ART OF ACCOMPLISHMENT

How Can I Make Better Decisions?

Decisions Series #1

November 25, 2022
Summary
Joe and Brett discuss how to find deeper clarity in decision-making, whether in the office or on the edge of a cliff. Decisions are emotionally-driven, and we navigate them based on how we think we’ll feel when an outcome arrives. When we’re willing to feel any emotion, our decision-making becomes clear. Tune in to see how becoming more aware of our emotions and using guiding principles can help us quickly identify the next obvious step in any decision-making process.
Transcript

Episode Intro: Hey, everyone. I am taking on some more coaching clients, and I have a few openings. If you want to integrate what we talked about in the podcast into your life and business, coaching is a good way to go deep. To learn more about working with me and to apply, hop over to artofaccomplishment.com/brett.

Welcome to the Art of Accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves, and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I am Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson.

Brett: Hey, Joe. How are you doing?

Joe: I’m good. How are you?

Brett: Doing well. I’ve been thinking that on the podcast I think I’ve mentioned a number of times how we first met, which was you had been doing a talk in San Francisco called How to Make Good Business Decisions. That was something that really caught my eye. I had ended up moving to the Bay Area from my life overseas doing air sports, base jumping and wing suiting, and I was on my own personal decision of how to make better decisions because there have been a lot of cost and consequence with not making great decisions in our community. That was a study I was really deeply in at the time, driving me down rabbit holes, neuroscience and consciousness in general. I just realized we have never actually done an episode on how to make decisions.

Joe: That tickles me to no end. That’s actually something I was thinking about when you said about decision making. What made me crack up at the beginning was the idea that we really haven’t done this. It is such an integral part of the work. I look forward to doing it. Let’s talk about decision making.

Brett: It is also one of the practical things that people desire. We talked a lot about how to feel your feelings, and people ask what the point is.

Joe: We should tie those two things in together. Let’s do that. We’ve talked about the thing many times on the podcast about how the emotional center is the decision-making part of our brain. If we remove it, it will take us half an hour to decide what color pen or whatever it is. You will maintain your intelligence, but you won’t be able to make any decisions. That’s the quintessential link. The quintessential link is that we make emotional decisions. We do not make intellectual decisions. What we are doing is we are using the intellect to help us try to understand how we will feel at the end of the decision. We use a SWOT analysis. It is not really what’s the best result. It is how we will feel at the end of it.

I think I’ve said this on the podcast before, which is if you took your SWOT analysis and some authority that you completely trusted looked at you and said if you just choose this, you will be happier or you will have a more satisfied life, the SWOT analysis just goes out the window.

Brett: For listeners who might not know what a SWOT analysis is, it is a term used in business, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Joe: If you have written a pro and con list to decide whether you are going to marry the person or to take the job.

Brett: Darwin had a very famous one of those on whether or not he should marry the person.

Joe: Tell me this story.

Brett: I guess Charles Darwin famously did that. He did a very intellectual pro and cons list about whether or not to marry his wife.

Joe: If somebody had said to Charles that they guaranteed him he would have a happier, better life than if you didn’t, that whole analysis goes out the window. That is the other clue. What we are really doing is just using the intellect to try to figure out how we will feel best. In that, there is an assumption that I will feel better if my wife is supportive, if the job makes me money, or if I am successful. Not only are we trying to figure out what’s going to make us feel the best or the way we think we want to feel, but in that are a whole bunch of assumptions that are often full of errors.

The intellect can also lead us into the wrong place, whereas the emotional experiences are a great way, if you are really aware of your emotions and you understand how they move, then decision making becomes a completely different thing than thinking you are making intellectual decisions when you are not ever.

Brett: Tying back to another thing you said, you told me once that the body lies as much as the mind, or you could say even the emotions do. This isn’t necessarily to say that our emotions are correct, and our mind is wrong. It is more just to say that we make decisions based on the emotions we anticipate we are going to feel based on the outcomes. That knowledge helps us be more aware of the full stack of what we are making decisions from, not necessarily to point to any particular part of our system as being more trustworthy as another part. Is that accurate?

Joe: Yes. There are a couple of things in that. The first one is clarity in decision making comes from being willing, able and welcoming all emotional experiences. What we know about neuroscience is we are more likely to make a decision or act as a way to avoid something bad than to feel something good. A lot of the time what that means is that our decision making, the intellect, is weighing the avoidance of something bad over the potential of feeling something good.

If you are happy to feel any emotion, good or bad, if you welcome any of these emotions, your decision making becomes very clear. If you can be in love with feeling fear, anger, excitement, exalted or exuberant, which everybody says they can, but notice that might not be the case. If you can feel all of those things happily, and you look forward to them, then your decision making gets a lot clearer. That’s part of it.

The second part of it is your emotional system is not always clear in itself in the fact that you might be feeling something because of a trauma that isn’t actually happening in this moment, or your mind might be telling you a certain emotion might mean something it doesn’t mean. A great example of this is anxiety and excitement. There is this great phrase. Excitement is just fear with breath, or anxiety is excitement without the breath. If you can breathe into a feeling of anxiety or fear, it can become excitement very quickly. What’s the right emotional experience there? Is it that you are not breathing? Is it that you are actually feeling excitement or fear? There can be a lot of confusion around that as well.

It is not that listening to your body will mean you will make all these great decisions. It is literally understanding how your emotions work, how your body works and how your intellect works in the decision-making process. That’s the beginning of learning to make great decisions.

Brett: That sounds like it also includes being aware of what our fears really are. An example in jumping would be you might have the healthy fear that points to the physical risk you are about to take, and you might also be feeling the fear of letting somebody down or some kind of threat to your identity. You might be registering that identity threat as a physical threat and feel the physical response of fear, and you wouldn’t realize you are weighing your decision towards something that is actually protecting an identity rather than protecting your life. That’s one of the core learnings from this work for me and through my life in air sports.

Joe: A lot of us are protecting our identity. That’s beautiful. A lot of us make bad business decisions and apparently bad jumping decisions in air sports based on something that’s actually not dangerous to us, but dangerous to our identity. I would say the thing is if you think you are making a decision, you are in fear. Period. I have made 500 choices today. I am unaware of those choices. They just happened. I am choosing to talk to you right now. I am choosing to have my computer in this configuration. I am choosing where to look. I am choosing what I am drinking and what words to say. They are all a choice. For semantics, I am going to call those choices. Decisions, that’s where you think you have a decision to make, and you are thinking about if you go left or right. Do I take the job? Do I not take the job? Do I buy the car or not?

If you are in a thing where a choice has become a decision and all of a sudden there is a lot of thought put into it and you are really putting some energy, that in itself is fear. Already you are operating in some fear.

Brett: I want to challenge that a little bit as a devil’s advocate. What makes it not that we could be operating out of desire? On one side of the coin, I can see we fear a negative outcome. On the other side of the coin, I can see we desire the best possible outcome. We might even desire to not have the thing we fear occur. How do we know whether fear or desire is actually primary there? Can it be both?

Joe: It can be both, but all I am saying is fear is involved. There is some place where fear is involved. There could be a ton of motivations, desire being one of them or the motivation to be right or to not be judged. There are a thousand motivations in there, but there is a fear There is a fear of getting it wrong. There is fear of consequences if you are making a decision instead of just having a choice that is in front of you. That’s a really important thing, just to notice there is fear involved in it. When there is fear involved in it, our ability to think becomes less clear, to learn dwindles, and to see more solutions because we become more binary in our thinking. All of that occurs because we are in fear. Once we are in that decision making, that’s what happens.

The short fix on that that a lot of people will use, and I will share here is that you just do the next most obvious thing. I will give you a story about this. When I was investing, which I called investing for philanthropy where we would put millions of dollars into some project, there is this moment when you ask yourself if you are going to do that, put this money in. When I saw that, I used to think that was a decision I have to make and make well. Through my time working in philanthropy, what I realized was that’s false. That’s not true. It’s never true. What’s true is you do the next most obvious thing. If I am thinking if I should put the money in or not, there is some fear. What is the fear I have to address? I don’t know if this person is going to be great. I will do some reference checks. Am I sending them money now or am I still trying to make a decision? I am still trying to make a decision. Maybe they are not serving. The next most obvious step is to call some of the people they are serving and make sure their product is as good or their service is as good as I thought it was. It was a constant looking. Anytime I thought I had to make a decision, what’s the next most obvious step? What’s the fear not being addressed here? What’s the next most obvious step?

Brett: What if the next most obvious step is fuck it, I will just jump? Or the next most obvious step is to go to the fridge and grab another beer. I guess this would be a matter of how well we have calibrated our emotions, where they direct us and how much we have felt, but I am also curious how you would distinguish between the obvious choices.

Joe: That’s awesome. Very specifically it means you are staying focused on the problem, and you are not speed bumping an emotional experience. What that means is that it is not that the next most obvious step is to ignore or to avoid nor to avoid again by jumping over an experience. I am just so tired of being in this not knowing that I am going to fucking just do something. That’s one level of avoidance, and the other level of avoidance is I am going to grab a beer. What you are doing is staying focused on it and you are not speed bumping any of the emotional experiences.

Brett: How do you prevent getting into analysis paralysis there? If the next most obvious choice is to check the charts, go back and check some other numbers, and then check your…

Joe: The next most obvious thing to do.

Brett: If you are looping.

Joe: If you are looping, you are not doing the next most obvious thing to do. Looping is checking the charts, which I would say isn’t doing. What’s the thing you have to do? What’s the next most obvious thing to do? That’s the critical piece. Those are great nuances you are pulling out. I would say that’s a short term, practical way if you are in a decision, here’s what you do. It is literally thinking that you have to make a decision. That means I am in fear. That means there is something I need to investigate. What is it that I have to do next? It is that analysis of seeing it. That means there is something here. What do I have to do to investigate and unravel that?

Brett: The next most obvious thing might be to take actions and follow the next most obvious actions, and it might be the next most obvious thing to do is to pause and do some yoga, take care of yourself. I guess if you were to do that and you get regulated to a point, it will naturally arise in you to start action on the problem again.

Joe: Yes. I am not saying you have to 24/7 the problem, but what’s the next step in the problem? If you need to take care of yourself in the meantime, that’s obvious. It is an amazing thing. This is a simple, little experiment you can do that is super fun. You are driving and you are thinking about where you are going to eat. All of a sudden, you are in the conversation with your girlfriend, fiancée, or your kids or with yourself. Then if you just say I am going to find out where I am going to end up and then all of a sudden you are at this place and you have a conversation. Boom, all of a sudden we are here. Oftentimes that’s the way life works where you can just say I think I have to make this decision, and I can look and find out.

That’s what used to happen with the philanthropy. I would say what’s the next most obvious thing, and then all of a sudden I would say let’s invest or I am out of here. A decision never felt like it got made. It was never like wow, I have made the decision. I am doing this or not doing this. I just looked up and thought I guess I didn’t invest there, or I guess I did. That’s how the world works. All of a sudden these big decision points evaporate and they just become the next most obvious thing. It is because you are addressing the fear directly instead of thinking that you can figure out the future by sitting and looking at charts or thinking it through.

Brett: We have talked a little bit about how emotions are a bit part of how we are making decisions, and they are generally fear driven. When we feel like we are in a decision, there is some kind of fear. Another way that relates to something I have experienced is that anytime that I find myself stressed in a decision, it also just means that I haven’t fully accepted the outcomes of all of the options or of the options I might take, which is a different way of saying what you are saying, I think.

Joe: What you are saying there is another nuance that’s really important. How most people think about decision making is here is a good decision. It is a decision where I avoided the consequences. I made the decision, avoided the consequences and got the reaction I wanted to get. I got the thing I wanted to get. A good decision in an investment is the investment went well. But my experience as a venture capitalist was my best investment was the one that I made not so good money in, and the worst investment was where I made the most money. I can’t tell you how many VCs have felt that same way. This was a great investment, but it didn’t make money. This was a shit show, but it made a ton of money.

Brett: You are speaking to some other intangible return than money that came from it.

Joe: Yes. The company was really well run, and they had a good team. It did something really cool in the world, but the market timing was off, whereas the other made a lot of money but it was all [unclear] in 17 other ways, caused headaches and took most of my time.

Brett: You are referring to a decision that based on the available information was a good decision and just didn’t work out, and the other ones you just happened to invest in. If you had had your druthers, you wouldn’t have done so, and it worked out. Especially with markets, companies and investing, there is a lot of stochasticity. A lot of decision making becomes about portfolio therapy. An example of that from jumping would be you could say you made a good decision because you survived the jump you just did. You could also survive a jump and say I made a bunch of terrible decisions because I don’t believe I could have done that 100 times and survived. If I plan on making 100 jumps, then that was a failure.

Joe: That’s exactly right. If I made the kind of decision that I made with a company that didn’t do so well 10 times, my portfolio would be freaking amazing. If I made 10 decisions with the one that did well, I would be bankrupt. That’s exactly the way to say it, beautifully said.

But one way people think about it is when they have to make a good decision, most people are thinking if the decision they are going to make is going to get them the result they want. That’s not how I see good decision making, and it also doesn’t lead to the best decisions or outcomes overall. What I would suggest is that when you are looking at how to make a good decision, the other way to look at what a good decision is that it feels really good inside of you. I could be happy with the consequences either way because I made a decision in a way that felt great. It felt like it is part of my authenticity, who I am.

When people ask to take the job or not to take the job, they are thinking which one is going to make them happy instead of what the decision is that would make them feel really good right now. Because we are in fear, we are thinking about it in a binary way. We are not seeing all of the alternatives. As soon as you say to yourself instead of trying to get the best or right outcome, I am going to change my focus to how it feels best in me and immediately the fear starts evaporating and new options get seen. It is not about taking the job or not taking the job. It becomes about asking for this and this, or I am going to make sure my relationship with this person is right before I take the job. I am going to make sure the resources that I need to be great at this job are going to be delivered for me before I take the job. How do I be in this decision that feels great right now? I think that’s a more fruitful way to make great decisions. It is not the outcome. It is how you are in the decision-making process.

Brett: I am seeing a really beautiful symmetry right now to the how relationships reveal us episode where you described if we are in a relationship where our role is to make the other one happy, then that’s hell. I am seeing that right here. If we are making decisions out of trying to make our future selves happy, you can’t predict that.

Joe: That’s great. The way I think I am making a great decision is if I am making it on principles. I think principled decisions are super critical. There are two reasons for them. One is if you are making a decision on principles, you are more likely to get the reality you are wanting. The other reason is because you make decisions a lot quicker. All of sudden decisions evaporate and they just become choices.

I could give you lots of stories about this, but I will give one principle I work off of, which is I don’t work with assholes. I just don’t do that. There have been times when there were large amounts of money I could have made if I could have just suffered this asshole for X period of time. It was really hard to say no to this big pile of money. At the same time, I have that principle. I will revisit them every once in a while and ask if this is true or right, the principles I live by. But if I live by those principles, then it turns out my life is the life I want it to be. All of my choices help me. If a principle doesn’t help me make decisions, it is not a true principle.

Brett: What’s another example?

Joe: Another example is I put connection first. If I have a decision to accept something or not, a job offer or a client, I connect. I will not make the decision unless I feel a sense of connection, so connection is first. If I am having a problem, the first thing I do is connect with the person. That’s a principle I live by. What does that do? In the long term, what that does is if I make enough decisions that way, it ends up that I don’t have assholes around me, which is fantastic, and I feel deeply connected with the people around, which is fantastic. The principles that you hold, if you hold them through all decisions, because a decision is one event. You can think about your decision like a portfolio, too. I have a portfolio of decisions and my job is to make most of them good decisions. If I am living principledly, I will do that. It might be hard in those moments, but finding those principles, living by them and making your decisions by them is the shortcut.

Brett: This ties back to what you said about feeling great about making the decision or making the decision that feels great in your decision now. I imagine if you make decisions from what you think your future feeling is going to be, then you are basically telling yourself that I am prioritizing my imaginary fantasy future over my present. You are going to end up living a life where your present is always organized to be sacrificed for some future.

Joe: Beautifully seen, that’s exactly right.

Brett: Beautifully seen because I have been there.

Joe: We all have. I remember this time when people talked about principled decision making and I thought what the fuck are you talking about. What do you mean? It just made no sense to me. What happened was I was working with somebody who worked exclusively on principled decision making, and it was over this deal, early in my venture capital career. He was making a decision and he basically just went through these five principles, this, this, this, this and this. It was to the board, and he said these are the principles. I saw him make a great decision really, really quickly. I saw him not lose his center in the process.

It was one of those things where the board calls and everybody is freaking out because something bad happened. This was a merger. Our big exit was about to go away. It was horrible, and everybody was freaking out. This guy said here are my principles on this. I remember one of the principles was you build a company to make the best company. You don’t build a company to sell it. That’s one of the principles he lived by. If they don’t want to buy the company, we don’t chase. If we chase, the best-case scenario is we get a lower price. If we are fine, the best-case scenario is they go oh shit and they come back. That would be great. In the meantime, we are just going to continue to build the best company we can. It was decided on principle. He had 5 principles, and he went through them. These are my principles. This is what I see work. He just did it. He never lost himself. It was absolutely the right decision for the company. We made a lot more money on that company.

When they came back to buy it, it was the same company that came back and paid a lot more money a year later. When I saw that, I knew what people were talking about when they say principled decisions. I am going to do something that feels like shit right now as far as my ego, my identity and short-term gain goes because I know these principles work. I am going to live by these principles, and they worked. If they didn’t, I don’t think it would have mattered to him at all except for maybe he would have looked at them long term and asked if his principles were wrong.

Brett: I guess if there is a principle of making the decision that feels good, that might conflict sometimes with the principles that draw us through our ego and the uncomfortable feelings of drawing boundaries, saying no, leaving money on the table, and firing somebody we like as a person, all of these decisions that can bring us through difficult feelings. There are a lot of times when our emotions might conflict with our principles and with our intellectual analysis, but it sounds like the difference between the intellectual analysis and the principles is that the principles have been consolidated over time and you have learned that it works. I don’t want to tell lies because I don’t want to have to remember 30 different truths for who I am talking to.

Joe: The distinction that I think is really important to make is I think about Mandela breaking stones in the quarry and being in jail for a long period of time. That wasn’t going to be comfortable, but it felt good. There is some aspect of him that felt true to himself, that felt like he was being himself in that process. The good I am speaking to is you feel good in the decision, meaning you are in yourself. You are empowered. You are saying this is who I am, not in an identification way but in a way of being present. I can be present in this decision making. I am not saying I am going to be comfortable. I am sure he was not comfortable, but I am sure he could be himself in that. That’s the distinction I am making.

Then being able to welcome all of your emotional states is to say I can happily feel the fear of losing this deal, the anguish of being stuck in this quarry, any of these experiences, which allows you to be in yourself and maintain who you are. Who you are is the principles as far as how you want to be in the world.

Brett: I want to tie this back to another thing. Maybe this is even just a principle or sort of a pillar of the work, which is we tend to invite what we fear. If we are acting on principles that bring us into our fear, how do we follow those principles into fearful places without inviting the thing we fear? For example, if I have a principle that leads me to want to approach a bunch of investors or some people I am attracted to at a bar and I also know that’s going to bring me into a situation I am afraid of and maybe I will stumble over my words and produce some kind of negative response and get rejection. I might be able to predict that that rejection is going to send me into an emotional spiral for several weeks. How do we follow principles into the fear without creating the conditions the fear invites?

Joe: It is the same principle, but it just works just a tweak different than how you are describing it. The things we fear we invite through the avoidance of the things we fear. I will give you a story. I was just having this conversation with my daughter last night at dinner. She has a new guy that she is dating, and she really likes him. She speaks to his last girlfriend or fling, and she gets this fear that he is playing her or isn’t into her as much as she is into him or some version of that. She very coolly decides to say I have this fear. What are you up to? What’s going on here? The guy says he totally wants her to be his girlfriend and he is totally committed. It worked out well for her.

In the conversation, as she is talking about it, I noticed she was defending him a little bit too much. I asked her what she was doing. Why do you need to defend him? What do you need to justify that he is not going to hurt you? What’s really going on there? She sat with it for a minute. She started crying. She said this is my own fear. This is me being scared that I am going to get hurt and I am trying to avoid getting hurt. She was tearing up, so beautiful. I told her I wanted to teach her something. In this particular case, it worked out well, but the reality is acting on that fear made it more likely that he was going to abandon you. You are more likely to come off needy, and she has broken up with a lot of guys who are needy. She knows that world. You are more likely to come off needy, which means somebody who is self-possessed isn’t going to be attracted to you. You also potentially could have pushed into something he wasn’t ready for. The other thing is that if you can leave him, be in that fear itself and learn to welcome it, then you are self-possessed and that’s a harder person to leave.

For her, it is the avoidance of that emotional experience that is recreating the fear. What living with principles does is it says I am going to go right towards that emotional experience. I am not going to avoid it. Just to give a couple more examples of this, in my twenties, I was really scared of being abandoned. I think we have talked about this on the podcast a couple of times. To avoid the experience of being abandoned, I would get angry at people, which would make it more likely for me to be abandoned. I would become avoidant, which made it more likely for me to be abandoned. It is really us trying not to feel the emotion, the thing that we fear, abandonment, being left, being rejected, being a loser, failing at our business that we are inviting back in. Living by principles forces us to feel the stuff that we don’t want to feel, feel the idea that this company that is going to hit bottom, we are going to lose our investment. We have to feel that shit and welcome it. It is the avoidance of that that makes us run towards them and ask them to please sign the deal. We will give you a discount.

Brett: It is also what makes us justify, prejustify and postjustify our decision with confirmation bias. One of the things I love about the story with your daughter is there was this hurt she was afraid to feel. The way she made the decision, she justified in her mind her partner to avoid feeling that feeling. That created the blind spot that would have had her fall into that feeling later on. This is just another really key thing about human decision making, the confirmation bias. Once we make a decision, because we don’t want to feel whatever consequence of having made the wrong decision or having the emotional experience we were trying to avoid, losing the money, the partner or the business, that’s the source of the fear that ends up constructing stories that blind us to reality. Feeling the underlying emotions is just the way through. We don’t need to construct a story anymore if we are okay with all of the feelings.

Joe: That’s the other way in which we re-create the reality we assume to be true or invite the fear. One way is we try to avoid the feeling in a way that immediately brings it towards us. Another way is we see the world and we prove this is the way the world is. That recreates that experience for us as well. A world leader who thinks the world is cutthroat and everybody is out to get me, and they are going to get me at some point, which is the leader who goes out and starts the war and verifies that everybody is out to get them. They start penalizing, punishing, containing, constraining and oppressing people so they are not destroyed. In that, they create a world where that is the actual reality, and they always get destroyed by it.

Brett: It would be nice if there were some examples of that on the world stage right now.

Joe: Maybe two huge examples are happening. One is currently happening, and one will happen in the next five years. That’s just how that works. This is the way we do it. If you live by principles and you say this is the reality I want to see and this is how I want to live so that I live really great about myself, then you create that reality. To do that, it forces you to feel all of these emotional experiences you don’t want to feel and become friends with them and welcome them. You can’t make that decision to not sell the company even though it was going to be a lot of money unless you are willing to feel the oh shitness of it, the fear of it.

Brett: Which brings up another principle, which could be I want to make the decision that leads to my deepest growth. You don’t necessarily know what that is, but you do know what you are avoiding. The more self-aware you become, you notice more what it is that you are avoiding. I can tell that I have definitely made decisions in the past that didn’t seem rational. I didn’t end up getting what I wanted. I didn’t end up feeling the way I wanted to feel. It is almost as if there was something unconscious, something deep in me that brought me into that place to feel the thing I was avoiding. I couldn’t tell if it was me that knew that or if it was some deep biological instinct to growth.

Joe: As a coach who has been through a lot of this stuff, I see that all of the time. I watch people, and they think they are doing one thing but nope. I have a client right now who isn’t working for a short period of time, just finished one big project. Typically really high-powered people, when they stop working, they go into this depression. It is really just exhaustion except for them beating themselves up over not doing anything. It becomes a depression. I am watching her do all of this recovery. I am watching her make all this growth with her family. I am watching her be with herself and be more honest with herself. She just thinks what I am doing. I should really go get a job. I am watching her do all of the groundwork to make the life she has always wanted and that she has been avoiding. I see that all of the time. I see people constantly make a series of decisions.

I will know when clients are going to make a move usually a month or two before because I see they are doing these things they can’t understand but their deep wisdom is leading them to it. I think it is something so beautiful when you can actually have faith in that. When you can say I don’t understand this decision, but I have faith that my wisdom is guiding me here.

Brett: That leads to a lot less stress and second guessing of ourselves.

Joe: I think the other part of good decision making is there is an act of surrender in it. There is an act of surrender to a decision. Since we can’t control the outcome, there is a place where that has to be surrendered. The outcome has to be surrendered. Learning that surrender is unbelievably freeing. It creates so much freedom and so much joy, to say this part is beyond me and this is what I can actually control. What I am going to control is how I am going to show up here and how I am going to be in the world.

Brett: That sounds like a wrap. I don’t know about you. That feels good to me.

Joe: I think we have more to talk about decision making at some point, but I think this is a good one to end with.

Brett: Thank you, Joe. I loved it.

Joe: What a pleasure. Thanks for bringing up this topic.

Brett: See you everybody.

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