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

Aug 8, 2024 1h 18m 12 insights Episode Page ↗
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.
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.