm feeling a little bit of maybe something but like I didn't want to admit to myself that I was feeling sad or hurt by these comments from these [ __ ] strangers on the internet stuff yeah and we ended up clipping that thing and it it's gotten like 50,000 views this like conversation between me and my brother right and a lot of the comments are like whoa yeah it's it's clear that Ali is really feeling something but is just completely ref using to acknowledge the feeling of these emotions that's right and now and then so fast forward four years later like to two days ago you and I and a couple of other friends were chatting over dinner yeah and this friend Kelly asked oh how are you feeling about the book and I said yeah I don't really know I I I haven't I haven't read any of the reviews because I've heard from authors that you shouldn't read the reviews and both you and Kelly suggested that in a in in a gentle way that reading negative reviews can be a very sort of spiritually enlivening and it's good for the soul yeah kind of thing yeah if it's SED the with the right s towards it for sure and so like if you're looking to disintegrate your ego trolls on the internet are [ __ ] fantastic yeah so it's it's almost like I'm avoiding reading reading reviews because I mean I made the mistake of just before the book came out looking at good reads and the we'd sent out the advanc reader copies yeah and they're more critical than than the standard standard readers and I saw some two and three star reviews and good reads and I was like and then I was like okay I can see why these authors gave me the advice of never to read reviews and then I started avoiding them to the point that now if anyone almost like what brings up the amazon page I almost don't want to see how many stars there are and how many reviews there are cuz I I want to avoid some kind of feeling yeah that's right and it was only like two days ago when you and Kelly both mentioned this I was like oh [ __ ] I think I'm trying to avoid some some kind of feeling right so exactly where where am I in this like levels of emotional fluidity in in this specific context I guess well in that specific context you are you have not learn to enjoy the the emotional experiences that are coming up and and it's this is the hardest part for people to Gro you mean I can enjoy helplessness yes on the back side of helplessness is the feeling of empowerment on the back side of sadness is the feeling of relief on the back side of anger is a feeling of clarity and so and and this has been known for a while like in traditional Chinese medicine they talk about it in in in tibetan texts they talk about how they call them like the five poisons equal the five virtues and how they they basically the way I look at it is this you have a tube and that tube let's call that tube anger okay and you twist it this way and it's I'm not angry and you twisted this way and it's like you son of a b and you twisted this way it's nice dress but untwisted it is Gandhi it is Martin Luther King it is Mother Teresa it is it is a clear bound with love no that's not because we don't get angry at anything unless we care about it there's always care and anger there's always love and anger and there's always a boundary in anger and so when it's unconstricted that's what it ends up being and so but if you're trying to resist it it Kinks and then something else happens avoidance or whatever and so that's how I I see it is is that that that tube all your job is to do is not constrict it and then when you don't constrict it it gets fluid that's the fluidity part of it and then it actually feels different so think about it this way if you went to a party and everybody didn't want you there you would act one way yep and if you went to the party and everybody wanted you there you would act a different way your emotions are the same your emotions show up and you want them they're going to act one way your emotions show up and you don't want them they're going to act another way is this this uh was it on your podcast that I heard this like like Joy is the matriarch or some just like yeah what's what's that idea yeah so Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house unless your children are welcome basically and so what it means is that if you are trying to repress anger you are not make there's no room for Joy so Joy is just kind of the Natural State Joy and love they're the Natural State and as long as you're not containing some emotion there's room for them and they show up and so you see that all the time in our Retreats when people moove their emotions all of a sudden they're just more joyful just like I was after I cried for for 4 days I was like oh goodness gracious and by move their emotion like what do you mean move their emotions I mean like get it out of their muscle so Express their emotions and is really important to express them the right right way is strong but so you can express your emotions in such a way that create shame and then that's not going to be very helpful yeah so expressing your emotions by like yelling at somebody or being sad at somebody or being scared at somebody which means trying to control them with your emotions you're going to create shame it's not actually move your emotion y whereas oh I'm going to get angry and and then I'm actually going to find a place where I'm loved after my anger so it's not like I'm there's a shame thing that's the best possible way so you're moving the anger you're yelling you're doing whatever you have to do but nobody no you're not hurting anybody with your words you might be having them but you're not doing it at somebody that emotional expression is the thing that allows you to start falling in love with the emotional experiences so is it sort of like you know how kids with anger management problems you tell them to get a pillow and punch it in the garden or something like that sort of idea yeah so there's the interesting thing there's been a tremendous amount of research so somebody's going to geek out and go let me go look do the research so there's a tremendous amount of research that shows if you start moving anger you're going to get angry more often and that's absolutely the case just like when I got sad I got sad more often like but what happens is it like a lot of it has been piled up and then moves out and then all of a sudden there's just less anger less passive aggression so when you repress something like anger leads to a lot of depression passive aggression feelings of stuckness so if you're listening to this you're like I feel stuck nope you're just not moving your anger cleanly oh I feel depressed nope you're just not moving your anger cleanly passive aggressive no you're just not drawing your boundaries and and moving your anger so so that so as you start moving them it it just kind of it it for while it gets and then it starts calming down and then all of a sudden then you have this emotional fluidity it's like riding a river it's not like being controlled being thrown over the Rapids where does the idea of chemical imbalances in the brain fit into this model cuz like the thing that you just said well if if you have depression well I I I can almost certainly imagine there are people listening to this repression is chemical imbalance hang on SR work this guy's full of [ __ ] [ __ ] you Joe Hudson on the okay you did a lot of things there uh SS SSR [ __ ] you Joe Hudson that thank you for I like that um ssris they don't actually work 100% of the time like there's plenty of research that shows that that's not the case also yes there are chemical imbalances that this is not all forms of depression I would call this more in the Damia low-level depression realm what I can tell you is I do know a lot of folks who I've worked with who have and I'm not I'm not diagnosing anybody but I there's a lot of people I've worked worked with where they've had depression and they that depression has been relieved but it's not just from anger so the way I look at Consciousness generally is there's the head the heart the gut that's a metaphor um but when you approach healing if you approach it in that way it's usually far more effective so the head is intellect the heart is the emotional and the gut is the nervous system or you could call it roughly roughly for those who are um neuroscientists out there the prefrontal cortex the head is like the human brain the mamelon brain is the heart and the gut is more of like the nervous system Reptilian Brain if you hit them on all three levels you're going to have much more transformation so you want to hit them on all three levels and so depression um I would say the head is the negative selft talk which is actually how it's defined in the DSM um in dyy anyways and it's like constant or increased negative self basically I would call Self abuse so you want to change that the way that you talk in that which can't be done by trying to change it but there's a whole bunch of tricks on how to change that and then there is uh the heart which is the emotion which is a release of anger sometimes sadness but often anger and then the gut part of it is about feeling safe it's because anxiety and depression go hand in hand so you wear out your adrenal glands and and then depression ensues so it's a three-part thing if if I'm working with someone who's depressed that's that's my Approach and it's not 100% effective but it's It's very effective a lot of the time okay so it's like and just by the way on that one you have to go into a lot more detail to figure that one out um but I do have a a podcast on it that like you can actually get into all the details of oh perect we will link that in the show notes or the video description wherever people are watching or listening yeah um so it sounds like in this model there are a bunch of different emotions and these emotions are almost like pipes yes and for certain people the pipes are kinked to the point that they don't identify or or or they don't consciously feel when this emotion is chilling in the pipes yes or they twist the pipe in a way that makes them that convinces themselves that the emotion doesn't exist yes and a lot of the goal of emotional fluidity is to unkink the pipes and then ideally start to enjoy the process of the emotion flowing through the pipes you can't unkink the pipes without enjoying the enjoyment happens first enjoyment is the thing yeah and so so yeah so typically the way I would think of those stages is first you know the identific that the emotions are having then there's the management there's often a management stage sometimes you need to learn how to label them depending on the particular thing and then there's the expression of them and then there's the place where you fall in love with them and that creates fluidity so okay so you in my tangible example of I'm afraid to read read book reviews or see negative comments written about me on the internet right how might I approach becoming more comfortable or loving those Sensations or whatever the very best possible way and this is is going to sound but like we had a good relationship and I was coaching you what I would say is I would have your girlfriend hold you literally physically like hold you and then you read read the the the negative reviews and and and and I wouldn't have her try to make you feel better it's really important so you don't want like someone to be like it's okay it's going to be all right because basically what you're saying is I'm in you're invalidating the emotions you're saying your emotions are making me uncomfortable stop it oh okay so you don't want that but you want just someone who's totally with you in the experience and saying right I love you yep you can be sad I love you you can be upset I love you you can be angry I love you and just actually just someone who's sitting there loving you as you're having the emotional experiences and then your job is to make sure that you're breathing so that you're not constricting the muscles and stopping the emotion and in your particular case like I would watch out for like jaw like holding the jaw or holding the throat tightly which is where a lot of the emotions get held yeah I did a a breath work thing for the first time this morning yeah here just in the in the space behind us and I felt a lot of like vibration in the jaw yeah and also like in the the all no nerve position of the fingers and stuff but like there was a lot in the jaw and also sort of just under the rib cage on one side yeah and I was like huh because I've I've listened to some of your podcasts I was like okay is this the whole the whole like draw tension thing yeah is there any relationship between like breath work and this emotion stuff absolutely yeah like when we do the iners Retreats that are off you know we don't we don't advertise them or anything like that when we do those we do breath work and emotional release work h on the note of okay so I'm going to I'm going to try this thing with my with my girlfriend the whole holding and as as we read negative reviews yeah um and then feel whatever feel but like it's like a kid or as as the person today the coffee shop said like the swan it's like so the emotion starts to arise the mind starts to tell you things like they're not rational yep you're right it's not rational or the mind will tell you if I'm sad I'll be sad forever if I'm angry I'm going to destroy my world if I'm scared I'm going to be incapable and the job is to say like oh I've been listening to you for 30 years or so I'm just going to listen to the emotions for 20 minutes H nice and then allow yourself to just feel the emotional experience that's happening okay so if anyone's listening to this I'm going to go on a bit of a Mad one reading negative Amazon reviews but I would appreciate some positive ones as well so if you haven't yet reviewed the book um on the note of okay so one thing that I really struggled with and continue to struggle with to an extent in my relationship is I want say one thing back up on one thing but also just like don't overblow your nervous system so do it into a point where you're just like don't don't go out of Regulation to do it like I have done that many times you will recover but it's a far quicker process to to like feel it into a point where you're like okay that's enough and then okay then go back to it okay so small doses rather than like a it may be small maybe just depends on your system just don't don't blow yourself out okay nice um one thing that I've struggled with and still do is the idea of like how to emotionally support my partner oh yeah and you mentioned like it's like I I don't really have any good models for this um I didn't I didn't have a dad growing up and like I don't and so it it's often weird for me to to think how would like a 30-year-old dude offer emotional support in like like what does that even look like and in the sort of a thing in my head I was like oh it's going to be okay it's all right like you see those stuff in the movies yeah how do how do I emotionally support my partner so the I the way I did with you and you actually felt it so if you go like back on the tape or the podcast you said oh I got these terrible views and I said I'm so sorry yeah I'm right here with you I'm empathetic yeah I'm not trying to fix you and I'm just right here with you yeah he won't say oh I'm so sorry I'm sure the book is actually good and blah all that kind of stuff just like yeah I'm just just empathetically being with somebody is all that's really required okay not wanting them them to change it's just literally I can sit in loving attention of you and your emotional experience and especially men in America especially men in western civilization man we have got to go in there and fix it but it's really not required and it Al often makes people feel very unseen because what you're telling them is like you're wrong for feeling this it needs to be fixed in of like oh I you and you can feel this no problem Y what if what if say okay what if the spouse is upset because of something that I have done same thing okay so just like said in loving attention yeah just be like oh I really if you want to go big this works but it can be really hard yeah um is oh right I hear that you're really upset with me I want to hear all about it tell me tell me what's bothering you y yeah what how how do you want to handle this what's going on like what do you want from me I'm not I'm not going to sit here and agree to whatever you want from me but I want to hear about it I want to like and what you'll notice is typically when somebody's given that space they'll like explain they'll get actually I think it's just I need this because it's the emotion that's stuck that's actually causing the problems it's not H if people are allowed to have that movement then typic they get to a much more yeah and it's unbel like it's if you can do that in a marriage it's like a like like such a cool superpower cuz I guess the Temptation there is to to defend ourselves correct be like oh but like I didn't mean that come on like right which is basically two people one person feels like they've been attacked yeah this person defends themselves they feel like they're defending themselves but this person feels attacked by the defense and so that's all that's happening is both people in a fight typically in a marriage it's like both people feel like they're defending themselves and both people feel like the other person's attacking them so yeah the dropping of the defense absolutely like okay I'm going to try this this is good I need to remember this the dropping of the defense drop the defense it's it's not unlike reading the bad reviews okay yeah nice yeah like being able to sit with a negative emotion yeah exactly and and and sit with the negative emotion and allow it to the point where it actually becomes quite enjoyable oh okay that's it cleans out like it cleans you out it's an amazing experience okay and what about if um let's say the partner is upset because something at work she she thinks she did something badly yes and I look at the thing and I'm like no it's actually really good yes and I want to offer reassurance that like she the fact that she thinks is bad is actually it's not actually bad it's like actually really good yes and like this there's all this like perfectionism in poster syndrome that she's feeling about the thing yes and I kind of want to reassure her that like no the thing's actually good right I feel like this is counterproductive anyway yes totally totally counterproductive um I it's not counterproductive to say it once to say oh actually my opinion is that it's quite good but to try to chase her into her happiness or to try to push her into her happiness so there's a great story about this there's like it was he was a Quaker man and he suffered like this big depression and um I love this story and he had a great community of people and everybody showed up and they said here's what you should do to not be depressed blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah one person came every Tuesday and just washed his feet and he said that did more for me than anything else because everybody else was agreeing with me that I was broken the person who was washing my feet was the only person who was saying to me you're not broken you're complete just as you are and that was the message that I actually needed and so chasing someone to feel better is more of an expression about you not wanting to feel that way it's more of an expression of oh I don't want to feel that uncertainty I don't want to feel that like uh yeah and so then it is about them and so it's far better to just be like yeah like cool you feel like ah yeah you feel like you didn't do good enough oh that sucks nice yeah and also ener like in a relationship like one person holds one side of the one side of the emotional experience and someone holds the other so like typically I've seen this tons in companies and in relationships one person's really worried about money one person's not worried about money and then all of a sudden one person's like oh I'll start worrying about money and then the other person's like oh come on relax about the money like that we hold these roles so if you want to hold the role of The Optimist everything is good then there's no other place for her to be but in the oh wait is it going to be good enough is it good enough and and being in the doubt yeah and so drop that role and it kind of insists that she can drop the other role this reminds me of a story I don't of a story in like the world of uh in the world of uh customer success or customer support yeah in that if a customer comes to you with a complaint there are two chips in your hand one chip is this is a big [ __ ] deal the other chip is this is not a big deal and the chip that you take the customer has to have the other one right so if you take the chip of this is not a big deal the customer has to take the chip of this is a big [ __ ] deal whereas if you take the if you take oh my goodness I'm so I know this is a huge deal like you must feel absolutely terrible but then the customer has to be like it's you know it's not that bad I calm down kind of exactly that's right that's absolutely right okay so in my quest to help my partner feel less imposter syndrome and perfectionism by reassuring her that her work is good she almost I almost forc her to take the position that no oh my work is actually [ __ ] Yeah Yeah by especially if it's pushing if it's like a one time oh actually I think it's great I remember one time I did this experiment I had a long time ago I had an employee who was like this is [ __ ] and I I was like chasing I'm like no this is good this is what I want from you and it yeah wasn't working and um and then so I kind of B basically took like a completely different position and they're like it's [ __ ] and I was and I was like I was like yeah and then they started to defend themselves and started to say why it was so good yeah I was like yeah see you knew it was good and there yeah it's a good Mind Trick um one of the things you said earlier on is that you uh enjoy or like get a lot of fulfillment out of helping other people Express their authenticity or what to effect um I wouldn't use the word help maybe I did but I would try not to but I would say yeah anyway I'm of service to that great okay why not the word help because again it says that they're not capable of it without me cool yeah or often can mean that to in people's minds the word itself isn't a problem it's just the way people interpret it okay nice on the note of authenticity yeah one thing that I sort of brought up to you slightly earlier this week is that um one issue that I have is and I'm sure a lot of people listening to this have this as well I get a lot of emails about it is you know wanting to be authentic to oneself yes makes a parent upset in some way or another yes yeah how does one deal with this yeah so the there's a a couple ways to look at it one thing that if anybody's really really working on this there's this weird Show on Netflix maybe you can find it and link it in the show notes there's a weird Show on Netflix uh called Magic for humans and there's this I think it's episode three or something like that where he does an episode on guilt and he's got all these moms around the table and all the moms they're just like oh yeah I'm really good at guilt guilt is like the coolest thing like oh I like yeah I can really get him to do what I want when when I do guilt so if you have a mom like that like you should watch that because it makes you see that it's like what oh you know I thought she was really sad but is she like what's going on there uh but generally the thing about guilt is that it it it creates an emotional Edy guilt shame judgment they basically make the emotions kind of run in place so you don't actually get the fluidity so they're an emotion that kind of like that create an an Eddy of the emotional experience so one of the greatest things to do is if you couldn't feel guilt what would you have to feel if I couldn't feel guilt would I have to feel yeah so your mom wants you to be a doctor say again like stay being a doctor stay being a doctor right and she she she's actually like for the record she has uh this used to be a problem in the past she's now chill with me being a YouTuber unless just use that as example cuz I think a lot of people have this where the parent wants them to do career X they actually want to do the liberal arts version career X and parents like oh my God like that's terrible yeah exactly Okay who wants you to be a doctor and if you couldn't feel guilt what would you have to feel so the idea is that we're feeling guilt because of that but if you said that's just not on the table not not on the table so what would I have to feel shame same same okay fine I can't feel guilt or shame so what would I have to feel I would have to feel selfish comes to mind selfish and shame are really close to each other like so guilt would be I feel guilty for doing this thing y shame is I'm feeling guilty for being myself or I feel like I'm wrong when is something I've done is wrong what is I'm wrong they get very confused selfish selfish we could go off on forever because selfish just means you're not doing what your mom wants you to do generally um or whoever you know um when parents call kids selfish that's generally what it means um but I'm just saying like if you couldn't couldn't feel that selfish as a shame like what's the what's the key emotion underneath that you would have to feel if you couldn't feel like you were wrong for bad for not doing the thing maybe acceptance that comes to mind mind like acceptance that my Mom feels sad about this thing and I'm okay with that exactly where does the phrase I'm sorry come into this if if I'm let's say having this conversation with my mom I feel like I'm sorry it's like I'm I'm sorry you feel that way but then that comes across as it authentic and it's like I'm sorry is also a bit of an admission of culpability on my part and like how do you feel about the phrase I'm sorry I love the phrase I'm sorry I'm sorry is such a great phrase because it's actually one of the most successful transformational tools that you can that you can use so if you can do an upright what I would call an upright apology and we have like all sorts of documentation on how to do an upright apology on the website and whatnot if you can do an upright apology which means I am not leaving myself I'm not feeling bad about myself I'm just actually don't want I don't want to be like this in the future I don't want this to happen to you in the future yep and you're just like that's where you come from it is one of the best ways for you to stop a behavior so wait what do you mean yeah so um if you can say to somebody like oh I'm so sorry that I treat that I yelled at you right there yeah not with shame but just like oh I'm so sorry I yelled at you yeah and I can do that three or four times I will stop yelling yeah so if you do a really upright apology and you really feel it and you allow the feel but as soon as you go to shame then you get the stagnation like guilt and then you're going to keep on doing it over and over and over again but in the sense of I'm so sorry that I quit being a doctor or whatever the thing might be yeah so in that particular case then then the question is this I said to you earlier it's like oh I'm sorry that they did that yeah I'm not responsible yeah I'm just that that makes me sad that that happened like I'm that that sucks that's all it is and so it's just like yeah I'm I'm like I'm sorry it could be I'm sorry that I can't I can't be inauthentic to make you happy right now that would and I understand that that stinks or that's probably not quite right but something to the I'm sorry that I'm sorry that my choices are hurting you I I really do not want you to hurt okay nice and if the response is well if you were really sorry you would stop doing it yeah and my response would be no I'm I that would be doing something that doesn't feel aligned for me to stop you from hurting I don't want you to hurt but I don't want to have to do something that's not authentic for me to have you not hurt so it sounds like you're just selfish then absolutely I'm absolutely selfish I'm yeah I want to take care of myself I also want you to take care of yourself and whatever you need to do to take care of yourself given the choice I'm making I want to support you in it even if it hurts me how did you get so good at this what's what's the training program for for this this what I think the the big training program is to realize the thing that you're defending isn't there the thing that you defending isn't there yeah so if you're defending yourself no but I'm really I do it means that you actually think there's something bad in you okay there isn't okay so if someone said to me Ali you've got a really slow typing speed I wouldn't defend myself because I know objectively that my typing spe is really [ __ ] fast it's like it's just yeah okay kind of thing but if someone said to me Ali prick or like you can't feel your emotions yeah yeah this wouldn't be a problem if you could feel your emotions that I would you exactly where I'm like yeah you're right I can't feel my emotions maybe maybe it's something I need to work on kind of we only get triggered at the stuff that we actually think is true about ourselves ah yeah yeah okay yeah and so this is why reading negative reviews is kind of like ego destruction yeah exactly that's right and I'll give you a great example this I'm like we were just hiking at the and I was on that hike with a friend and he's like Joe you're a dick and I was like no I'm not you know but this is years ago no I'm not and he's like Jesus why defend it you're just a dick like take pride in the fact that you're a dick what's the problem I was like H okay let me relax into that for a moment I'm like yeah I can see ways that I'm a dick yeah okay I'm a dick and in that non-defensive the non-ending of being a dick I just stopped being a dick like it just like reduced like there I had a behavior where there was definitely a way like I would push to get something that wanted and that just that went away because I wasn't defending it anymore so the thing that we resist persists you've heard this before this is the resistance the defense is the resistance so there's like yeah we're all selfish yes I'm selfish I why would I defend that I'm not gonna I'm I'm not there's nothing I don't think there's some bad part of me that I have to prove as good so what's to defend and yeah the being able to take an attack and learn to keep an open heart destroys the ego take an attack and keep an open heart to the troll says the thing yep and you keep an open heart while reading it yeah and that'll create a ton of emotional fluidity it'll move a lot and it'll it just destroys the ego because the ego has to defend itself and oh I'm excited to read these negative reviews now in small doses no um okay I have so many things okay let's start with this um what is Enlightenment and would you say that you are enlightened okay so I I mean there's so many different versions of what enlightenment is and you know there are even within Buddhism there is which is where the term and some Hinduism where the term Enlightenment showed up I think Christ Consciousness is another example so there's a lot of things I I take a slightly more um Western psychological view of Enlightenment and so in the human development domains and so the way I think about and so maybe in Buddhism this might be considered Awakening some people would call it Enlightenment blah blah blah but the way I look at it is there's three ways to do it we'll just do two of them one is a sense of self so you're a little kid your sense of self is very solid and and we know that because if I say to a little kid what do you want for Christmas they say GI Joe with a kung fu grip you're like what do I want for Christmas GI with a Kung Fu Grip they can't really discern themselves from the world okay yep and then as they get a little bit older they can discern themselves from the world they're like I want a GI Joe with a Kung Fu Grip but Mom wants a Tesla dad wants a tie or whatever yeah and so our sense of self moves from that to oh I am the family I am the tribe I am the nation I am Humanity I am the ecosystem so as we develop yep we start seeing our sense of self as everything like and so people who are like I want to take care of the environment it's because I see the environment as them and that there there's an interdependence and it's not like something that's separate okay at some point at some point the sense of self becomes Universal again and it actually feels like a memory it's like oh I remember this that sense of self becoming Universal again where you're like I am everything and everything is me Y and there's some distinction you can go further on where it's like I am nothing I am everything but like let's just leave that out for now that moment is what people call Awakening or Enlightenment yep when that moment persists y that's usually what somebody would call Enlightenment okay yeah because I was reading um a book by Jed McKenna which is a he call it um abiding non du awareness yeah non-duality so that would be another way to describe Awakening or Enlightenment as non-duality I so that's that's the some from the sense of ey there's also a sense of time that goes along with it so little kids if you say to them oh your birthday's in like 3 months they could give a crap yeah birthday's in 3 days ah they get really excited the average American they can see out like three and a half years they can you they can think about things longer but they'll sign a mortgage y that will blow up in four years because they're not really considering and then you move into like seven generation thinking which is a the American Indians the the the Native Americans they would um they talked about like you couldn't really know a valley and or a location until you'd lived there for seven generations and when you're making a decision you're making a decision for Seven Generations that was like that thought process so you're actually thinking about the expanse of time like when your work stops mattering about like today or tomorrow and your start work starts mattering about future Generations this is kind of where that moves again there's this point where it kind of implodes on itself and infinity doesn't become a length of time it becomes like the depth of a moment okay so there's a sense of self sense of time and those are easy ways to see how that works in the system another thing that happens especially with like the mental one is that the oftentimes the negative selft talk y Loop will really change there won't be a lot of it because you start seeing through all your thoughts all your thoughts become true and not true and so none of them you take very seriously so you can't like someone's like oh that person thinks you're an [ __ ] and there's some part of you that's like huh look at that thought yeah I don't really particularly believe that and in that spaciousness is a lot of like lack of defensiveness and stuff like that okay that's a lot yeah nice this is good so um I am me I am my family I am My Tribe yeah but it's not like I am right like it's like I don't like my mom doesn't feel like she is me but she really cares about me yes so is that is that the same thing yes oh fine okay that's yeah that's the same thing and there are some friends of mine who really care about the environment I don't particular she really cares what your actions are and like where you live and everything she's very identified with you as her and her as you like she would be like my like so my kid if they did something embarrassing I'd be like that's embarrassing for them but I wouldn't say like oh my God I'm so embarrassed by what my kid did ah yes right because I'm not really identified in that way so identified mean like what does identified mean yeah so it means that I I'm a good way to say is like I'm taking it personally oh okay yeah yeah okay fine so huh it's like very hard for me to take things personally yep so are you enlightened so I don't really believe in the enlightenment term but yeah the voice in my head is like there's no negative repeating voice in my head my sense of identity is very Universal I am everything I am nothing that's true and and what was interesting about that is I was very identified with that for a bit very like look at me I'm this and now it's like you know it's like hair color it's like it's not it's not relevant okay interesting because I've been listening to some Alan wats lectures where he also talks about how like the the quest to destroy the ego becomes its own ego trip correct think yeah yeah so I mean I went through like many many years sitting on a pillow meditating looking out a window at a tree and reading nonel teachers like I just went through like trying my hardest to get to Awakening and like why uh how did this yeah how does this Vibe with the whole venture capitalist philanthropist being coach for CEOs who are billionaires kind of thing yeah where does all this fit into the picture uh historically it was I was doing Investment Banking I went to a Meditation Retreat I got a taste of unity Consciousness and I was like whatever the [ __ ] that is I'm after it and then I chased so so hard for it yep which made it harder and harder to like see that it was actually just what I was by my name so the more I chased the more pushed away how old were you at the time 25 years old something like that so 25 you had this experience in a Meditation Retreat yeah where you're like oh and then I dedicated my entire life to it for a decade oh okay yeah and I didn't do Venture Capital till 35 oh how do how do you dedicate your life to meditation do you I I made $112,000 a year I made almost no money I worried about money quite a bit Yeah I had all those things that people like so everybody out there who's like that rich guy he doesn't know about money did I was like actually yeah I was incredibly poor worried about money and stressed about it all the freaking time yeah and um but I just was totally dedicated to this thing I was I was a I was Avid about it and so I tried everything I could I I did meditation I did the Hoffman process I did somatic healing I did breath work I did everything I could possibly do for I I was dedicated to it you know I could do high pain work because I did International stock lending so I could go out and like make make a lot of money for a couple weeks and then I would just be back in the room sitting meditating for seven hours a day isn't that really boring my wife sure thought so um it wasn't for me no I got what happened somewhere along the line this question arose in me they just like what am I essentially and and it's not you know you can say I'm Joe or you can say I'm a human but like what is it that I've always been always will be that can't be taken away this never been changed and that question just naturally showed up 10 times a day and I was on a hunt to find the answer to that only to find out that it was the question that was the Brilliance not the answer yeah this is what I don't what's also talks about like the hell um yeah okay so you went on this 10y year long journey and then so what happened at the end of it I was taking a pee at a Meditation Retreat and yeah I was like oh I was I was okay so backing up for a second yeah so I was like lucky and unlucky I was unlucky in the fact that when I tasted it I put a lot of effort into getting it so and that really slows down the process the more effort putting an effort really slows down the process okay because it's the same thing as like you know ask for advice you get money ask for money get get advice like it's the same thing it's like if you're running after you're also pushing it away okay and so um and then and so that was very unfortunate but it was great because I got to learn a whole bunch of stuff and then at the moment when like I was going to the bathroom and it was like oh oh I am that basically was the answer which is a non- answer but the answer kind of evaporated yep and then the next thought was this never ends which is where I was very lucky and so this never ends was the thought and the reason it was lucky was because there's this thing that happens where people have that Awakening moment and they think they're finished yep but evolution doesn't end we don't stop evolving yep um and that's when your identity kind of gets solidified as the awakened one or something like that sure and so that luckily for me I know people who who stuck in there for 10 years yeah so like when I was there and I like I know those people identify that way I was just at a wedding recently and they're still identified that way and it will it will undo itself it just will take whatever time it takes but for for whatever reason I was very lucky in the fact that it was just like yeah this never ends like I there's never an end to the growth and to the movement which is why I Stray away from Enlightenment because Enlightenment seems to connote uh finished yeah done and that's not I haven't ever seen that and I know a lot of folks who a lot of folks in our courses have had Awakenings a lot of people in the meditation Retreats that I've done that's like it's not an uncommon thing in the circles and I and everybody's still is growing and but there is a there's a piece that you can access at any time and that's another interesting thing because that can become an emotional avoidance so I've seen people like access that piece like Alan Watts was a drunk as an example I like and his daughter will openly talk about it wonderful teacher amazing person but it was like it wasn't done it wasn't finished yeah and so yeah so it just like yeah it's just it's it's a NeverEnding thing but you can access this piece and in the access of the peace you can escape into it yep and what they it's interesting because you find those people and they're like yeah peace I'm like yeah where's the joy joy but I got the peace and at some point you kind of want to you get back into the human skin you get back into the emotional thing it kind of feels like you're going back into hell a little bit and then all of a sudden you learn to like move all the emotion and boom Joy okay so I so I've read a few of these texts I've res for Enlightenment Jed McKenna I recently finished a new Earth in Power of Now yeah and started reading Grist for the mill by ramas yeah and waking up by Sam Harris ages ago and stuff so it's like all of the things you're saying I I'm sort of connecting to the stuff that I've read yes um one thing came to mind when he said that it's it's never finished is that in Jed McKenna's book he there's there's this line where he says you know at some point along the journey you'll meet the Buddha and when you do then you should kill him yeah kind of thing and he he says in the book like don't think about this too hard like when you get to the point it will it will suddenly make sense and like but like for now just like ignore it kind of thing and a lot of these like spiritual teachings seem to also make this point that you that you made which is like the harder you try for it the the further it goes but also you kind of do have to try but also you don't really like have to try and it's all feels a bit hard to words to describe yeah so the so to geek out on this the reason for that is because the teaching is like pointed at what is in front of it and so I wanted to do this thing when I was in the searching mode I wanted to get four different teachers ask them the same questions and see how they answered differently and the name of the film that I wanted to call it was four fingers one Moon okay because they all answer it slightly differently but they're all kind of pointing at the same thing Y and so you can say you have to you have one way to say it is oh you have to like destroy the ego yep to become awakened the only problem is and then you're in a war with yourself called the ego right so then another teach but it's a good pointer it's a good thing like it's useful for a moment and then someplace along the line it's useful to say there is no such thing as an ego y like it doesn't exist it's it's you're it's a phenomenon that you made up in your brain it doesn't even exist it's just a concept and then that creates like a a a spaciousness so you can see something different so all they're trying to do in they're teaching even though they're a little bit different is to create enough space for a moment so you can actually feel what's actually looking out behind your eyes okay so if I want to shortcut the process spend 10 years meditating seven hours a day yeah yeah yeah not necessar what do I do um what's what's the process you'd recommend yeah so the process I would recommend is the the the part that I got right luckily was and by luck um is that I was doing the emotional healing work at the same time that I was doing the non-duality and I heard it expressed recently that a lot of time like the I thought this was pretty accurate that a lot of the like emotional holding makes it harder to see the truth of who you are yeah and so I think it works on that level but M but the other thing is I noticed that it's it's just natural for us to get there like this is just human development this isn't this isn't like spiritual or something special it's just like if you continue to like look at yourself and discover yourself see what you are pay attention it just is going to happen yep it's just its nature so it's like it's like saying how do I learn how to walk like you keep on kind of trying to walk and then then walking happens like does a baby actually try kind of but kind of not like it's just going to happen either way yep so it's it's a very similar thing to that it's like this is our nature yeah and and the interesting thing about it is because it is like a memory oh it's it's like it's always been there too which is really interesting and strange but like we don't ever in our work we never talk about it as a path to Enlightenment okay but you'll read reviews where it's like the person's like I [ __ ] meditated for seven years and what the hell are you doing I do this one little exercise and I have this Awakening moment what the [ __ ] now doesn't happen for everybody that was a right moment for him at the right time doing the right thing but it's not uncommon in our work but we never talk about non-duality we never talk about Awakening why it just happens because it often times when people start striving for it it gets in the way but but doing that emotional thing that's a great exercise for it like to like be undefended that like be undefended that that's a great if you want to do something but even that notice it okay you're going to go be undefended yeah is that a doing or is that an undoing is that an effort like try to effort being undefended oh interesting yeah right and so that's why they're pointing to it yeah you have to do something go be undefended so it's a doing but it's kind of not a doing because if you try to do it you're defended how how do you feel about the word spirituality it's like Christianity or or Buddhism or Judaism it's going to trigger somebody yeah yeah they're all pointing at the at at something similar with slightly different you know whatever you know there thumbnails all there are different thumbnails all at the same video so to speak and so I try to use words as much as possible that don't trigger folks yeah I try to just use like regular words and it's why I somewhat stay away from the you stay away from like the I like I never call myself a spiritual teacher yeah I and and I rather have it be like applied self-discovery like our conversation started with you know business and how to make money I want to think like these tools it's like how do we apply them to creating a world that we want to live in yeah they're not really useful otherwise if I just learn how to meditate I can fool myself all day long God knows I did for years yep whereas like if I'm actually interacting in the world and they're applied I know these things work I know what's real or more more real what what's your take on reincarnation multiple lives All That Jazz I have none yeah yeah I don't know it doesn't yeah it doesn't it's not that when you have that moment of Awakening you suddenly realize oh this is just one life out of 10,000 lives or some something like that things like that happen uh but to me it's like the way I look at it is no matter what my belief is I don't know how that's going to help anything okay I don't know like I don't know how that belief system or whatever the experience is that I can make a story out of yeah explaining it it's just living in the future in some other way I don't it doesn't ever seem to really be a benefit you know and they're usually turned into stories to create morality and morality stops us from listening to ourselves I'd much rather have people deeply listen to themselves because that's our nature and our nature is good so instead of being like that there is you know there are some things that are just right and wrong kind of thing which is what a lot of religious people will often say yes yeah so I mean this gets in a really touchy subject but it like to geek out on it for a minute um if your boss says you you got to like work twice as hard it's not going to be really fun you're not going to really enjoy it yep if you are sitting there working you're like oh wow I wonder what could happen if I do this twice as hard and I like can I do this twice as quickly and you like create a game with yourself it can be incredibly enjoyable so morality it takes the joy out of being moral like it becomes an obligation it becomes a sh it becomes something that I have to do and it takes a long time to actually get to the joy of it y but being good to people is joyful to being bad to people is disconnecting it's painful it sucks so I'd rather have people listen to themselves than follow an idea of what's good or bad how do you feel about the word should don't I don't think it's effective so I think um if there's if if anybody's listening to the podcast you probably have some habit that hasn't changed in a decade or five years or three years depending on how old you are that you've been telling yourself should change and the reason I know know that is because you're telling yourself it should change and the thing about all those habits haven't changed you're telling yourself they should change it's just not an effective mechanism for transformation H shoting yourself just doesn't work it's a resistance it's shame it's shame so it stagnates it's a resistance so it persists look at everything that did change the other way to do is the reverse look at everything that did change of who you are in the last five years and how many how many of those needed a should to change H surely that's like you know I I should be a less abusive spouse to my partner or like surely there are there are some shs that are genuine shs right I I think all the shs are genuine okay I I'm just saying that they're ineffective ah okay so if I'm saying I should be a better partner to my spouse it's not going to to make me better it's not going to help you be a better partner as I I want to be a better partner to my spouse it's going to be far more effective oh yeah yeah oh okay yep I should is like you know tell your kids you should they should do [ __ ] and it's great way to make sure that they don't do the [ __ ] that you tell them they should do on that note so I was uh I was giving a talk a couple weeks ago and a parent came up to me afterwards when I was like signing books and [ __ ] and she said hey you know my kids they're teenagers and I just can't seem to motivate them and like what advice do you have and I was like well I mean I'm not a parent so take this with a pinch ass all but like I didn't I didn't really know what what to say to her because I I I had a sense that like it's really hard for a parent to motivate a teenager like whatever that means yeah and I was like what are you trying to motivate them to do and she said oh I want them to take their studies more seriously I was like okay so that oh so that they they can actually get into a good University because at the moment they spend all their time playing playing video games and so I've been telling them that they should watch your videos and I've been trying to put your videos in front of them to say look at this guy you should listen to what he says and there was all this Shing going on I was like oh hello there's there's something here but I didn't quite have time to get into it and I didn't really know what to what to say to her so I just said look man all of these like Bros all all of these like super successful like teachers and stuff that I know their kids don't listen to them either so like you know it's probably all good but like how how do you approach that like a parent saying how how do how do I motivate my child to take studies more seriously I would say what are you trying not to feel I mean when you're telling their kid that they you should be different what you're basically telling them is they're not good that they're broken in some way that they need to be they they they need to be managed yep that that that there's broken so much that they have to be managed and controlled to be a good thing yep so like why the [ __ ] would you want to listen to anybody who thinks you're broken why would I would like that's not the person I like I want the coach who's like I see you as whole and complete and I know you're going to get there right that's who I want to listen to that's you know like criticize your kid all the time why would they even want to listen or be around you so to me it's like I have a great I love the teenage years I freaking love them and it's funny because I I mean I talked about the $2,000 thing which I've only paid for something like that like once for one kid and kind of this other weird time for another kid but my kids are totally naturally motivated because they just are listening to themselves kids who are listening to themselves they they're motivated kids who have been taught not to listen to themselves but listen to their mother they're usually not motivated unless the only way they got their mom's love is through achievement then they might be motivated but with a lot of fear some some parents will say well I'm not going to let my kid jump off a cliff that would be terrible and therefore when I see my kid doing doing this thing which I viewed to be the equivalent to him like taking cocaine you know if all your friends were taking cocaine would you expect me to just like step by and stand by and let you do it yeah yeah yeah how does this yeah yeah I mean if you're at that point you might need to but it's getting it's like preventing yourself from getting to that point like I meaning like that only happens after years of your kids being told that they're bad wrong and you criticizing them why else would they need to do cocaine but to like escape the negative voice in their head that you gave them I'm I'm being ruthless about it but it's absolutely true like I've never met like outside of of G there's some neurological atypical or some some chemistry but if that's the case you don't have much of a chance of managing it anyhow addiction comes with Shame Shame is the the lock that holds the chains of bad habits in place you want your kids not to have bad habits teach them that there's nothing that they don't need to be ashamed of themselves one thing we were talking about earlier is um hand in-and parenting yeah I wonder if you could just do a bit of a like a quick explainer of what is handon hand parenting and why is it why did you raise your kids using this methodology type thing yeah it's pretty much the same thing it's it's actually so the reason I did it is because my wife said we're going to do this and at this point in our marriage I had realized that she was right when it came to kids most of the time especially young kids okay so I had come up with a a a methodology and it was do whatever she says for 3 months and if I don't like it don't don't resist whatever she says do whatever she says for the first three months and if I don't like it at that point like but do a good at clean experiment on it yep so I did the clean experiment on what she wanted which was hand inand parenting and it was freaking remarkable and basically it's very much centered around that same thought process of like if they allow if you allow your kids to feel their emotions all the way through Express their emotions all the way through they get back to connection they're not overwhelmed anymore they go back to just being the kid that is like this wonderful loving child and if you look at little kids like two years old as an example if they see that you're out of atunement they'll go Dad I love you they'll like try to bring you back into Attunement that's how badly they want to be in Attunement and connection and so that's their nature and the job is to just help them live their nature which is to move the emotions through them so they can get back to connection so hand in hand parenting has five basic um rules and and Patty whiffler is much better to speak about this than than I am but it's uh having a place where you can uh off gas whatever emotions you're having about raising kids so in a way that's not going to hurt the kids um that's called The Listening partnership there's uh stay listening which is allowing their emotions to be big and just sitting in loving attention of them similar to what I was suggesting for you there's uh play listening which is playing with the kids so that the fear can move um and so it's like playing in a kind of rough housing way with kids so that they can actually move fear that's been moving through them um having gentle and firm boundaries uh which is like staying close and insisting it's like I'm the adult this is what we're doing it's just very gentle but very firm we're not going to go out of it and then the last one is uh going down the rabbit hole where you basically like have special time with a kid and you go into their world and join them you don't try to make them in your world you're just like tea tea it is let's do tea come on oh is that really an elephant over there you know and you're fully going down theit hole and so what sort of age group is this useful for like 0 to eight okay cool yeah and there's some usefulness and I mean I used this with CEOs when I was a VC like like it's the book is great even if you're not a parent that it teaches you so much and the doing it with the kids was a huge spiritual practice for me it was it is the thing that allowed me to feel all the emotions that allowed me to get to emotional fluidity because if my kids were sad I needed to feel it or I was going to be tied in a [ __ ] knock just stop just just eat a cookie and stop being sad or whatever the hell it was yeah because I guess it's easy to take it personally if your kid is sad or if your partner is sad yeah or you just don't want to feel sadness then you're going to get agitated you can be on a plane and if a kid starts crying like you can just stand up look at the entire plane and you're like you can just you weren't allowed to cry as a kid you weren't allowed to cry as a kid it's all the agitated people oh wer allowed to is is the book like what's the book called It's called Listen by Patty whiffler but the the organization is called hand-in-hand parenting and Parenting by connection and that is they have so many great resources so if you have if you have young kids and they have resources just like kids are biting this is what you do as long as you know the five tools it's pretty easy and we'll put links to all of that yeah um when you are rich how do you not spoil your [Laughter] kids yeah you know that's an interesting question so I I've thought about this a lot [Music] um so the thing about it is there's a difference between spoiling a kid and then teaching a kid that they of like buying off a child y so are you giving them money so that you don't have to feel an emotion or so that they don't have to feel an emotion that's one question Y what I notice is that kids who are used to having a certain kind of Lifestyle will probably maintain that lifestyle if they're like loved and like they're respected and supported so I don't have a problem in particular of like allowing them a particular lifestyle yep but what I'm not looking for them to do is avoid their emotions through money because that's where like the troubles start coming and the other thing is I don't want to hand them money unless they know they can earn it so meaning so I've seen there's this great family that I worked with for a while I just was so impressed with this they had hundreds of millions of dollars and it' been passed on generation to generation successfully and kept on growing and they're like okay if you don't want to make money then you just get x amount and you can like live comfortably but not great it's like you know good middle class job kind of thing if however you want to be a part of the thing and decide where the money is going to go and blah blah blah then you have to take a million dollars and start a company that gets you X millions of dollars they had like kind of this hurdle and if you did that then you could be because they didn't want anybody controlling the wealth who was scared of losing it oh okay nice because the because what happens in the second generation of wealth typically is that they get scared and get really tight and they're scared of losing it instead of which makes money go away yeah right like you as an entrepreneur I as an entrepreneur we take risks all the time that grows our money if we were scared as entrepreneurs our businesses would shrink and shrink and shrink and Shrink so I love that thought process so I'm thinking about it that way I'm not thinking about as spoiling as much yeah you cuz there are some people that I know who have decided that like the kids are going to get zero inheritance or that the kids are going to get only as much inheritances pays for their education and a house or whatever like do you have any kind of system like that or um I I mean once my kids are out of school I I won't be giving them money unless they have like a good reason you know like it's not like because I want to buy a car but it's like I will support you growing as a human with my money I couldn't think of a better way to spend it yeah but I'm not going to like throw money at you to solve a problem or anything so you can avoid an emotion nice yeah I haven't thought much about what I would do if I died with the money okay um I don't think it's going to make much of a I mean the way that my kids are with money right now is that they generally are respectful of it they appreciate it they're grateful for it yeah which is I think the most important thing is that they're just like they see it as a as a blessing for lack of a better word okay so bringing things full circle we started off the conversation talking about this relationship between uh money success fulfillment how do you become how do you achieve success while also enjoying the journey along the way yes and we kind of took a bit of a roller coaster ride through emotion through Enlightenment spirituality parenting all those sort of things I guess if someone's got to the end of this of this episode if you were to if you were to imagine the people you've coached they're all Successful by society's definitions yes by any stretch of the imagination uh but some of them are probably enjoying their life in feel fulfilled and some of them probably don't like what are the what are the key factors that differentiate someone who is Success successful and fulfilled and happy versus successful and unhappy yeah I what I notic is that there's seven key factors and and um it's actually what we what we teach in um like our long course and so I'll go through just some of them but they all kind of revolve around the same thing like one of them we've already discussed which is um wants are more effective than shoulds so if they're moving from their wants and they're willing to be vulnerable enough to share their wants and feel their wants like in this weekend I started with wants um what I know instead of shoulds they're far more fulfilled far more happy um if they focus on connection over Perfection is another one so Perfection like and whether this is a business where I want to make the perfect product or I want a product by create a product by connecting with my customers the second one's always going to work better than the first Y and so it's the same thing and like almost everything it's like there's some weird like if you're going to do a book you kind of like need to spend a little time with perfection because it's in print forever or whatever but um but the book that you try to make perfect is not going to be as good as the book that you really feel connected to connected to while you're writing it and connects to the people that you're writing it for so that's another one as an example love over defense we've touched about in a little bit as well people who still stay defensive rather than being openhearted even in their boundaries even in saying no even in you know actually being incredibly competitive in a in an in a business environment but still can be openhearted in that far more so those are some of the examples nice and where can people go to learn more about these if they want to find out the rest and yeah there's um a couple ways you can get on the website but also in our podcasts we have one podcast on each seven so and when we do the online courses what we do is we make the podcasts available for free and but the courses is where you know the exercises like what we did the other day where it gets really deep and really intense and you get to experience it in your bones that that we do in the coures Okay cool so we'll put a link to the YouTube channel the podcast the website and all the free stuff um and then if people want they can explore the paid stuff exactly I I'll be attending your ground Breakers course in a few months so that should be fun looking forward to it final question so I am turning 30 in about a week uh any tips on turning 30 yeah or any any advice for someone who's just about to turn 30 yeah a couple things are weird about well things I didn't know when I was 30 one is like oftentimes for men their Prime is 40 so you think that like there's some idea that you're kind of passing your Prime but somehow like 40 is like this time where like there's this Confluence of energy in your system your body is doing great your mind is doing great you've learned all this great stuff so that's one thing that I would tell anybody who's 30 is like don't like nothing is like nothing has gone over the cliff nor is it going to I I've actually liked getting older every year but but there's definitely like a feeling of primeness in the 40 years old I think the only other thing I would say is what I notic is that like from like 28 to 30s there's a major from 208 to 30 there's like a turning that happens in in humans generally they go from kind of thinking they know everything a little bit and they feel like that even if they're curious and learning there's kind of like this brash I can do anything kind of feeling and that starts flipping at 30 years old there's like a like a couple lessons to get learned and there's like wait I maybe I don't see things as much as I thought that I would see them um and it's uncomfortable but it's also like incredibly relieving at the same time because it allows it like it softens us in a way and so I would just say like enjoy the softening there's a lot like as we get older there's like less to prove less to show less to get to and like and if you can enjoy that softening often times things explode Blossom that you could never even imagine but it's also just super enjoyable to enjoy the Soph me Amazing Joe Hudson thank you so much pleasure thank you all right so that's it for this week's episode of Deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store it really helps other people discover the podcast or if you're watching watching this in full HD or 4k on YouTube then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that would be awesome and if you enjoyed this episode you might like to check out this episode here as well which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode so thanks for watching uh do hit the Subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you next time bye-bye

Get the Black Friday offer for our Part-Time YouTuber Academy: https://go.lifestylebusiness.com/bf25-poddesc Subscribe to LifeNotes 👉 https://go.aliabdaal.com/lifenotes_deepdive Sponsored by Brilliant - visit https://brilliant.org/DeepDive/ and the first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription. I’ve built a brand new community for like-minded people called Productivity Lab. We’ll have online classes, workshops, and coaching to help you double your productivity. You can find out more here 👉 https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0bqgs70 📚 Check Out My New York Times Bestselling Book Feel-Good Productivity! 👉 https://go.feelgoodproductivity.com/podcast 📧 Sign up for LifeNotes - my weekly newsletter where I share actionable productivity tips, practical life advice, and high-quality insights from across the web directly to your inbox. 👉 https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0bqgy70 In today's episode, I chat with Joe Hudson about success, money, and fulfilment. We discuss having a purpose beyond money, the role of joy in success, and how emotions affect decisions. Joe shares insights on self-awareness, spirituality, and parenting, emphasizing the importance of listening to oneself and valuing connection. We end with advice for those turning 30: embrace the changes that come with age. Enjoy! 00:00 The Relationship Between Success, Money, and Fulfilment 05:23 The Importance of Enjoyment in Achieving Success 08:13 The Role of Emotions in Decision-Making 13:29 Developing Emotional Fluidity 28:23 Balancing Financial Security and Passion 37:06 Tools for Accessing and Releasing Emotions 38:04 The Impact of Childhood Experiences on Emotional Expression 39:32 The Role of Emotional Support in Relationships 40:58 Dropping Defensiveness and Being Present with Emotions 46:14 Exploring and Releasing Guilt and Shame 01:02:05 Enlightenment as an Expansion of Self and Time 01:13:56 Listening to Yourself and Following Your Wants 01:15:21 Connection Over Perfection 01:18:07 Embracing Vulnerability and Open-Heartedness 01:21:22 Hand-in-Hand Parenting for Emotional Processing 01:24:33 The Seven Key Factors for Success and Fulfilment 01:46:20 Embracing the Softening with Age 🔗 CONNECT WITH JOE 🎥 YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@UCK3IN-E6f2bXdNFNOp7esOA 🐦 X ( Twitter ) - https://x.com/FU_joehudson 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/joehudson_aoa/ 💻 Website - https://www.artofaccomplishment.com/ 🎙️Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/6MjoHFfLmNgo0Msais7IJ2 🔗 CONNECT WITH ALI 🎥 YouTube Channel - https://youtube.com/@UCoOae5nYA7VqaXzerajD0lg 🐦 X ( Twitter ) - https://twitter.com/aliabdaal 📸 Instagram - https://instagram.com/aliabdaal 💻 Website - https://aliabdaal.com/ 👥 Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ali-abdaal/ 📄SHOW NOTES & TRANSCRIPT Visit the website for the transcript and highlights from the conversation - https://aliabdaal.com/podcast/ 🎙️ ABOUT THE PODCAST Deep Dive is the podcast that delves into the minds of entrepreneurs, creators and other inspiring people to uncover the philosophies, strategies and tools that help us live happier, healthier and more productive lives.Want to start your own podcast? We use Transistor! https://go.aliabdaal.com/transistor 🎧 LISTEN FOR FREE Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/deep-dive-with-ali-abdaal/id1587142091 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7gZkflCpck1rTixj8M7yHt RSS: https://feeds.transistor.fm/deep-div 🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we’d love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :) https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/deep-dive-with-ali-abdaal/ 👋 GET IN TOUCH You can also Tweet @aliabdaal with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you’ve learnt from the episodes and we can thank you personally for tuning in 🙏 PS: Some of the links in this description are affiliate links that I get a kickback from 😜