next cohort: jan 2027
Great Decisions Course
Uncover the emotions running your life. 2026 cohort is sold out.
Sign up for updates and early access to the next cohort.
Stephen Simon
Owner, Indiana Pacers (NBA)
"Joe Hudson and the entire Art of Accomplishment team have been truly transformative mentors and teachers in my life."
The Problem
The emotions you run from are running your life
When we push our "negative" emotions aside in the name of being "rational,” they don't just disappear.
They resurface as procrastination, analysis paralysis, or that nagging feeling that something's off, despite all the logical evidence.
Our Invitation
Decisions driven by clarity, not avoidance
Studies show that great decision-making is driven by emotional intelligence. You're stuck because there's an emotion you're avoiding, not because the decision is complicated.
We'll show you how the most effective people make great decisions: by leaning into their feelings to find clarity, rather than dodging them.
What You Get
A training ground for emotional fluidity
Most decision-making courses teach you frameworks. This one goes to the root of what's driving every choice you've ever made. Over five weeks, you'll discover that the decisions you've been struggling with are emotional problems disguised as logical ones. And when that unlocks, everything changes.
Emotions that work for you, not against you
Most of us were never taught to work with our emotions. So we either get flooded by them or shut them out entirely. You'll learn to sit with what you feel, hear what it's telling you, and use it as valuable data.
Principles to actually live by
Not borrowed values or aphorisms that sound good. You'll discover your own principles: discovered, tested, and refined through real-life experiments. When you know what you stand for, decisions stop feeling like dilemmas.
Clarity when it matters most
The fog that descends on big decisions, the overthinking, the paralysis, the endless pros-and-cons lists. They all lift when you discover they've been driven by avoidance, and sit with what you've been avoiding.
Less second-guessing, More confidence
The goal isn't perfect decisions. Most people think confidence comes from never getting it wrong. But unshakable confidence comes from knowing your worth isn't tied to always getting it right.
"Every emotion is like a young child. Ignore it and it will find a louder way to be known. Treat it like it's bad, and it grows defiant until it runs the home. Give it attention and connection, and it will always turn back to you in love."
Joe Hudson
Course Results
97%
Cohort
Completion Rate
96%
Purchase
Satisfaction
How it Works
Go deeper than you thought you could
Everything in this course is designed for one thing: direct contact with yourself. Because once you understand yourself, the decision becomes clear.
Daily Emotional Inquiry
Every day, you'll spend time doing Emotional Inquiry with an emotion you've been avoiding. Not analyzing it. Experiencing it. This daily practice is where some of the deepest shifts happen, quietly, between sessions. We'll also have pop-ups you can sign up for where facilitators will help you with specific emotions.
Three Layers of Learning
Each week operates on three levels: solo study to go inward, 1:1 partner sessions to practice in relationship, and group sessions to see yourself reflected in others. The three reinforce each other in ways to create powerful transformations.
Weekly Large-Group Coaching
Every week, Joe will lead a live group session with the full cohort where he'll works directly with participants in real time. You'll witness 1:1 coaching unfold in front of the group. And whether it's your turn or not, something in it will land for you.
Principles in the Wild
You won't just identify your principles — you'll test them. Every week, you'll run real experiments in your actual life and bring back what you found. Principles that survive contact with reality are the ones that actually guide you.
Nervous System Practices
Change doesn't just happen in the mind. Each week includes somatic practices designed to help your body catch up to what your mind is learning.
Course Curriculum
What you will learn
We’ve spent decades teaching this approach to hundreds of world-class founders, C-suite execs, and top creators. Then, we distilled the most powerful tools into a 5-week training ground that will equip you with the tools to become more emotionally fluid and make great decisions.
Next cohort starts Jan 2027
The Golden Algorithm
The emotions you don’t want to feel start running your life. They determine what you attempt, what you delay, what you rationalize, and what you don’t allow yourself to want.
How to Find Your Emotional Blind Spots
Practice five different methods of uncovering the biggest emotions that you've learned to avoid, from fear to anger, grief to joy.
Your "Negative" Emotions Aren't What You Think
Your mind is constantly telling you stories about your emotions. But many of those stories aren’t true. The unlock: It’s not the emotion itself that hurts. It’s your resistance to it that does.
How to Work With Stuckness, Overthinking, and Analysis Paralysis
Learn how to work with the different forms of resistance that come up. This resistance is a natural part of the process. It's what arises when you reach the edge of what you’ve been willing to feel.
Using Principles to Reclaim Your Life
Principles are what makes decision-making effortless. The principle becomes the authority—not your avoidance, mood, or fear.
Course Schedule
Your 5-week roadmap
No lectures. Each week, you'll experience three live sessions: partner work, small group work, and large group coaching with Joe Hudson. You'll also get a weekly curriculum (self-paced) of podcasts, solo experiments, demos, and teachings designed to help you go even deeper.
5
Partnered
Sessions
5
Small Group
Sessions
5
Large Group
Coaching
50
Hours of
Content
Week 1 - Setting the Stage
When it comes to decision-making, most people come in thinking they need better frameworks or rationale. By the end of this week, you'll see it clearly: You don't have a logic problem, you have an emotions problem.
Week 2 - Emotional Inquiry
The emotions you avoid don't disappear. They go underground and start running your life from behind the scenes. Start uncovering these avoided emotions and experience why accessing them is the most strategic thing you can do.
Week 3 - Principles
You don't actually need more frameworks. You need your framework. Learn how principles rooted in your own experience — not borrowed wisdom — become the reliable compass that emotions alone can't provide. Test them in real situations before you need them.
Week 4 - Finding Clarity
Clarity isn't a feeling. It's a skill. Learn to distinguish the voice of fear from the voice of truth, and how to access both with precision. Discover what's actually underneath your fear of making the wrong call, and what's on the other side of it.
Week 5 - Integration
Great decisions emerge out of who you become. Practice applying your new decision-making approach to the real choices in front of you. Leave with a process that's yours, and the confidence to trust it.
Weekly Schedule
Each week is an arc that starts on Friday. Get a sneak peek into the rhythm of how each week looks, from solo curriculum to live calls.
apply now
Experience the Great Decisions Course
Uncover the emotions running your life. Runs for five weeks every January. Our 2026 cohort sold out in two days. Join the early access waitlist to be the first to know when we open applications for 2027.
Next cohort: Jan 2027
Great Decisions Course
Uncover the emotions running your life
$3500
Find clarity on the choices you've been stuck on
Feel your emotions without being controlled by them
Stop waiting for certainty that never comes
End the endless pros-and-cons loops
Build emotional skills that compound over time
Leave with a process you'll use for decades
course testimonials
Hear from Great Decisions Course alumni
Real clarity around how I want to live my life and lots of empowerment
Vera Budean
Founder
It is an emotional rollercoaster that will give you the tools to be more authentic and make your decisions from there.
Tali Kimelman
Photographer and Coach
Emotional roller coaster that's intense and rewarding.
Slava Ukrayini
Innepreneur
This is a forcing function to look at your mess.
Raphael Sisa
Product Designer
It helped me be even more in tune with my body and emotions and gave me tools to make better decisions and live a better life.
PJ LeBlanc
Creative Entrepreneur
More access to uncomfortable emotions – including fear and joy. Deeper feelings of connection. Noticing how what I've been chasing is what I have (and unconsciously push away).
Pranav Mutatkar
Marketing Coach at Got Users
It makes decision-making super clear and easy.
Peng Wu
Engineering Manager, Meta
This course is a roller coaster of emotions where you learn how to be with yourself in total acceptance. A move that produces so much freedom in your system.
Pablo Estrada
Project Manager
If you don't resist, this course, like all of the AOA experiences, will open your head, heart, and gut to everything you didn't know you desperately wanted.
Nancy Elliott
Life Coach
Powerful.
Mac Martine
Entrepreneur
This course isn't about better strategy, but about transforming the core of why the decision is there in the first place. When that's unstuck, decisions make themselves.
Max Sutter
Executive Coach | Ex-Founder/CEO
Reframing what decisions are and thus reframing what life is.
Luan Hassett
Doctor
If you want to get clear on decisions, the Great Decisions Course is what you have to join.
Lycos
z/OS Software Engineer
It's a course about how decisions get stuck. It has you sit down every day and experience emotions you're avoiding, which is like pouring gasoline on the candle of your personal development.
Lady Red Beacham
I feel so much better about the scariest things I used to feel squashed by. I feel ready to have kids and don't feel crushed by work emotions anymore.
Lex Charriere
Small-Business Owner
[I am] much more aware of my emotions and how they affect my behavior; instead of walling them off I listen to them.
Kunal Bhalla
Software Engineer
By helping you welcome all your emotions it becomes possible to make decisions that take into account what feels right in your system…
Kalia Crowder
Director of Strategic Development
It’s a course to learn how to find all the answers you seek within you.
Jing Wu
Product Designer
I spent time in the course understanding the emotions under the decisions and at the end the decisions didn’t feel the same- it all felt lighter.
Jen Gleason
CEO of Living Services Foundation
Don’t doubt it, test it. It will change your life in all ways possible
Irene Vogelaar
AI ethicist / compliance advisor
Applied self exploration. Deep emotional work. Pattern breaking and assumption questioning.
Gabriel A. Johnson-Wesley
Entrepreneur
It changed my life. It led to joy on a regular basis, like I have not known before.
Dan Rubin
An intense and highly effective learning experience for which I am profoundly grateful.
Deborah K Fygenson
Experimental Physicist
Come with confusion, leave with clarity, and a set of tools to find your way back there again and again. And again.
Drew Smith
Founder & Leadership Coach
A mental and emotional rollercoaster filled with moments of authenticity and vulnerability, self-introspection, and a collective acceptance of messy human existence.
Daria Jung
A new more effective template for identifying avoided emotions and working through any decision you have to make.
Colin Beverly
Wellness Innovator and Entrepreneur
It's like being thrown into the water and learning how to swim with all the support needed to learn on the edge.
Bryce Astill
Coach/Business Owner
GDC helps you make decisions by teaching you why you avoid decisions. You better be ready for a wild ride, but it's worth it.
Brian Johnson
HR Director
This course taught me how to meet myself for the first time with compassion and love and connect to all of my emotions.
Bogdan Dumitriu
Art Director / Motion Designer
It was transformational. My relationship with my emotions has changed dramatically. I no longer look at them as enemies but rather aspects of myself that I want to get to know.
Audrey Desjarlais
Grants and Contracts Administrator
An intuitive framework on how to stay connected with myself to make more confident decisions. And lots of work :)
Baha B. Rudin
Head of Sales at a Fintech company
Discovering a deeper truth about what I really want from life. Deeper truth about my own reality.
Archana Murali
Senior Engineering Leader
Life changing.
Angie Wang
Writer
A crash course in better understanding and accepting more and more parts of yourself, with ripples that will go out to every part of life.
Alex Kopelyan
Investor, human health and climate
Enlightening and empowering.
Alex Brooker
High Performance Trainer for Professional Athletes
The Great Decisions Course (GDC) significantly improved my ability to tolerate difficult emotions—before, they would interfere with my judgment in decision-making.
Adrian Micu
CFO
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What if I’m not sure I have enough time for Great Decisions Course?
Thinking you have a lack of time to do this work is a good indication that this work will have benefits for you.
The sense that you have a lack of time is often due to over-management, perfectionism, defensiveness, fear, and shame. All of these, and how they affect your decision-making, are addressed in the course.
Consider this: Many of us have time to consume content, scroll on our phones, and run around in circles at our job, but we don’t have time to work on things that increase our capacity for a lifetime, which no one can take away from us.
Why is Great Decisions Course only held once a year?
This course is an intense and immersive journey. Joe works with our team of highly trained coaches to track each participant’s journey. The level of care and commitment we give to your transformation is why we are only able to run the course once a year.
What should I know before joining the course? Are there any prerequisites to joining
There are no formal prerequisites for joining the Great Decisions Course. The only requirement is an openness to explore, engage, and experiment with the principles taught.
To get the most out of the program, we encourage you to approach it with intentionality, vulnerability, and a spirit of curiosity and enjoyment. Also, nobody is forcing you to take this course. If a friend or colleague is pressuring you to come and you don’t feel called to it, then you shouldn’t do it.
What is the weekly time commitment?
- 2x Mandatory calls a week (3.5 hours)
- Solo work and Daily Experiments (10-15 minutes daily)
- Podcast and prep for Partner Call (1 hour)
Optional Work (Recommended)
- Friday Large Group calls (1.5 hours) - Optional and recorded
- Weekly Study Halls (1 hour) - Optional
Who is the Great Decisions Course not for?
If you’re not using your skepticism effectively: Skepticism is healthy and an important part of the journey. But if you’re skeptical before running experiments, it will add in a bias that renders the experiment ineffective. Our exercises are most useful when you can keep an open mind, until after the fact. Then, skepticism is invaluable.
If you’re not ready to be sincere: The work we do requires a deep commitment to self-exploration. If you’re unable to join the program from a place of sincerity and openness, this likely won’t be a good use of your money. (Note: Sincerity does not mean seriousness. Enjoying the process is one of the most effective ways to be in this work.)
If you don’t want something emotionally rich and intense: The Great Decisions Course is an immersive experience that is designed to push your boundaries and challenge you to find your edge. While we provide expert care and guidance along the way, this isn’t the right program for everyone.
What will I get from this course that I can't get from just listening to the AOA podcast?
What can you get from playing baseball that you can’t get from watching it? The answer is the same: It’s an embodied experience. It’s the difference between listening to a podcast from a personal trainer and booking an in-person appointment. There is a world of difference to have someone guide you into what it feels like to be in certain positions and to help you make micro-adjustments. This hands-on approach helps the knowledge actually become a part of you, integrated into your body, rather than something you’ve heard someone talk about.
How flexible are you with timing?
Very. Your solo work is done on your own time, the partner session is scheduled on your own time, and the weekly Q&A with Joe Hudson is recorded if you are unable to attend. The small group session is available at four different time slots. Please reach out if you don’t think any of the times will work for you.
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