How embracing emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (executive coach, Art of Accomplishment)
Joe Hudson, an executive coach for tech leaders, discusses how a critical inner voice and a dysfunctional relationship with emotions keep people stuck. He shares experiments to transform these issues, improve decision-making, foster effective teams, and enhance daily life through gratitude.
Deep Dive Analysis
13 Topic Outline
The Critical Voice in Your Head
Changing Your Relationship with the Critical Voice
Understanding and Embracing Emotions
The Importance of Emotional Fluidity
Questioning Assumptions and Self-Perception
Consequences of Avoiding Emotions
The Power of Enjoyment for Productivity
Enjoying Daily Tasks vs. Innate Enjoyment
Authenticity Versus Self-Improvement
Understanding Problems to Find Solutions
Emotions and Better Decision-Making
Creating Effective Teams and Meetings
Daily Gratitude Practice for Personal Growth
6 Key Concepts
Critical Voice in Your Head
This is the internal voice that is critical and repetitive, often telling you 'bullshit' and assuming a 'boss' position when it's more like a 'little kid having a temper tantrum.' It is never truly accurate, even if it contains a kernel of truth, and typically hinders productivity and enjoyment.
Emotional Decision Making
Decisions are primarily made in the emotional center of the brain, with logic used to figure out how one will feel. Avoiding certain emotions limits solution sets and prevents taking necessary risks, leading to decisions based on an inability to feel rather than clear choice.
Emotional Fluidity
This is the state where emotions move right through you without getting 'kinked' or resisted. It allows for full expression of emotions with 'love' and 'clarity of purpose,' rather than uncontrolled outbursts or suppressed feelings that manifest as physical tension or stuckness.
What We Resist Persists
This concept explains that any emotion or experience you try to avoid is inadvertently invited into your life in the very way you're trying to prevent it. This happens because the resistance mechanism itself perpetuates the unwanted feeling or situation.
True Efficiency
True efficiency is not just getting something done quickly, but rather completing a task and feeling like you have more energy afterwards, or are 'stoked' to do it again. Enjoyment is a key component of true efficiency, as it correlates with higher quality, longer engagement, and less energy expenditure.
Authenticity vs. Self-Improvement
This idea posits that human beings naturally evolve, similar to an oak tree growing through different stages, without needing to be 'improved.' Focusing on 'shoulds' and the idea of being 'broken' slows down this natural evolutionary process, whereas acting from authenticity leads to a life aligned with who you truly are.
9 Questions Answered
Two major factors are a critical, unproductive voice in their head that prevents enjoyment of success, and a dysfunctional relationship with emotions, where they try to pretend, compartmentalize, or manage them instead of harnessing and embracing them.
Instead of trying to stop or control it, experiment with different responses daily, such as acknowledging its fear ('Oh, I see that you're really scared. Don't worry, I'm right here with you') or simply not believing it, viewing it as a 'little kid having a temper tantrum.'
Emotions are crucial for decision-making; people with damaged emotional centers struggle to make simple choices. Embracing all emotions expands your solution sets, allowing you to take risks, speak your truth, and avoid feeling stuck or overwhelmed, which often stems from unexpressed emotions.
Practice 'emotional inquiry' by somatically and mentally exploring an emotional experience in your body with curiosity and wonder, welcoming it rather than just being non-judgmentally aware. Also, allow your body to move and make sounds to fully express and release the emotion, as mammals do.
People often live in stories describing old versions of themselves or lack clear self-perception, leading them to misinterpret issues. They may also resist compliments, indicating an inability to truly feel who they are and accept positive feedback.
Whatever emotion you try to avoid, you will inadvertently invite it into your life in the exact way you're trying to prevent it. For example, a conflict-avoidant person will find themselves constantly dealing with tension and feeling out of control due to unresolved conflicts.
Fall in love with all emotional experiences to expand your solution sets and optionality, allowing for clearer decision-making. Additionally, create and live by a refined set of 5 core principles, which can automate decisions and guide your actions even when you don't initially want to follow them.
Focus on making every meeting a 'five-star meeting' where everyone walks out feeling great, even if the content was challenging. This approach surfaces all company problems, as the meetings that 'suck' will pinpoint areas needing attention, leading to more effective and potentially fewer meetings.
Engage in a seven-minute gratitude practice daily with another person, focusing on *feeling* the gratitude and letting that felt sense speak, rather than just intellectually listing things you are grateful for. This practice is especially powerful when applied to areas where you feel a lack, as it can dramatically shift your perspective and circumstances.
12 Actionable Insights
1. Daily Gratitude Practice
Engage in a daily 7-minute gratitude practice with another person, focusing on feeling the gratitude and letting that felt sense guide your expression. This practice can dramatically change your life, especially when applied to areas of perceived lack.
2. Welcome All Emotions
Learn to fall in love with and welcome all your emotional experiences, rather than resisting or avoiding them. This approach expands your solution sets for decision-making and prevents feelings of being stuck or overwhelmed.
3. Experiment with Inner Voice
Instead of trying to stop your critical inner voice, experiment daily with new ways of relating to it, such as responding with compassion (“I see you’re scared, I’m here”) or disbelief. Approach this as a learning experiment, not an attempt to control the voice.
4. Question Underlying Assumptions
Challenge the assumptions that make your problems or self-stories feel real. By deeply exploring and questioning these underlying assumptions, you can often find that the problem begins to fade as the solution becomes clear.
5. Solve Problems by Feeling
Identify any recurring problem in your life and trace it back to the specific emotion you are trying to avoid. By becoming okay with feeling that emotion, you can break the pattern of inviting the very thing you’re trying to avoid into your life.
6. Cultivate Present Enjoyment
Actively seek to enjoy what you are doing 10% more right now, without changing external circumstances. This internal shift improves efficiency, quality, and staying power, naturally leading you to pursue more enjoyable activities.
7. Create Life Principles
Develop a concise set of 5 simple, well-defined principles to guide your decisions, testing and refining each one over several days. Living by these principles can automate decision-making and align your actions with the life you want.
8. Authenticity Over Improvement
Focus on evolving from your authentic self and acting from your “wants” rather than striving for “improvement” based on “shoulds.” This fosters a life and relationships that are genuinely right for you, not for a perceived ideal self.
9. Conduct “Five-Star Meetings”
Strive to make every team meeting a “five-star meeting” where everyone leaves feeling positive and engaged. This practice will surface every underlying problem within the company, indicating exactly where to focus for improvement.
10. Embrace Meeting Intensity
Start meetings by asking what people are scared to say or by intentionally leaning into uncomfortable topics. Embracing this intensity helps address underlying issues and improves business outcomes.
11. Practice Emotional Inquiry
Engage in “emotional inquiry” by somatically and mentally exploring an emotional experience in your body with curiosity and wonder, welcoming it fully. This practice helps open up emotional fluidity.
12. Physically Express Emotions
Allow your muscles to move and make sounds as a natural way to release and process emotions, rather than just sitting still and feeling them. This physical expression aids in achieving emotional fluidity.
7 Key Quotes
Every single time the voice in your head is wrong.
Joe Hudson
Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome.
Joe Hudson
Whatever emotion that you're trying to avoid, you are inviting into your life in exactly the way that you're trying to avoid it.
Joe Hudson
If you understood the problem there, there would be no question about the solution.
Joe Hudson
If you say, I'm going to figure out how to enjoy what I do 10% more and you succeed, you are 10% more efficient.
Joe Hudson
The atomic structure of a company is the meetings and the decisions.
Joe Hudson
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Joe Hudson (attributing to Drucker/Branson)
4 Protocols
Working with the Critical Voice in Your Head
Joe Hudson- Recognize that the critical, repetitive voice in your head is always wrong and often sounds like a child's temper tantrum.
- Instead of trying to stop or control it, change your relationship with it.
- Pick an experiment every day to respond to the voice in a new way (e.g., 'Oh, I see that you're really scared. Don't worry, I'm right here with you,' or sing to it, or express disbelief).
- Approach this as an experimental mindset to learn about yourself and the voice, rather than aiming for a specific outcome, which prevents feeling like a failure.
Emotional Inquiry for Fluidity
Joe Hudson- Engage in a 'somatic mental experiencing' of an emotional experience in your body.
- Get very curious about the emotion, like a child exploring a toad (look, feel, smell).
- Welcome and love the emotion, observing what happens when you do, versus when you resist it.
- Allow your muscles to move and make sounds to fully express and release the emotion, rather than just sitting still.
Creating Personal Life Principles
Joe Hudson- Identify 5 core principles that, if lived by, would guarantee the life you want.
- Define each principle not only by what it is but also by what it isn't (e.g., 'embrace intensity' is not 'create intensity').
- Experiment with each principle for about five days to see if it works for you.
- Refine your principles based on your experiments until you are confident they will create your desired life.
Seven-Minute Daily Gratitude Practice
Joe Hudson- Find another person (friend, family, business partner) to do this practice with daily.
- For at least seven minutes, express gratitude back and forth.
- Focus on *feeling* the gratitude in your body and letting that felt sense speak, rather than just intellectually listing things you are grateful for.
- After a couple of weeks, apply this practice specifically to areas of your life where you feel a lack (e.g., money, time, love) to experience a profound shift.