Q&A #3—Ambition, Narcissistic Parents, Addiction to Stress, Parenting Emotional Experiences, Emotional Fluidity

Joe: Not being able to feel an emotion all the way through is an emotion that you get to feel. I should be able to cry is shame and so feel the shame. Oh my gosh, if I cry, then I'm never going to stop crying. Oh, that's fear. So feel the fear.

Brett: Welcome to the Art of Accomplishment, where we explore living the life you want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler here with Joe Hudson.

Joe: Hey, Brett. 

Brett: How's it going, Joe? 

Joe: Good. Good to see you. 

Brett: Yeah, that was a hell of a workshop on Friday. 

Joe: That was fun. 

Brett: For listeners, we ran I don't know was it three hours or so?

Joe: Yeah, I think so. 

Brett: A seminar slash workshop at the Robot Heart Residency here in Oakland with Ply Alchemist. 

Joe: It was, yeah, it was a total joy to be there. I loved that somebody brought their baby. That was really good. 

Brett: Yeah. The baby really tied the whole place together with your occasional references to, yeah, this is how you can see all the people who weren't allowed to cry as a baby.

Joe: Yeah, so yeah, let's dedicate this episode to Osa, the baby at the workshop. 

Brett: Yeah, beautiful. Now, so what are we gonna do for this episode? We've had a lot of questions coming in. 

Joe: Yeah, 

Brett: We have a survey up on Spotify. If you're listening to this on Spotify, you might see when you finish an episode that there's a way to ask us a question or suggest another topic, and others have been asking via Twitter, X and other formats.

So we've got a whole bunch of questions, and I'd love to see how many of those we could make it through and make this a q and a episode. 

Joe: Cool. 

Brett: How's that sound? 

Joe: I love it. That makes it easy. Yeah. Maybe we'll only get through one. Let's find out. 

Brett: Yeah. Great. . . Yeah. Any one of these questions could be a full episode, right?

Most likely. All right. Let's start with Dima. Dima asks about ambition. Where does ambition come from and how do you deal with the pressure it creates? 

Joe: Where does ambition come from? I don't know. I know that we're all born with some level of ambition. I suspect that neurologically speaking that level of ambition is different based on some neurochemical genetic brain construct that is, unique in all of us.

But I've never met anybody with zero ambition, right? They would just be what, just not even eat and then die. So I think we're born with it is the short answer to where does ambition come from. I don't know. Like it almost doesn't make sense in my brain when somebody asked the second part of that question, which was how do you deal with the pressure it creates? So I would say that ambition doesn't create pressure. 

Brett: Yeah, 

Joe: Needing to be a value might, thinking that you're who you are is tied to your success and your ambition, that would all create a lot of pressure, but just the raw ambition. It's I want to get up and walk out of bed. That's what ambition is. And then it can go as, I want to create this huge company, or I want to, let the whole world know that they're loved. There's a thousand things that ambition can express, and it's just the impetus to move and do something. It feels like the pressure of ambition comes when you start attaching stories to it.

Such as, I'm no good if I don't, my identity requires that I, if I don't, the whole world is going to collapse, if I don't live to my ambition around climate, then the atmosphere will burn and all the children will die like that. All that stuff, I think, is what creates the pressure.

The ambition itself is almost the relief of the pressure. And I'm reminded of something that I heard recently and I can't remember exactly where I heard it, but it was a definition of stress and the definition was beautiful in the fact that it wasn't overwhelm and stress based on everything you have to do is it was based on not doing it and I find that to be very much the case that if I am not acting on the thing that I want to be acting on that there's a lot of stress that shows up in my system and I noticed that with other people as well that oftentimes the stress is the thinking about doing it. And it's relieved by the doing of it itself.

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: And to me, that would be, the ambition is the impetus to move. I don't see that as the stress. I think it's the stories that we tell ourselves or the ways that we convince ourselves that we're stuck that causes the stress. 

Brett: Yeah, it seems that there's a distinction between the different kinds of ambition.

There's the ambition that's just the natural thing that's happening that you don't need to manage. And then there's ambition that is a trying. And there's the kind of ambition that's like overriding a natural evolution or impulse in order to, and that's where the stories come in. I have to be of value. I have to be a certain way. I need to be successful. So I'm going to strive rather than on a fold. And it seems like that's a distinction here. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: Between the ambition that's stress and the ambition that's not. 

Joe: Yeah it's funny, somebody that we hired recently has been working and just hasn't been happy, hasn't been doing the stuff that's needed to be done.

I was talking to her the other day and I said, and it became clear that it was really important that she wanted to do things right. And I said, Oh God, please don't like, just don't ask yourself when you have a task, don't ask yourself, how do I do this? Please ask yourself, how do I enjoy doing the task?

And then do the task the way that you enjoy doing the task. And for whatever reason it clicked and boom, like two days later, everything that I would want to work with was there. Just because of that flip of the switch, the ambition was wanting to like, be a part of the team and contribute and live this purpose as she gets to live by working with us.

But the thing that was getting in the way was the trying to get something perfect. And as soon as it went to oh, how do I enjoy this? It was like the productivity quadrupled. It was just amazing to see what happened. So I'd say that's another thing is when you, if your ambition is getting in your way, move to that metric and say, okay, how do I get things done in a way that I enjoy them and see how much more productive you become, how much more your ambition feels like it's getting fulfilled. 

Brett: Yeah. And then at that point, it doesn't matter where it comes from. It matters. There's a way you'll notice where it comes from and it won't, the question will fall away.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. 

Thank you, Dima. Beth asks using emotion at people. What does that look like for emotions like sadness, anxiety, et cetera? Is love an emotion that gets used at people in parentheses? 

Brett: That's a great. 

Joe: It's a great question. 

Brett: Love bombing.. Yeah. Yeah. 

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. All of the above. I think you can constantly watch people who want other people to hold their fear and they'll come into a conversation and, oh, I'm really worried about it and they're hoping that somebody else will also be really worried about it so that they're not alone in the worry. And it's, so it's literally using your emotion to manage somebody else. And so that's like an example of it. You see this in offices all the time. Somebody is really anxious and they'd need to everybody else to be anxious or they don't feel safe.

So that's one, I think getting sad at people. Anybody who's guilt tripped, anybody else that like sad at somebody is like a prime guilt trip, like movement. I'm going to be sad so that you manage or change the way you are, whether it's subconscious or conscious, oftentimes, like when someone gets angry at somebody, they don't know that they're manipulating their emotional behavior. They just feel out of control. I think sometimes that's the case with sadness. Sometimes that's the case often with the fear. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: But when, if you look and you're like, oh, if that person doesn't change their behavior at all, am I still okay? And if the answer is no, then you know you're in that place of doing it at somebody. So absolutely all of them can be done. Love at somebody. Yes. If it's love at somebody, it's not love. So there's that. But there's this thing that looks like love at somebody that is definitely, I'm going to love you up so that you love me back. Or I'm going to love you up so that, I can feel like a sense of connection that you don't particularly want to give me or, there's all that things like I'm going to endear myself with you. I'm going to, all that stuff that you can use love for, but then it's not really love. But it looks like love and it, it might feel like love a little bit, but not, it isn't love. 

Brett: Yeah. And that illuminates something interesting here. Because if I think to apply that across what makes it special about love? That if you're doing it at somebody, it's not love. Maybe it's actually the case for all emotions. If you're sad at somebody It's not really sadness that you're feeling, you're projecting the sadness, you're using the sadness to manipulate, which is a way of avoiding feeling it. So it seems like that might be true for any of these emotions, where if you are using them to manipulate. You are essentially self manipulating your experience of the emotion, which is one reason why it might just continue showing up in your life in the same way without really moving and transforming.

Joe: That's a beautiful point, right? Someone's guilting you with sadness. They're not actually feeling their sadness. 

Brett: They want you to feel it for them. 

Joe: Yeah, exactly. That's right. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Yeah. That's an interesting, they want you to feel the fear for them. Yeah. But it also means that they're not fully feeling it because if they were fully feeling it, they wouldn't be trying to get it out of their system onto you. So yeah, that's a great reframe of it. So yeah, I love that. 

Brett: Yeah. Thank you, Beth. We have a question from A, just the letter A . Hello, A. 

Joe: Hi, A.

Brett: How do you apply the view principles when interacting with a narcissistic parent? 

Joe: Ooh. Wow. That's a question. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Yeah. Okay. So defining terms that I think is really important on this one.

There's a narcissism that's like a personality disorder. Sounds like that's what they're talking about. Before we go into that we all have a narcissism to us. The idea that there's somebody who's a narcissist and we're not is ridiculous. Like, all of us have some way in which we are narcissistic.

The thing about narcissism in general, there's a couple things about narcissism in us, even, and even more if somebody has that personality disorder, is that . Narcissism is an inability to feel like emotions, to feel emotions like it, it's the best definition I've ever heard of it. I think it was Lowen who said it, and he said narcissism is the incapacity to feel emotions. On an emotion I think that's a really great level. Mentally what I see is it's the part that thinks you're better. and worse than somebody else. The narcissists that I've run into and since I like work with CEOs of big companies, like you run into them. What you notice is that they very much think they're smarter than everybody or most people but they also feel like there's something really wrong and broken with them. And both of those two things are happening simultaneously. One maybe is more subconscious, one is more extroverted. And so that's another thing that's really important to know about the narcissism. And then the other thing that's, I think, really important to know about narcissism is that they don't feel contained.

So they often, when containment, that their trip isn't gonna work. If they, if their trip, if their thing that they're gonna do, I'm gonna yell at you and get angry at you, if that works, they don't feel contained. If they are more of a malignant, or what I would call a passive narcissist, and so it's passive aggression then if their passive aggression doesn't work, then they can feel contained.

And so view really doesn't have much of a place with somebody who's like very far out there on the narcissistic scale. It's like you can do it for your benefit and for your love and joy. But if you're really far out there, then boundaries are really the tool that you want to be able to use and you want to make sure that you can contain the person, that you're in love with your own anger enough that their anger doesn't affect you, that you're in love with your own passive aggression enough that their passive aggressiveness doesn't affect you and so that you can actually contain them because without that containment, they can never feel safe.

Also it's absolutely 100 percent totally wonderful and acceptable to just separate yourself from a narcissist, even if it's your parent. There's nothing that says that we have to interact with narcissists to be good people or something like that. It's totally okay to say that relationship is toxic and I'm gonna limit it, whether that's all the way or just to limit it in such a way that works. So boundaries I think are absolutely a hundred percent critical. 

Brett: Yeah. I noticed I'm a little bit thrown by the way that like you, you said something about how like view may not be the tool here, but boundaries are the tool. What would make those mutually exclusive? 

Joe: They wouldn't be mutually exclusive. But what I notice is that when people are using view, they drop like using view in itself is dropping the, is becoming partial. So if you're using view as a way to get somewhere with the parent, then you're not actually in view because view can't be used particularly. And so throw the tool out, drop out. 

Brett: I see. So what you're saying, what you're saying there is if you're using view as a tool to get somewhere with your parents. 

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: It's not a failure of the tool, it's that you're actually using it as a tool, which has pulled you out of view. 

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: Which would actually be impartial, which might be impartial to the reality that I don't want to be engaging in the way that we're engaging right now. Impartial to the reality that I want to draw a boundary. 

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: Perhaps a loving boundary, perhaps a somewhat messy boundary to take care of myself. And being impartial to the results of that in the world, and in trust that taking care of myself is taking care of them on some level. 

Joe: Yeah, I think that the issue also is that, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder is something that will bring most people into connection.

If you are that way, you will, most people will be brought into connection with you, And so you can start thinking of it as a tool. That doesn't happen with about 5 percent of people. If your chemicals are off or you have a mental illness or there's, neurologically potentially atypical, those things may not work to bring into connection.

But so using view is a way to keep yourself in connection. That's fantastic. And so great do that. But if you're using it to get them somewhere to improve the relationship, it's not going to work, not only because you're using it and being partial, but also because it's like someone who's really narcissistic, your vulnerability is something they'll exploit.

Brett: Yeah. And I'd also watch here for the projection too. Like we could have described all of this, not in the third person, but in a first person describing that aspect of ourselves. And when you have a model that there are 5 percent of people who are a certain way and somehow different, it can be really easy and convenient to avoid your own feeling, to lay, to apply that label to somebody, to be like, oh, this person is just a narcissist. So view is not going to work. 

Joe: Yeah, that's exactly why I started with the narcissist. We all have narcissism inside of it. Like we're all on this narcissistic spectrum and to separate yourself from that is something else. And the other thing is, if a narcissist is triggering you great, there's all sorts of shit that you get to learn about yourself because you're being triggered and there's the projections.

And that's great use of a narcissist is to see all that stuff. It's also great use of a narcissist to learn how to draw boundaries just because they're not capable of a human interaction that you want to have doesn't mean that they hold no use to you. It doesn't mean you can't love them. It doesn't mean you can't be in connection with them, even if you're separating yourself from them, right? You can say, Oh, hey, mom, narcissistic mom, I don't want to hang out with you in these ways anymore. I'm only going to really interact with you in this way, or I'm not going to interact with you at all and still have a sense of connection for mom and that is all about you, like your ability to connect your ability to stay open hearted towards a narcissist, your ability to contain them, your ability to draw boundaries. That's all great stuff that you get to learn. So if you just say they're a narcissist, you throw all that baby out with the bathwater.

Brett: Yeah. Yeah. And taking that step back, drawing that boundary may be the first step to really repairing and developing a deeper connection with them over time. 

Joe: Correct.

Brett: Giving yourself a space to allow that distance and have it be okay and not guilt yourself about it or feel connected and tied into the dynamic that's in play around them. 

Joe: That's exactly right. And yeah, with parents it's a particularly difficult one but it's, definitely doable. 

Brett: Awesome. Yeah, that was a good one. Thank you, A, whoever you are. 

Joe: Asana asked, Can you talk about being addicted to stress and dysfunction? 

Brett: Yeah. Oh, I could talk about that.

Joe: That's so good. Yeah, it's such a broad question. I don't know where to start exactly. Except for yes. I definitely see people addicted to stress or addicted to dysfunction or addicted to shame or addicted to a lot of the emotional patterns that we have. I'll give you an example of this. When my mom and dad were, in their fifties, they were stressed over the fact that their son had a green mohawk, that I was not doing well in school, that I was running away from home. And I would say like 40 percent of their time was stressed. And then I became successful, moved out of the house and everything. And then they were still stressed 40 percent of the time, but it was over like if the shopping got done or if the roast was, overcooked or whatever the hell it was.

So absolutely, I noticed that people have a kind of an emotional diet that they like to keep themselves on. And you can call it addiction. I think that's a fine way to call it. You can also call it identity. I think that's also a fine thing. It also, for some people, stress and dysfunction is a way to stay feeling alive.

You get to see this with teenagers a lot is like they create this drama because there's this feeling of aliveness and it's like going and watching a horror show or going and like watching an action film. There's this, we do it so that we get to feel alive. Like we get to feel like we're in a drama and the drama is being resolved and all that goodness. And so I think that's one thing to talk about is just that. Yeah, it absolutely exists. 

Brett: Yeah, I would add as well that framing it as an addiction might imply that the whole pattern is unhealthy and parts of the pattern may be unhealthy, but if you look really deeply under what's trying to occur, there might be an impulse that is actually like a deep search for homeostasis from the body.

So one of my experiences with what we might call addiction to stress would be a lot of some of the motivation into extreme sports, not all of it. Some of it was always a search for aliveness and exploration and joy. And there was also some of it that was just, oh, there was fear in my nervous system that I wasn't feeling all the time.

And when I put myself in a situation where that fear made sense. Then all of a sudden everything was unified and things made sense. So it made sense for me to be in situations that were scary. And that allowed me to process those feelings that I wasn't capable of feeling, or wasn't likely to be feeling otherwise, I was suppressing.

Back to our earlier conversation about narcissism being the incapacity to feel, also I think like the fear of feeling, the fear of our feelings. And I feel like there's a way that actually helped me process through a lot of that in my journey. And so I could have labeled it as an addiction and it might just be there's something deep within me that wants to be felt that I'm recreating the situation to feel it.

And if it's cycling like an addiction, it's probably a sign that I'm not actually getting it. Not necessarily a sign that I should turn the other way and not look there and try to like completely avoid the pattern. It might be that I need to go deep enough in the pattern to really feel the thing that the pattern is actually trying to be, to create the chance to feel.

Joe: The other thing to say about stress and dysfunction is that it's typically just what we learned as kids. So, we're reproducing the level of stress and dysfunction that we had in our house, either by being the thing creating the stress or dysfunction, or marrying or having friends that create the stress or dysfunction.

So I can count to 20 friends that I had that were very calm, but they lived like a chaotic childhood. And it's hey, what are you doing for a living now? And literally one of them became like the head of a circus roadshow, just like absolute crazy chaos, stress and dysfunction and, he played that same role out. So as we start feeling the emotions, as we start moving through the trauma, oftentimes a lot of that, the narcissism fades, but also the addiction or the propensity for dysfunction and anxiety and all that stuff that just starts fading. 

Brett: That ties back to the identity too. If my identity is I'm the one that is calm in the face of chaos. 

Joe: Yeah.

Brett: Then I can't have that identity if I'm not making sure that there's chaos around me, so I can be calm in it. 

Joe: Yeah, I love that. That's one of the coolest things about identity. It's if I'm the calm one, if I'm the smart one around all these stupid people, like you see that with a CEO identities, like some of them are like very much that. Then wow you hire a whole bunch of dumb people. It's a crazy thing that your identity 

Brett: Or you disempower them in ways that make them look dumb. 

Joe: Exactly. You make choices that don't allow them to be successful. And, so it's just, it's a beautiful thing that identity really actually, doesn't just carve out how we look at the world, but who's around us. And so that's the other piece to it, which is that, that as the identity slips away, generally, so does the chaos, so does the stress, so does the dysfunction. Not all of it, because there's some that's just very much tied to the trauma and to the emotions as well. 

Brett: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you Asana. This is one from Vlada on parenting and emotional fluidity. My kids are not interested in getting anger out. So how do I help them move it? Oh, I love your agenda. 

Joe: Oh my gosh. 

Brett: And I can't yet relate. I don't yet have kids, but I'm just sure I'm going to be, I'm going to get it when I do. 

Joe: So the first one.

Yeah, great. You see the agenda, which is lovely. All people want to move, it's natural for us to want to move emotions like it's just, it's as natural as anything. If you, if nobody's been trained by society, you look at little kids who aren't trained they want their emotions moving. That's just our nature. But at the same time I understand, cause kids will go through something like, no, I don't want to get angry. There's two things you can do. The first one is show them what it's just ask them to witness you as you're moving your anchor. That one's a really very useful thing.

The second thing that is useful is to draw boundaries with them. If you tell them they can't have some, they will get angry. And then you're like, Oh, great. That's anger. That's fantastic. But I noticed that some parents do, I can't speak for in this case, but what some parents do, it's I want you to go move your anger. But when you're like angry because this thing isn't, you're not getting this thing or this thing you don't want, that I want you to stifle. So it's yeah, don't get angry at me now. But, hey, let's go over here and then go beat the heck out of something, which is really telling the kid it's not okay to get angry, so of course they don't want to get angry.

Brett: Or it's okay to get angry, but you can't let it transform you and create a different situation for you because my way is still the highway. Oh, my way or the highway. 

Joe: And so I just, so with our kids, like there was a big learning that when they were angry because of a boundary that was being drawn because they couldn't do something that they wanted to do because they couldn't have something they wanted to do.

That was the time to go yeah, fucking right on. I love your anger. That was the time to really be excited about it. And drawing boundaries really helps them get angry. And then, but once they see it, and then they usually want to do it with you, depending on how old they are, you might get a lot more resistance if they're teenagers and you've been managing them their whole life, then like they're probably not going to go for it with you.

And so there's other ways to help them get it and find other circumstances where anger is part of it, like boxing or, like a self defense course or something like that. Those are ways to start that movement. But what I noticed is that even those teenagers, they're angry a lot of the time and you can say, Oh, cool. I see you're angry. This is amazing. So I, but the bigger part that you're saying there that is in the question is that there's a management to it and that management, kids resist it no matter what you're doing with your kid. The more you're trying to manage it, the more you resist it at some age, like once the kids get to about 10 years old, then I would be having a conversation with them that says something to the effect of, hey, it's really, this is what I've learned about getting angry. It's really important to me. My job is to teach you this as a parent. And so how do we explore this in a way that you get to learn? And I feel like I've done a good job and you've gotten to learn everything from me, like what works for you, which is a very different thing than trying to manage them into an experience, which they will resist. 

Brett: It's modeling it, creating space for it. 

Joe: Exactly. 

Brett: Beautiful. Thank you for that question, Vlada.

Joe: Oh, but by the way, on that one, I just remember these times where my daughters would be like, I'm not angry. I'm not angry. Yeah. I really love your anger. I'm not angry. Yeah. You're not angry. Stop saying that. 

Brett: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks Vlada. We have another one from Cheryl. Joe often talks about the concept of feeling the feeling all the way through as the tool to find freedom. What does that look like and how do you feel a feeling all the way through? Yeah.

There's a tweet that I recently made that I really liked about this, or just a metaphor that came up for me, which is that when you're really fully feeling an emotion, it's like an earthquake and it reorganizes your psyche from the ground up. You're not the same person afterwards as you were before.

And so one thing I noticed is something that stops the feeling from really moving all the way through is any amount of subtle trying to hold myself together so that I'm still the same person after I felt the emotion. I still have the same wants, goals, still have the same story about who's right and who's wrong. And if I'm holding on to anything about my world, then that's going to slow down or stagnate the process of an emotion moving through. 

Joe: Yeah, that's really true. 

Brett: When it moves, it'll restructure the way I see things. That's what makes it such an efficient, beautiful biological process. 

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great thing. I think your mind is another one. Just not just in that capacity of wanting to hold on to an identity, but just trying to figure it out. There's clearly like, so many people in our society have learned when I have a problem, I go to my mind and I will find out the solution and I will work it out. And then, but with emotions, it does just the opposite. As soon as you enter your mind, the emotions will stop moving. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: So even the question that's being asked here in a way is getting in the way of feeling the emotions, right? It is a thought that I am not feeling an emotion right now. It is not a reality.

And so the more you can put your attention in your body, the more you can follow your body, not try to get somewhere, not judge what's happening in your body. So somebody like lays down, breathes a little bit, and starts feeling their emotions as soon as they think, this isn't how it's supposed to be. I shouldn't feel this way. Or, this is too subtle, or anything like that. Then it immediately constricts the emotional process, whereas if you feel the body and just follow it and be like, oh where's this river going to go? And I have no judgment, then the whole thing moves a lot better. So that's another way to feel it all the way through.

Also, like it, it happens as it's supposed to happen. So you trying to push it there is going to slow the whole thing down. And so it's much, you're there because you love the emotion. If you felt an emotion all the way through, you love the emotion at the end of it. And. Like in love with the emotion like you would with your kid, it's like this wonderful, amazing part of you. And so that's how you know you're there. But the process, it can look a lot of different ways. And so it's really just about following it. The question is like asking, how do I float down the river? How do I fully float down the river? And it's I don't know exactly how to answer that question. Or it's maybe more like, how does a log float down the river? It's that's what it does. It's what we do. If we don't get in the way. 

Brett: Yeah. And there's an interesting kind of double bind there where if you have the thought, Oh, I don't feel anything. I'm not feeling anything. And you trace that thought back to where it comes from. How is it not fear? Or there's like an assumption. Thoughts come from, they require assumptions to operate. We need to have certain axioms for which to do the logic with. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And so what's the axiom there? The axiom is I should be feeling something that I'm not.

And what is under that? The fear of not feeling, the fear of not being good enough. And whatever that is, if you look on the other side of the spine, you then have the strategy of trying to push an emotion to make it happen, to try to poke to make something happen. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And that also is, so it might be that there's sadness. You're like, why am I not feeling sadness? I should be feeling sadness. I'm going to try to feel my sadness. And in reality, what really wants to be felt first is the fear of not feeling your sadness. 

Joe: Yeah. Or the shame of not feeling the sadness followed by the fear followed by the sadness itself. Or it might be the anger, oftentimes with sadness for some people, it's the anger that I can't feel it. But what I like about what you're saying is it is a really cool hack is every thought that you have about not being able to feel an emotion all the way through, is an emotion that you get to feel. That's like such a beautiful pointer, every thought.

Brett: And sometimes the river goes around the bend, then through a little gentle class two rapids, then to the right and over a waterfall and then a class four and then into the ocean, 

Joe: Exactly. Why isn't it all waterfalls? 

Brett: Where's it going next?

Joe: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It's really sweet, that thought process. I really dig that thought process. Oh, I should be able to cry is shame. And so feel the shame. Oh my gosh, if I cry, then I'm never going to stop crying. Oh, that's fear. So feel the fear. And another hack is fake it. If you're just really stuck in your head, you can just use the old crowbar, which I had to use, which is just fake the emotion for a while until it finally flows.

Brett: Yeah, I think there's a really important subtlety there as well, because there's, I think there's a fine line between just full on faking it, where on some level you know you're faking it and like you're trying to get yourself somewhere and so the resistance happens and then you get nowhere. But there's something, there's a subtle fine line where if you're faking it with sincerity, there's an invitation like, hey, I'm, if there's hay in their muscles, if there's a tension, that's like this one that wants to be felt, let's try feeling like you're welcome to feel it.

If if there's tears that want to come, like I'm going to get the process started and if I'm striking a chord, you can, the body can follow it and you hit a resonance and it starts to move. 

Joe: Yeah. The way I describe it that I think works the best is pretend you're an actor and your job is to give the most convincing performance of sadness, but you're just an actor. And what it does is it does the two things that we just, that you just talked about. The first thing that it does is it creates a sincerity, but the second thing it does is it allows you not to believe any of your thoughts because you're an actor. And so it's like you're outside observing it. So it's your identity is not involved, right?

Because your identity is the one observing the actor and you have the sincerity or it's not a good performance and you don't believe any of the thing because it's just a story. And though, if you're going to fake it, that's the most effective way I've seen to fake it is pretend you're an actor playing the part of you right now and your job is to give the most sincere performance, best performance of anger, best performance of sadness. 

Brett: Yeah, 

Joe: That's the old crowbar. Yeah. Yeah. And then it'll just take you. 

Brett: The pointer of being an actor acting as you also is just like a great way to drop into the body because, okay, how am I going to act like me?

The first place I'm going to go, at least maybe that's me, but the first place I'd go is into my body to be like, what is, what does my body want to do if it's that, if I'm feeling that, and then I'm most likely to actually take the shape that, that, that is actually what my body wants to take to move that emotion. So it's tapping the body's wisdom there without overthinking it. 

Joe: Yeah. Which would not tap, which would be the opposite of tapping the bottom of his body. 

Brett: Exactly. Tapping the body's wisdom rather than overthinking it. Yeah. Awesome. 

Joe: This is from Asana. What does it mean to passionately hold a perspective while being grounded, curious of others perspectives, especially when they spur feelings of anger and frustration. What if I don't want to be in view all the time?

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Yeah. So we're not making you, 

Brett: It wouldn't be view if you're forcing yourself,

Joe: That's a better answer than I had. The first thing I'd say is let's not I don't want to, view in itself, just, if you're in view, you can't see morality around view. Meaning like, let's not make this like the golden rule or something that you have to do or, right or wrong or good or bad or view is just a place you get to go if you want to go there.

Like it's quite lovely and it is connected. And so I think that's the first thing is no, you don't ever have to be in view. And I hope that during our course, we never tell anybody that you have to do this. I think people, I know a lot of people walk away with it. And but it doesn't have to be, it's not an imperative.

It's, hey, experiment with this, see how enjoyable this is, see how it is to live in this, see how much you want to live in this. It's great. And pretty soon you'll just learn that oh, this is like a place that gets a lot of really good results in life and I like it and it's enjoyable and it doesn't always get me what I want, but eventually it gets me something better than what I want, all that stuff. 

As far as what, if you have a perspective, yeah, great, have a perspective. I think there's a kind of an interesting point of view here, which is you can hold a perspective and not think you're right and it's an interesting nuance. You can hold a perspective and think you're right, that's fine.

And what I notice is holding a perspective and saying, oh this is a perspective that's dear to me, and I can't believe that it's right. I just know it's the one that's right for me. There's a lot of freedom in that, both freedom of action and freedom of not taking things personally. And so the implied part of the question that Asana asks here is especially when they spur feelings of anger and frustration, meaning that I have a perspective that is creating other people's anger or their perspective is creating my anger. I would say either one of those two things, yeah, then go feel the anger. Or go feel the fear that somebody is angry at you or the feeling of aloneness or the feeling of I'm different and isolated or whatever the emotions are that are there. It's like fantastic to have all that experience as well.

Brett: Yeah, something that comes up for me just pondering this is that this is my perspective that may be true, maybe not true, but I perceive view to be a natural state for us. Prior to things getting wired together and to patterns and ways that we learn to get love underneath all of it is what view points to, the natural state. And you can't adopt your natural state, push yourself into your natural state. You can explore it. And the way you explore it is seeing what comes up in the way, that seems to be in the way, the stories that would have you say, oh, I'm getting angry. Therefore, that's isn't view. Is it like, what is it? The story or the anger that is actually in the way of recognizing that natural state?

Joe: Yeah, that's a lovely way to put it. 

Brett: Awesome. 

Joe: Cool. There was one more question that I really liked in here that I wanted to, there's a lot of really good ones. I want to do this again. Scott says, or asks the common pitfalls of self transformation through emotional fluidity needing an emotion to move, thinking once it moves, then you'll be lovable, using tactics as a strategy to move things, et cetera.

So it feels like all of those are traps about thinking about your emotional experience. So it's those are all traps of thoughts when related to emotional fluidity. These are the thought patterns that get me all focatta around emotional fluidity. Emotional fluidity has its own focattaness, which is, with the the little pitfalls or eddies along the way.

One of them that I find is that people start believing their emotions. That the emotions become very convincing, like the thoughts did for a while, and then the thoughts get rejected. No thoughts are bad, emotions are good. And it's really the integration of the two that's important, and neither of them are bad or good, and both of them have value, and it's being able to have them both online together that actually creates the most clarity. So that's I think one of the things that gets in like one of the common pitfalls in emotional fluidity. There's other ones. We have the episode about the stages of emotions and emotional fluidity. And a lot of those have a trap to them.

The one I fell into of, I'm talking about my emotions and at one point that helped me feel them and at some point that stopped helping me feel them. So that there are ways in which, like the tools that get us to emotional fluidity have to be left behind and it can, it just turns into an experience of emotions moving through your body.

But so holding onto those tools is another trap, things that got us there. That's another trap that I think people get into with them. As far as the ones that were mentioned here about thinking that you need to do it to be lovable, your emotions wouldn't fall for that. In a hot second, neither would your body. That's a mind thing that would convince you of something like that. And emotional fluidity would, in fact, probably require you to mourn the fact that you thought you needed to be lovable. 

Brett: So something interesting about what you said about one of the pitfalls being that people will start believing their emotions, it seems to me that's what, that what will happen is actually that they believe an interpretation of their emotions. I'm angry, so that means some things, somebody did something wrong, or I'm 

Joe: No, literally that, also, I'm angry means I'm angry. I believe that I'm angry. 

Brett: And that it's not something else that there's sadness underneath it, or 

Joe: That's one, or that the anger it's I that I'm angry. That it's not just something that's moving through me. They'll define themselves by their emotion. The way they would define themselves by the thoughts. 

Brett: Yeah. So it seems like we have some independent things going on here that to the extent that use you can see through your identity and you feel your emotions, you're less likely to make the emotions about you. So if you do the work of opening up your access to your emotions without doing the work of seeing through identity or seeing through thoughts, you might sometimes find yourself in that snare. 

Joe: Yes. And feeling your emotions all the way through also loosens the identity, like as you start noticing like this is just something that moves through you and it has nothing to do with you, it's not personal, that it's not you getting angry, it's just that's what's happening, then that also can loosen up the identity quite a bit.

Oftentimes when people have a big emotional expression, their mind will be very quiet. You see this in groundbreakers all the time. Their mind will be very quiet. Like their identity will be very gone, for a little bit. And so it works both ways. But what I noticed is that people can identify with their emotions.

Brett: Yeah. It slows down. That's the interesting catch 22 here is the more you identify with your emotions, the less the emotion gets to fully move and restructure your identity and allow it to dissolve and fall away. And it also makes it a virtuous cycle. The more of this work you do, the faster, the rate of transformation in that way.

Joe: Absolutely. That's right. Yeah. So yeah, that answers the question. I don't know if there's anything else to add. Yeah, that's it. That's what I've got. 

Brett: Awesome. Cool. Thanks everybody for the questions. Keep sending them. If you notice in Spotify, there is, when you finish this episode, you'll likely be asked what kind of topic should we do for our next episode?

Feel free to just drop something in there or hit us on Twitter, X, LinkedIn, email, any of the socials platforms. We'd love to hear from you. I'd love to do more of these. These are fun. 

Joe: Yeah. Awesome. Thank you very much, Brett. Thanks everybody for the great questions. 

Brett: Yeah. Thank you, Joe. All right take care. Thanks for listening to the Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and rate us in 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.