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August 8, 2024 • 1hr 18min
How embracing emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (executive coach, Art of Accomplishment)
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
In this episode, Lenny interviews Joe Hudson, a highly sought-after executive coach who has worked with leaders from companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Apple. Joe's unique approach draws from spiritual, psychological and neurological practices to help people create lives of enjoyment and ease.
The conversation covers a wide range of topics related to personal growth, emotional intelligence, decision making, and creating high-performing teams. Joe shares numerous practical experiments and tools that listeners can apply to improve their lives and work.
How embracing emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (executive coach, Art of Accomplishment)
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Key Takeaways
- The critical voice in your head is often wrong, contradictory, and unhelpful. Learning to change your relationship with this voice can be transformative.
- Embracing and understanding your emotions, rather than avoiding them, leads to better decision making and more fulfilling relationships.
- Focusing on enjoyment and authenticity is more powerful for growth than constantly trying to improve or change yourself.
- Creating a set of guiding principles to live by can streamline decision making and lead to more consistent positive outcomes.
- For teams and companies, focusing on making every meeting enjoyable and productive ("5-star meetings") can surface and solve major organizational issues.
- A daily 7-minute gratitude practice with another person can rapidly transform your life and mindset.
Introduction
In this episode, Lenny interviews Joe Hudson, a highly sought-after executive coach who has worked with leaders from companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Apple. Joe's unique approach draws from spiritual, psychological and neurological practices to help people create lives of enjoyment and ease.
The conversation covers a wide range of topics related to personal growth, emotional intelligence, decision making, and creating high-performing teams. Joe shares numerous practical experiments and tools that listeners can apply to improve their lives and work.
Topics Discussed
The Critical Voice in Your Head (2:57)
Joe identifies the critical voice in one's head as a major obstacle holding people back from success and fulfillment. This voice is often contradictory and unhelpful, yet many believe they need it to be productive.
Joe advises changing your relationship with this voice rather than trying to silence it:
- Recognize that the voice is always wrong, even if there may be some truth to what it's saying
- Experiment with different ways of responding to the voice, like saying "I see you're really scared. Don't worry, I'm right here with you."
- Take an experimental approach, trying a new response each day
The goal is to gain freedom from the voice's influence and potentially reach a state where it disappears entirely.
Embracing Emotions (13:17)
Joe emphasizes the importance of embracing all emotions rather than trying to avoid or manage them. He explains that emotions play a crucial role in decision-making and that trying to avoid certain emotions limits our options and effectiveness.
Key points:
- Neurological research shows decisions are made in the emotional center of the brain
- Avoiding emotions leads to limited solution sets and ineffective behaviors
- The goal is to achieve emotional fluidity, where emotions move through you without resistance
- Welcoming all emotions leads to a more joyful life overall
Joe recommends an "emotional inquiry" practice to explore and become more comfortable with emotions.
Authenticity vs Self-Improvement (46:31)
Joe challenges the common focus on self-improvement, suggesting that authenticity and self-acceptance are more powerful approaches to growth. He uses the metaphor of an oak tree to illustrate that we are always evolving naturally, and forcing improvement often slows this process.
Key ideas:
- Focus on wants rather than shoulds to align with your natural evolution
- Self-awareness, self-experimentation, and self-discovery are more effective than self-improvement
- Loving yourself as you are leads to more loving relationships than trying to become lovable
Decision Making and Principles (55:59)
Joe shares two key approaches to improve decision-making:
- Embracing all emotions: This expands your range of possible solutions and options.
- Creating a set of guiding principles: Develop 5 core principles that, if followed, would lead to the life you want. Test each principle for 5 days and refine them over time.
Following clear principles can make decision-making more automatic and effective. Joe gives an example of his principle to "embrace intensity," which guides his responses in challenging situations.
Creating Effective Teams and Meetings (1:02:53)
Joe shares insights on improving team effectiveness, focusing on the concept of "5-star meetings." Key points:
- The atomic structure of a company is its meetings and decisions
- Aim to make every meeting enjoyable and productive for all participants
- Identifying which meetings aren't "5-star" reveals where company problems lie
- Improving meeting quality often leads to fewer, more effective meetings
Joe also recommends using short pulse surveys to measure team culture, which can be a leading indicator of performance.
The Power of Gratitude (1:10:40)
As a powerful tool for personal growth, Joe recommends a daily gratitude practice:
- Spend 7 minutes each day expressing gratitude with another person
- Focus on the felt sense of gratitude rather than intellectual thoughts
- After a couple weeks, practice gratitude for areas where you feel lack
Joe shares a personal story of how this practice transformed his financial situation within months. He emphasizes that gratitude can shift your perspective from scarcity to abundance in any area of life.
Conclusion
Throughout the conversation, Joe Hudson offers a wealth of insights and practical experiments for personal and professional growth. His approach emphasizes embracing emotions, cultivating authenticity, and focusing on enjoyment rather than constant self-improvement.
Key themes that emerge include:
- The power of changing our relationship with our inner critical voice
- The importance of emotional fluidity and embracing all emotions
- Focusing on authenticity and natural evolution rather than forced self-improvement
- Using clear principles to guide decision-making
- The transformative potential of gratitude practices
Joe encourages listeners to approach these ideas with an experimental mindset, testing what works for them rather than blindly following advice. By applying these concepts, individuals can create more fulfilling lives and work environments, ultimately contributing to a better world for future generations.
