Loving the No (Coaching Session Breakdown)

Joe: Every no is a better solution to your product, and you're trying to stop them instead of invite them. And the solution is the same as the one that you just got to experience. What is it when you open your heart to the no? 

Brett: I'm Brett Kissler, and this is the Art of Accomplishment, where we explore living the life you want with enjoyment and ease. People really liked our recent rapid coaching commentary episode on stuckness. 

Joe: Yeah, 

Brett: And that was a really good experiment. We were just seeing how that would go, and turns out a lot of people really liked it and have asked for more. We've even had a couple people send in their own rapid coachings with you for us to do commentary on. So there's already a little bit of a backlog there. 

Joe: Yeah. That's great. 

Brett: Yeah, so this is a person from one of our courses who gave us permission to use this session publicly, and we're really grateful for that. And he came in, and he started working with some kind of jealousy that he had around his wife's friend. And over the course of the session, it was tied into the way that he seeks control in both his relationship and in his company. And he came to a really beautiful place of really loving people's no, as new information that can help him make his company or his relationship or his life even better.

Joe: Yeah. I think the thing for me, though that's really important, is the most important part of coaching anybody is understanding yourself, understanding people in general. Yeah. And that comes from personal exploration. And if you are ever interested in coaching, just to say that every one of these conversations is a way for you to explore yourself. It's not a one-way conversation ever. 

Brett: Yeah. So, let's get into it.

Joe: What made you just cross your arms? 

Coachee: Mulling over which question I wanna ask? 'Cause they're both important to me. 

Joe: Okay. How does crossing your arms help you mull that over? 

Coachee: It creates tension in my body, and it actually doesn't help. It's actually when I'm feeling awkward, and that is something I do.

Joe: Ah, great. So it is a form of kind of protection, of feeling awkward is what I'm hearing you say. 

Coachee: Yeah, absolutely. 

Joe: Let's just, how about, let's just be fucking awkward. 

Coachee: Alright. 

Joe: Okay. Hold on a second. So, there's a lot going on already in this coaching session. He's announced a couple things to me immediately in this coaching session.

The first one is that his typical way of, if you have to think about him in the fear triangle, right? He's probably gonna be more in the bully section of the fear triangle, right? There's like there like he doesn't have any problem presenting with anger. He does that immediately with that kind of crossed-arm defensive anger rather than say Oh, I'm stuck or I'm here to save somebody.

But the more important thing that he announces already is that he actually is quite introspective. He knows how to feel into his body. He knows how to say what's going on with him underneath the surface level, which means he's done like a considerable amount of work. So, typically what you'll see is that when, unless somebody else is also in that position of oh I understand what it is to get angry, and that, that's a form of vulnerability. When somebody interacts with somebody like this, they'll be likely to write them off because of the, like the propensity for the err and the propensity for the defensiveness and not be able to see that whole secondary thing that's happening, which is.

He says he's actually quite introspective, quite thoughtful and if you see right here on his face, he like the idea, oh, we can be awkward together like this. And he just totally lights up. It also tells you that he knows and has experienced the freedom behind the defensiveness or the anger.

So all of that I'd say is already happening. That's already, we know all of that if we're gonna walk into this session with him. 

Brett: Wow. Yeah. That's beautiful. Yeah. Great. Let's continue. 

Joe: Great. What's your question? What's your question? 

Coachee: So, there's a stuck point.

Brett: Yeah. For listeners that aren't seeing this on YouTube, Joe just started going blah blah blah to further cut through the awkwardness and it seems to have worked for everybody, including myself watching this. 

Coachee: I've been somatically jealous of my wife's best friend, and after a year of therapy and a bunch of shit, anytime her name comes up, I can't get over it.

Joe: Oh, wow. Cool. How much of this turns into abuse of your wife, emotional abuse of your wife? 

Coachee: Oh it's not good. Yeah, it's pretty bad. 

Brett: Wow. So that was a pretty quick leap right there. Yeah. Can you say more on that? 

Joe: Yeah. He's already presented that he, in the fear triangle, his habituated place is anger. And so usually if that's your place, there's gonna be not, there's two things that are happening. One is that you're probably gonna release the anger on somebody. In our society, generally, we'll call that abuse or emotional abuse, and everybody will recognize that, including the person who's doing the yelling.

Whereas if it's passive aggressive, then oftentimes the person doesn't recognize that they're doing the abuse and so they can't actually see it. So for me, the question was not just like I wanted to understand his awareness and I wanted to understand how deep the pattern went. And by the way, just all jealousy is abuse.

Jealousy of somebody is, it's like I'm going to have a big emotional reaction to try to control you to do something else. It's the jealous person's way of pushing love away as well as, like wanting it, wanting the love and affection but pushing it away at the same time. So all of that would say there's abuse going on there. That would be the pattern behind it. 

Brett: Yeah. And the jealousy can also, another aspect of it can be like a discomfort with someone else's autonomy, which can also point to the control that, yeah. Later on will come up in the session. 

Joe: Absolutely. And the cool thing about if you really watch him here he's yeah, it's not good.

Like he, he can admit it and see it. And so there's, again, he's showing us that there is this consciousness, and so the availability is there. Like, oftentimes you talk about, there's some forms of therapy that you do. It's like the quote that I heard once was like 10 years later, you can describe exactly what's wrong with you, but nothing has changed.

And then there's this form of therapy where you can't describe shit but everything has changed and there's a whole bunch of cool reasons behind that. I think the best explanation I've ever heard is that if you're in theta, which is where we get programmed from zero to eight years old, 'cause that's the brainwave that we're dominantly in during that time period. It feels more like a dream. You can't quite understand everything that's going on, but things change. Whereas if you're in more of a like typical brain state of say, alpha or beta, then typically what's happening is that you can describe it all, but you haven't reprogrammed that subconscious that happens and is programmed in that zero to eight years old. So what he's showing us is that he's very smart. He's showing us that he understands himself, at least on an intellectual level. And he is also showing himself that he's there's not a shit ton of shame there. There's shame, but there's not he's not hiding it from us. He's yeah, boom. This is what's up with me. Yeah. Which shows a lot of bravery. 

Brett: Yeah. And on the emotional fluidity level, it's also a sign that the emotion just hasn't moved. You can have the story, you can understand what the pattern is, but some underlying emotion hasn't moved and that, I think would link to the theta as well. Like the emotion moving, being in the emotional state of moving something that hasn't, that's been stagnant has a similar effect, could be tracked similarly. 

Joe: That's right. There's a lot of emotional movement that can't be understood by the brain for sure.

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: Awesome. Let's continue. 

Coachee: It's pretty bad. I threw a giant tantrum of a fucking psychological meltdown all through last year, making her choose between her and me. Yeah, only to realize it's my own issue, obviously. Hence the question. 

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. Great. Okay, cool. So you realize the jealousy, you realize there's an abusive quality to it. What are you trying to control for in the jealousy? 

Brett: Yeah. And right there, that's the leap to control. He's recognizing the jealousy. You helped him immediately recognize the abuse. He already saw it there, but you brought it into the frame and now control. 

Joe: Which is every time we're in fear triangle, no matter what you're in, whether you're in the victim or the, you're trying to control the situation. It is fear. Oh, I'm scared. So I'm trying to control, and that's what creates the drama, and that's what creates all the pain. So, definitely, that's what made me ask the question. 

Brett: All right. 

Joe: If you could make something happen that would go, oh, I have that now. I don't really care about this relationship with her best friend. What's the thing you're trying to? 

Brett: That laugh right there? 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: I'm curious what in that laugh. 

Joe: So what I saw was that I asked the question the first way and it's hitting him. It's hitting him on a subconscious level. He hasn't like fully gone through that thought process. So he's 4-0-4 in a little bit. He's seen, he's more spaciousness is occurring. And then I ask it a different way to make it more accessible to him. And then he the laugh that I see right there is that he sees something about himself and not only does he see it, but he can also see that it's funny that there's something in it for him. And so again, not shame, just like a lightness, which is really quite sweet. 

Brett: Yeah. Awesome. 

Joe: Great. 

Coachee: A public company? 

Joe: No. With the relationship with your wife. 

Coachee: Yeah. Like, I view this person to be a blocker in my life, to my hopes and dreams. 

Joe: Okay. So if this person was like a hundred percent supportive of you and was like, let me help you with the company, then that would be fine. Or do you actually have to create the company? 

Coachee: Oh no, the company's created, but it's like, she's like a rowing in the other direction. You know what I mean? It's like of an anti-capitalist type mindset that's influencing my fucking life. 

Joe: Oh, I get it. Okay. Okay. Okay. Got it. Cool. Lovely. What stops you from loving the fuck out of the anti-capitalist in you, your wife and this woman? 

Coachee: Because you just said capital and money is the sun. I think it's fucking stupid. If you do good shit for the world, you should get paid for it and not hide behind cowardice.

Joe: Okay. Hold on a second. Hold on. Because something big is about to happen, but I want to talk about what just happened. So a lot of times, like people will be like, Oh, Joe, you contradict yourself. This is a perfect example. So if I recall correctly, the coaching that I did right before this was all about this person thinking money was bad and we were like seeing through that belief system. And here he is like taking that thing and saying, look Joe, you just said money is awesome, money is the sun.

So like you can see there's this part of him, and I'm about to almost contradict myself. And if I fully contradicted myself, that would be fine because the way I think about it is that if I'm gonna point to a tree. I'm gonna point to it differently depending on where you're standing. My arm's gonna move. And so where he's standing pointing to the truth is gonna be different. It's gonna sound different. It's gonna look different. And his freedom isn't in seeing the goodness of money, though, there's probably some freedom in that for him. There's still some judgment that he has around it, or he wouldn't buy into any of this stuff. But the bigger freedom is for him right now is to like, Hey, what are you defending? What makes you have to defend this? So I'm just pointing at the thing I'm always pointing at the thing that I think will show someone the possibility of freedom and the truth that I'm pointing to is the freedom, not the intellectual idea that's coming outta my mouth.

Brett: Yeah, 

Joe: I think that's just a really important thing to, to recognize not just in a coaching session, but in your own worldview, as you're approaching life, being able to hold two opposing ideas at the same time and see the truth in both of them. There's a tremendous amount of freedom in that.

And so that's basically what we're doing here. And I just say that because I think anybody who's watching this, see what life looks like when you're actually able to hold opposing viewpoints. 

Brett: Yeah. And in, in a team, that's how conflict gets resolved when all viewpoints can be held in the complexity of the overarching perspective.

Joe: Yeah.

Brett: Then there's resolution, tension remains, but yeah, the conflict resolves. 

Joe: Yeah. Awesome. So let's see it back up just a little bit, just because I'm about to whack him a little bit. 

Brett: All right. 

Coachee: And not hide behind cowardice. 

Joe: Yeah. And I noticed all the defense in that. 

Coachee: Wait, what? 

Joe: Like that your heart had to harden to be able to say that. Which means there's something in you that believes that capitalism is wrong and capitalism is wrong. I can give you fucking 30 reasons why it's wrong. It does not create equal opportunity is just one of them. 

Brett: That look was just like, fuck you Joe. 

Joe: Yeah, it's so good. 

Brett: He was like, no. 

Joe: I came to you, just said money is the sun. I came here to get my worldview verified and it is verified, but it's also but not at the exclusion of closing your heart, not at the exclusion of being able to see the truth in other worldviews. 

Brett: Yeah and continue. 

Joe: Go to where your grandparents came from and you can fucking see it right there. So there capitalism is wrong. Just simply. 

Coachee: I wanna believe that too. 

Joe: Yeah, exactly. So what if you don't defend against that? 

Coachee: Let me actually get deeper my issue... 

Joe: Oh, No. Just first, what if you don't defend against that right now, just allow and like actually have an open heart to the fact that capitalism is not a perfect system. Money is not in any way a perfect system. You're thinking about it, but I'm asking you to open your heart to it. You have kids, you have a daughter. 

Brett: I noticed when you said he was thinking about it, he was looking around, looking as though looking for an answer. And then when you said go to your heart, open your heart to it. He like tensed his eyebrows down and closed his eyes. It went internal, but there's a, there's some like tension in it. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: What do you see in that process happening right now? 

Joe: He's attempting to, he's attempting it. And he'll get there. And so it's like just, it's just loving patience at this point because that's what he needs for himself. 

Because anything that anybody is doing to others, they're doing to themselves too, right? Which means that he has his own thoughts that he doesn't allow if he doesn't allow the thoughts externally, because he thinks he needs to be able to compartmentalize, to be able to get stuff done, to control.

So anything that I'm seeing externally I know is happening internally. So if I start jumping in on it right now, then I'm just reifying the part of him that thinks he needs to manage himself instead of just bring awareness to the problem. 

Brett: Yeah. Lovely. 

Joe: I want you to open your heart. I want you to open your heart to the idea that capitalism is not perfect, the same way you open your heart to your daughter.

There it was. There you go. 

Anything get destroyed? 

Brett: So what happened right there for listeners is that tension on his brow just dropped, and you could see him land in his body. 

Coachee: Yeah. Like a hyper vigilance. 

Joe: Yeah. That's gonna help you build a better company. Seeing capital for what it is allows you to make a better company. Having non-automated vigilance will help you make a better company. You think control is gonna make a better company, but that's not how it works. Here's a guess that I have. Are you're the CEO of a company? 

Coachee: Recent CEO. 

Joe: How many people-ish? 

Coachee: Um, just a handful of us. 

Joe: Okay. And have you managed a team before? Like a sizable team? 

Coachee: Yeah. 

Joe: Yeah. Okay. My guess is, I may be wrong, but my guess is that one of the things that has happened in your career is you think that you have alignment from the team and then people do different things and stray and you get very frustrated 'cause you're like, wait, I thought we all fucking agreed on this.

Coachee: Yeah. 

Joe: Yeah. So it's the same issue that you're dealing with your wife and best friend or, and her best friend. 

Brett: Awesome. I love that tying both of those things together that really helps tie together, even for listeners, the way that our personal life patterns and our work patterns are the same thing.

Joe: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Him managing people like that, managing the wife, like that, it's applying force. And the way that I think about it is that if you apply force to something, it has to push back. Rather than, oh, how do I harvest the wisdom of the no, which I think I'm about to go into.

Brett: Yeah. That's where you're going with this. So let's go there. 

Joe: That you're dealing with your wife and best friend or, and her best friend, is that you are rejecting the No. Instead of excited about the no. 

Coachee: Oh, 

Brett: Now he sees it. 

Joe: Yeah. You got it. Yeah. Every no is a better solution to your product. Every no is a refinement of a process that can make you more efficient and you're trying to stop them instead of invite them every, no provides clarity. Maybe just a little bit of clarity. But some clarity. 

Coachee: Yeah. Yeah. I completely actually fucking agree with you. 

Joe: Great. And the solution is the same as the one that you just got to experience. What is it when you open your heart to the no? You don't accept it as, I'm bad. It's a bad solution. It's a bad company. You're just like, ah, there's truth to that too. 

Brett: Yeah. You can really see him sitting with this and mulling it over. There's definitely, there's intellect online, trying to confirm, deny look for evidence for against, but his body's there too now in a way that it wasn't earlier in the session?

Joe: That's right. 

Coachee: Thank you so much, Joe. 

Joe: Pleasure, man. 

Coachee: And in the perfect time, my chair moves and fucking sign from the university. 

Joe: Rock and roll. 

Brett: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. That was a cool one. Thank you. Thank you to this anonymous person for for letting us dissect this session publicly. 

Joe: I think just as a, something, just something about the no generally and the open the heart and the holding to opposing viewpoints. 

Brett: Yeah,

Joe: I know we, we mentioned it a little bit, having the, opening your heart and like opening the wisdom of the different viewpoints is really profoundly important if you want to create like a certain level of freedom. And this includes like the thing in the voice in your head, right?

So the voice in your head is talking to see the truth in the non-truth of everything it says, to see the truth in the non-truth of all these things. It really creates a very open perspective. It can create a lot of wisdom. It creates a lot of spaciousness internally. What I noticed is that when people start experimenting with that then they'll be like, oh, I don't know what to do. That's true? And that's true and that's true? Like they have this, the problem of is and isn't is the way I've heard it described. It's yeah, that's true and it's not true. So what the fuck do I do? But there's only one thing that's gonna feel right when you do it.

There's only one thing. 

Brett: Yeah. You're no longer navigating from the mind. 

Joe: And so let your mind do all the processing. Look at the spreadsheets, look at the, the pros and cons, what, do the intellectual debate. It's fantastic. And then take a moment and like really feel like what's, what feels like the right thing to do?

And give credence to the frustration or the fear, or the whatever. It's the same thing. It's oh, I'm gonna open my heart to the frustration and the fear, especially if you're running a business, that frustration is usually a good sign that oh, like we're not being determined enough or we're not pushing hard enough. And the fear is probably a good sign. Oh, there's something that we're not accounting for, or there's a risk that we're taking that we need to risk adjust for, or to be prepared for, or whatever. Like, all of those are really good signs and it becomes a lot less about like, on the intellectual plane. It's oh, I can see, and the emotional plane, oh, I can feel all of it. I can see all of it. But on the what to do is far more of a gut response is there's only one thing, there's only one thing that's gonna feel right. And so if you're playing with it, if you go home and you play with this and you're start opening yourself up to no's, also just consider oh yeah and there's just one thing that is your truth. 

Brett: Yeah. And it's gonna be a feeling. Yeah. And so one thing that's common in this, in many sessions and core to the work that we do is that like I'm, and the questions just here is what makes it that opening your heart to the opposing viewpoint is so difficult for people?

Joe: There's so many. One is you usually have to feel something you don't wanna feel. Two is, the way that we create distinction is the way that we define our personality. So to be able to see the wisdom of the Biden side and the Trump side. Woo, man. You're gonna have to let go of some of your personality. You're gonna have to feel certain things. You're gonna have to feel the fear and the loss. Those are two of the, two of the reasons why it's scary. I think the other reason it's scary is because you don't get to be right anymore. Like you can't believe the voice in your head, you can't believe your own thoughts. You've seen me do this where people are like, you, like you don't know what you're talking about. I'm like, yeah. Correct. Yeah. Yes, and you just made this up. That's right. Like we all did. Yeah. And so you don't get to hang on to any of that. You just get to, to be, and that's that, that can be very destabilizing for people for a short period of time. 

Brett: Yeah. And I think in our culture, being right is tied with being accepted, being loved. So that's if we're not. It's not just that it feels uncomfortable and groundless, it's also that, our entire body has associated it with a loss of love.

Joe: That's right. 

Brett: So to let ourselves not be right, we have to open ourselves up to feeling the love that has been lost. 

Joe: Yeah, that's right. Feeling the love that can't be lost, which is even scarier. And the love that has been lost. Yeah. Beautifully said. Cool. Awesome. That was a fun one. Thanks for doing that with me. 

Brett: Yeah, thank you, Joe. 

Joe: Yeah, man, appreciate it. 

Brett: Yeah. And thank you to our guest, really appreciate you. 

Joe: Thank you. 

Brett: Putting yourself out there, that was a vulnerable one. 

Joe: Yeah. And I hope this serves you to be able to see it again in this format. Yeah. All right. Talk to you soon.

Brett: Thank you. Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and rate us on your podcast app. We'd love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions or comments. You can reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.

‍