How to Stop Sabotaging Your Own Life With Joe Hudson

Joe Hudson is an executive coach to people at SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, and Apple. He is also the creator of the Art of Accomplishment. This conversation explores avoidance, emotional fluidity, the Golden Algorithm, the inner critic, and why self-understanding beats self-improvement. At certain points, I become the subject. Joe has some thoughts about my patterns. There's a lot here. We barely tiptoed around the surface. Enjoy! Learn more about Joe & Art of Accomplishment: artofaccomplishment.com Joe's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ArtofAccomplishment Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF👉🏼https://www.gobrewing.com Eight Sleep: Get $350 off your Pod 5 Ultra w/ code RICHROLL👉🏼https://www.eightsleep.com/richroll LMNT: Try out LMNT's new Lemonade Iced Tea! Get a free 8-count Sample Pack of LMNT's most popular drink mix flavors with any purchase👉🏼https://www.drinklmnt.com/richroll Prolon: Ready for your own reset? For a limited time, Prolon is offering my listeners 15% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Program! 👉🏼⁠ ProlonLife.com/RICHROLL Squarespace: Use code RichRoll to save 10% off your first order of a website or domain👉🏼https://www.squarespace.com/RichRoll WHOOP: The all-new WHOOP 5.0 is here! Get your first month FREE👉🏼https://www.join.whoop.com/Roll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:04Speaker 01

  Right now, if I said to you, "Stop feeling all of your emotions," it is a stressful experience. Joe Hudson.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Executive coach to some of Silicon Valley's most famous executives and CEOs. Facilitator of people returning into wholeness within themselves.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  To help them master their emotions so they can become unstoppable.

• 1:22Rich Roll?

  The more I dive into your world, the more fascinated I'm becoming with you.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Business is, you just can't bullshit yourself. Can we actually allow the emotional experience of our body to be there without thinking that it's wrong, or bad, or shameful? How do I feel loved? How do I feel valuable? How do I not feel like a loser? How do I not feel stressed? That's what we're making our decisions based on. Almost all of us have some emotions that we're just not allowed to feel, which ends up making us make incredibly horrible decisions, which create more stress. The thought that you're broken creates most of the brokenness that you're trying to solve for. And so, don't try to improve yourself, try to understand yourself.

• 2:01Rich Roll?

  Joe, delighted to meet you. Thank you for doing this.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Good to be here.

• 2:05Rich Roll?

  You've canonized your kind of core philosophy around how you coach people into this thing called the art of accomplishment. So what is that? Like, what are the principles behind this? And, you know, what is the kind of architecture around how you work with people?

• 2:23Speaker 01

  There's a lot of ways to describe what we do. I would say the best way to describe what we do is, people are stressed out, just like not happy in their lives. A lot of people are not happy in their lives and they're very stressed out. And we think that's because we've got too much to do, or we think because we don't have enough money, or something like that. And what I notice is that people are stressed out because they have a lot of negative self-talk, so they're constantly under attack. You're constantly beating yourself up. That's stressful. That's like, did I do that right? You know, you messed that up. Why didn't you do that? How could you? You mess up that words. Like, you're saying the thing you need to work out. Why aren't you working out more? All that kind of recursive self-talk is incredibly stressful, psychologically, extremely stressful.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  The other thing that keeps people incredibly stressed out, and by stressed out, I mean, they're not present, they're not loving the way that they would be naturally, inherently, is that they're not feeling their emotions. So like, right now, if I said to you, "Stop feeling all of your emotions",

• 3:28Speaker 01

  it is a stressful experience. You have to constrict muscles, you have to like tighten up, you have to stop things. And almost all of us have some emotions that we're just not allowed to feel, which ends up making us make incredibly horrible decisions, which create more stress. Because neurologically speaking, if I went into the emotional center of your brain and I took it out, your IQ would stay the same, but it would take you... Half an hour to decide what color pen to use. It would take hours to decide where to have lunch because the way the human brain works is we use logic. And there's a great book on this called Descartes' Error. You can look it up, but we use logic to decide how we're going to feel.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  And so what we're really doing is we're deciding how like, how do I feel loved? How do I feel valuable? How do I not feel like a loser? How do I not feel stressed? And that's what we're making our decisions based on. And when you're like, I'm happy to feel scared. I'm happy to feel angry because I know the the gifts of all these emotional experiences, then you have like this incredible ability to make great decisions for yourself.

• 4:37Rich Roll?

  It seems self evident that this is the way to be, but it is interesting that, you know, we, we, we're sort of hardwired to believe that like, oh, our stress is a function of external circumstances. Like if things weren't so crazy and like, I just have to get over this hump and then it's going to be fine. And like

• 4:55Speaker 01

  My husband just didn't, my wife just

• 4:56Rich Roll?

  Right, it's all, you know, kind of lodged, you know, outside of the self. But that's kind of an epiphany to understand that like, stress is a function of repressed emotions or feeling like you're not permitted to feel yourself in certain circumstances. Like I had never thought of it in that context before.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so to me, that's, that's a lot of the core of our work is emotional fluidity, learning to, well, I mean, emotional fluidity, I don't mean like you go around getting angry at anybody every time. It means that you can feel all of your emotions. You're not being emotionally abusive, which means I'm going to throw my emotion at you. In, in, in our world, the easy one that everybody recognizes is, oh, I get angry at you. Like everybody knows that that person got angry at me, but you can get sad at somebody too. Right? You can say, oh, poor me, this is all to manipulate somebody or to control somebody. You can get scared, oh, I'm really worried about you. I'm really worried. So there's lots of ways of getting emotional at somebody that controls them. So we're not speaking about that.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  We're speaking about, oh, can we actually allow the emotional experience of our body to be there without thinking that it's wrong or bad or shameful? And, and I mean, that's, you just see people's like, you know, we get to see people's lives change. That is like one of the biggest change agents on the planet because if you think about it this way. How many people know they should exercise and they don't? How many people know that they should be nicer and they aren't? How many people know that they should eat one way and they don't? So that means intellectually, they get it. There's nothing more that you can do intellectually to change the situation. But they don't get it on some other level, right? Because if you got it, you would do it. Instead of I'm bad because I don't do it. There's this other option, which is you actually don't get it yet.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  And where people typically don't get the transformation is with emotions in our society. And so what I notice is that when people get it in the head, which I would call like the human prefrontal cortex brain. If they get it in the heart, which is what I would call the emotional intelligence, the mammalian brain, and they get it in the nervous system, the gut, reptilian brain, then transformation happens. It can't not. So part of what we do at Art of Accomplishment is work on all three of those levels. We don't work on one of them. We work on all of them.

• 7:19Rich Roll?

  It's counter-programming for kind of our cultural prerogative. You know, it's an antidote to this hustle culture that we're in right now. Repress your emotions, barrel forward, you know, just, you know, get it done. And it doesn't matter how you feel about it. These are short-term strategies, you know, like that that always, you know, end up in some kind of worse scenario down the line inevitably, right? So emotional fluidity is the opposite of emotional repression, basically. Can you be with your emotions? And, you know, I'm, I'm somebody who's, who I'm in addiction recovery. Been an A forever. And one of the annoying catchphrases, there's many in those rooms.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  I love this slogan.

• 8:04Rich Roll?

  You know, feelings are just feelings, you know? And we're so afraid of our feelings. Like we do so much to avoid any kind of discomfort. I mean, all addiction is, you know, stems from an avoidance strategy of like just not being able to tolerate some kind of emotional situation and being willing to do anything to avoid it. And the more that I reflect on my own life, I told you ahead of time, I was going to make this like a personal thing, but like it's going to seep in. All of my errant patterns and, you know, kind of behave, behavioral coping mechanisms that don't serve me. All stem back foundationally to something that I'm trying to avoid.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:45Rich Roll?

  It's incredible, like it.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  And emotion you're trying to avoid.

• 8:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, an emotion that, you know, and you can say another annoying thing in AA is like self-awareness will avail you nothing. Like, I have a lot of self-awareness, but it doesn't mean that I'm doing anything about it necessarily. You know what I mean?

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:01Rich Roll?

  You can talk about it and form a whole narrative and a story around it.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:05Rich Roll?

  But that is very different from being in the solution.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, yeah. So if you put together that thing that I said about emotion, making good choices, you want to have a drink. There's an emotion that arises that makes it that you want to have a drink. If you're like, oh, cool, that emotion, I can't wait to feel that emotion. There's no need for the drink. You know, and you can have all the self-awareness that I'm an alcoholic, but if you can't sit with that emotion, you're going to have the drink.

• 9:32Rich Roll?

  So how does one go from a conscious or even an unconscious aversion into experiencing a certain emotion to curiosity and welcoming of that experience?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. The first one's the hardest. The first, the first one is like, why would I ever want to feel this thing is kind of where you, well, you'll hear people on the first, the first emotion that they're going for. And one of the things I like using is like, well, why would you ever want to work out? Like, that sucks. You know, like it burns. It's like you get exhausted. Like, what would make you ever want to do it? And the answer is always well, because the next day I, or the, in weeks, I feel better. So it's like a very similar thing is, so that's what you can help people get to. You said curiosity. Curiosity is the right way to approach it. It's a deep wonder. So it's not just a feeling's just a feeling.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  It's like, well, where is that feeling in your body? How does it move? How does it sit? Because feelings don't stay still. It's not like I have a feeling of anger and it's just this sedentary thing in my system. Right, there's like, there's even the most, even the feeling of stuckness has some movement in it. Like, what is the somatic experience of that in your body? And starting to have curiosity and understanding. But then what happens is, once you can welcome that first emotion, patterns start changing. So I have this thing that we call the golden algorithm. And the golden algorithm is the feeling that I'm trying to avoid, I'm going to invite in the exact way that I'm trying to avoid it. So for me, emotional abandonment was huge.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  My dad became an alcoholic. I felt very emotionally abandoned. So every time anybody would, I would smell emotional abandonment, even when it wasn't there, I would do one of two things. I would be, fuck you, I don't need you anyhow, which makes people emotionally abandon you. Or, oh, okay, what can I do to? Which makes people emotionally abandon you, right? Neediness and getting hard both cause that. And so this thing that I was trying to avoid, the feeling of abandonment, I was creating in the exact way I was trying to.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Well, once I'm like, oh, cool, I'm being abandoned. I can't wait to feel that. Like, I can sit with that, I can be there with that. I've done that before. And when I do, I learn something, so I'm going to do that again. Then all of a sudden, I don't do those two things. I don't get hard, I don't. And then the pattern starts to dissipate. So as soon as people start to say, see,

• 12:06Speaker 01

  oh, here's the pattern in my life, here's the emotions I'm avoiding. If I can look forward to them, the pattern changes, then, then people just, what's the next emotion? Let's do the next thing, let's go, let's go.

• 12:18Rich Roll?

  And it falls away. I've heard you talk about like the conundrum of letting go. Like, letting go is sort of this active like verb, right? Like, you're like willing something to go away as opposed to, I don't know if there's a word in the English language to represent what you're talking about. Maybe surrender is a little bit closer to it. But like, you're in this allowing space. Like, it just, it falls, it falls away naturally.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, what I notice is the best word in the English language for our society today is receiving.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Like, if you and I just here right now just receive. Life, it's called life energy or life and we just receive, it's the way that your brain can construct the least amount to do. Like letting go, surrender, all that stuff is like, I have to do something to let go. But you know, the Zen say, how do you let go of a hot frying pan? And so receiving, I find is the one that works for people the best.

• 13:13Rich Roll?

  In reflecting on your golden algorithm, I was thinking about my mother and you know, she's somebody who suffered quite a bit of loss and never really got help for, uh, you know, kind of healing the trauma of that. Her brother and her father both passed away and as a consequence of that, like she kind of clutched on to me pretty tightly, you know, out of fear that, you know, she might lose me one day, which of course, you know, pushed me away.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:41Rich Roll?

  And I've spent decades resenting her and have a very challenging relationship with her and now she has dementia. So there's no kind of like reconciliation between us possible. But I'm on the precipice of like recognizing not only the fact that like she's been my greatest teacher, um, but that kind of the love and emotional needs that I didn't receive were a reflection of her on some level, like loving me too much, you know, and it's given me this, this like portal to empathy for her that I always lacked. But downstream of that, I've been challenged in my, in my capacity for intimacy, you know,

• 14:25Rich Roll?

  it's like, I don't like, leave me alone, you know, like I gotta, I can't have anyone like smothering me. And so this has impacted my marriage and I'm on this journey to like kind of move towards the discomfort of intimacy.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:39Rich Roll?

  And so your words around like curiosity or just like, you know, that on the other side of that experiment is a new freedom.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  I have like 20 things that I see in what, what you just said. So that pattern is very, like you clearly know that pattern of if I feel smothered or dominated in that way by a mom. Avoidance is kind of the natural thing because that was the only way you could get a sense of self as a kid. So it's like, if I allow it, there won't be a me left. So I have to rebel. And the way that I can rebel is to avoid because it's a sense of me. And so intimacy is hard typically in that situation because this is like, this is the emotional stance that you learned to take because your mom was this way, right? That you weren't like this, so you went this way because that's how you got to keep yourself. And if you do this, the fear is that you're going to lose yourself again.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  So the protection is to actually keep yourself, which is when you see it that way. You're like, oh, the job is actually to like be in myself in the intimacy. It's not to lose myself in the intimacy. It's actually to be fully a hundred percent myself in the intimacy. That that changes for me. I've seen that change a lot of folks. The other thing that's like useful to see with your mom is that like all that fear that she had was in a weird sense devotion, not like you don't, you don't, we're not scared of what we're not devoted to. It just like, so for me, one of the ways that I I learned to forgive my mother who had a different pattern.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  But by the way, also lost a father at a young age is to just see that fear as devotion. And that that helped me have a lot of empathy. But that's not like a step you take right away. You also have to get angry and pissed and you have to do all the things to get to a place where forgiveness is like to jump to forgiveness doesn't really work.

• 16:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm dancing around it right now, but it's still a leap.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Is there any other kind of like practice or like sort of daily ritual or anything like that?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the best one is it's the same practice that you have in AA rooms that, but it's in the marriage.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Right. If you remember like in 12 step, the first time you came up and said something, it felt really, really vulnerable. The hundredth time you said that same thing, probably that vulnerability feeling wasn't particularly there. I say that because it's important that to come into your marriage every day and say one vulnerable thing, one thing that makes you pucker, that makes you go, that is like a tremendously important.

• 17:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm just like recoiling, you know, it's like, I'd rather run an ultra marathon, you know?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:28Rich Roll?

  And, you know, on that kind of avoidant.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  So make it, make it really small, just like you don't run your ultra marathon the first day, you know, just like, it doesn't have to be big. It could just be as simple as like, I don't want pasta tonight.

• 17:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  But it's that one thing that makes you just pucker a little bit. That changes it very quickly.

• 17:47Rich Roll?

  That's helpful. Thank you.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:49Rich Roll?

  Then there's the pesky inner monologue that has something to say about all of this that runs interference on everything that you're sharing.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there's two forms of it. There's like the inner monologue that's self abusive. And then there's the story that like you're telling, which is like, at one point was clearly a healing story for you, but now maybe holding you back. There's, there's those two forms of inner monologue. There's the, the inner monologue of belief and the inner monologue of like daily recursive, you're not good enough. Why are you doing? Why didn't you, you should have done better?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  You've got these sex other things to do. Have you done them yet? All that. So there's this two levels of that recursive, the limiting belief and the, and the negative self-talk.

• 18:32Rich Roll?

  That's a situation in which self-awareness definitely avails you nothing. Like we're all, we all have our inner monologue, you know, like I just assume everyone's is negative.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:41Rich Roll?

  It's probably not the case, but like mine certainly is. And, you know, just being aware of it, even understanding how it's impacting your stress levels and your inability to kind of function optimally in the world, doesn't do much to derail it.

• 18:59Rich Roll?

  Or to cajole it, I suppose. I mean, you have a whole thing about like, you're not trying to shut it down or mute it. Like, you kind of have to dance with it, right? You have to humor it and

• 19:10Speaker 01

  I have like 10 tools, like our week long that we do that's like, you know, under, under the table

• 19:19Speaker 01

  thing. We go through like 10 tools to work with the, with the negative self-talk and, and the studies that we've been doing on that is like a reduce it, we can reduce on average negative self-talk by a standard deviation. So there's a lot of tools that are used, but you're right. Just awareness of it doesn't typically do much and fighting against it entrenches it, you know, that which we resist persists, I think is one of the

• 19:44Rich Roll?

  That's another, that's another

• 19:48Speaker 01

  But there's lots of tools and one of the simplest ones to access is to, right now, what happens for most people is they have an inner dialogue is like, you're not good enough for X, Y, and Z purpose. And this one's like, yeah, right, but fuck you. So, yeah, right. Okay, fine. And then I'm going to undermine by not doing the thing. So you should eat differently. You're right, but I'm not gonna, you know, that's like the typical dialogue. Everybody's like worried about this, like, how do I change this? But the, the more, the more flexible option is to change the response.

• 20:25Rich Roll?

  And what would be an example of that?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Well, the best way to do it in my experience is experiment. So, because if I could tell you, but it's then it becomes something that you have to do. Why aren't you responding to yourself in this way? I don't know. Fuck you. Right? If I tell people how to, what's the most effective response, then they'll, it'll become a should, which will be this person, the upper dog's voice. And then they'll rebel against it. So that doesn't work so well. So instead, what I say is experiment. So, one day respond to it with, oh, aren't you cute? And the next day respond to it by singing a musical. And the next day respond to it with, I see how scared you are and I'm right here with you. And then the next day respond to it with like, shut the fuck up. And then the next day respond like, like,

• 21:08Speaker 01

  write a list of 20 ways that you think would be fun and enjoyable to respond to that negative self-talk and respond that way for a day, like do the experiment.

• 21:17Rich Roll?

  The dilemma with the Striver is of course, this notion that whether it's that internal monologue, or that quest for specialness, these are defense mechanisms born of childhood trauma, or just, you know, experiences when we were young. That highly capable people figure out how to turn into superpowers. This is what, you know, creates, you know, successful companies, or you know, you name any kind of successful person out in the world. You know, many of them have this unhealthy relationship with some kind of strategy that was born out of, you know, something dysfunctional early in life that has fueled their success.

• 22:02Rich Roll?

  And here comes Joe, you know, when these people reach, they've climbed to the highest mountain, and they look around and they're like, how come I'm unhappy? Or like, how come I don't feel fulfilled? Or I can't be present in my life? Like, this is something that, you know, I've struggled with. And you're saying, well, you know, these strategies that served you so well are not serving you, and it's time for something better and new. That's a threat. Like, well, if I, if I don't have those, then my whole thing is gonna like, fall apart or cave in on top of itself.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, my message is a little bit different, which is, this strategy has always been dirty fuel. Right? So, if you take right now, I did two little videos on this one, was like, the, this woman who's Chinese-American, great skier, got, won the gold medal. Another one is a, the best golfer in the world right now. And what they'll tell, you'll hear in both of the interviews, they'll just talk about, I, I love skiing, I love playing golf, I love practicing. They're not grinding, because they love the thing that they're doing. If they were grinding, they wouldn't still be doing it after decades, right? Or whatever it is.

• 23:15Rich Roll?

  Being process oriented.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  It's like, there's something that they love about the thing that they do. And so, that's not dirty fuel, and that makes champions. It makes the best. If you go to great jazz players, they're like, you gotta fall in love with practicing. Like, I love practicing, I love, there's this great thing on the internet about this guy, and he's just like, yeah, I fall in love with every note. Like, I'm just falling in love with every note. And- And and you don't practice to get anywhere. You practice like you brush your teeth. You're brushing your teeth. You're not trying to get anywhere with it. And that is what you see makes excellence in every field. And then there's also obsession that I see all like. And you don't get obsessed over something you don't love that you, you know.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  I'm totally obsessed with whatever the thing is. For me, it's the work that I do in the world. If I didn't love it, I couldn't stay obsessed with it. And so I think that those are actually the clean fuels. And the thing is that anybody who's been that successful has those two things somewhere so they can recognize them. They can see them. They can say, oh, I, I can acknowledge that that fuel is cleaner than this other thing. And so to recognize that the thing that you thought was driving you has actually been putting the brakes on is often the first step to being able to have the courage to think, oh, this might not be the only way to get it done.

• 24:40Rich Roll?

  So this is a long way of saying the critical inner voice is a dirty fuel in that it may have catapulted you to a certain, you know, kind of plateau, but essentially you're on a crash course with burnout, anxiety, perhaps depression, like there will be a reckoning at some point. Yeah, it's not, it's not sustainable.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Correct. There's three ways it's not sustainable. There's like, I'm gonna like get like blind drunk every weekend, not sustainable. There's, and so some people can do that for like, you know, into their sixties. There's the not sustainable, like I sold my company and now I'm depressed in my house and I like, I don't know what I want to do. And I'm second guessing myself all the time, unsustainable. And then there's the unsustainable in the fact that I just constantly sabotage myself and I never get to the thing that I want to get to. Those are the ways that it typically is unsustainable.

• 25:34Rich Roll?

  Talk more about the self sabotage instinct. On some level, we're all getting in our way all the time in various ways.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what you learn when you start.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Welcoming your emotions is that the negative emotions are the ones that you learn to welcome first and they're the easiest to welcome and the positive emotion is the hardest emotion.

• 25:58Rich Roll?

  Why are we so welcoming to the negative emotions?

• 26:01Speaker 01

  And so, you know. Well, some of us aren't even welcoming to that, but yeah, they somehow are easier than like the love that we earlier in the podcast, like that's the one that's actually scarier for people. And if you just think about, it's very rare to find somebody fall in love and they're not scared when they're like romantic love or they're just that. And so a lot of what's happening is what I would call like pleasure anxiety or love anxiety, where like, oh, I, and the reason that that is, we'll call the love anxiety one is because for most of us, love was married to something that was destructive. Love was married in your, in my case to criticism, in my case to abuse, in your case, it was to

• 26:45Speaker 01

  smothering. And so if I'm going to accept love, then I have to accept the smothering. They're like wired together in our heads and until we can separate them, until you can separate, oh, I can have love without transaction. I can have love without being smothered. I can have love and have my own self-possession. You have a fear relationship with love and instinctually correctly so because you needed to separate yourself from a mother who was doing that or you'd have no sense of self. So that's typically why it happens is because we actually have to distinguish it and there's somehow or another, having a negative emotion is less, is more comfortable than having a really great emotion that turns negative.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  You know, that's like, ah, I don't want that, I don't want to lose that thing. And you always lose it, like you don't stay blissfully in love forever.

• 27:44Rich Roll?

  You're a very curious figure to me. The more I dive into your world, the more fascinated I'm becoming with you. Like a bit of a conundrum, this guy with a venture capital background, who is coaching, you know, some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, people at SpaceX and Google and OpenAI. But also this person who is steeped in spirituality and spiritual inquiry. And as much as that might strike people as counterintuitive, it's obviously like a cohesive philosophy and a foundational aspect

• 28:28Rich Roll?

  of how you interact with people and interface with them and coach them. How do these two cohabitate in your mind?

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. I think one thing to think about is, you know, 1970s, there was a, you were an environmentalist or you were a businessman and you couldn't be both. I don't even think there was many businesswomen in 1970, right? And then now you can be an environmentalist and a businessman or a businessperson.

• 28:58Rich Roll?

  Or an artist and an athlete.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  An artist and an athlete, right? That apparent separation of identity collapsed somewhere along the lines, 1990s mostly, when clean tech came in. And so to me, it's the same thing. It's being deeply committed to self-discovery only serves business, right? You can make a lot of money planting trees. You can make a lot of money cutting trees down. You can be very successful in business in a way that allows you to understand yourself and get to know yourself better. And you can do it in a way that doesn't do any of that and leaves you miserable, even if you've had all the success in the world. That was one kind of recognition that allowed for it.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  But I think the deeper recognition for me was I spent You know, 10 years mostly meditating and business is like you just can't bullshit yourself. You can bullshit yourself on a pillow pretty easily. You know, you can, you can sit down and convince yourself that you're happy. But then, you know, get in like a car with a screaming kid for five hour road trip and see how you're doing. So to me, business was this thing where could I maintain an open, loving heart? Could I maintain a sense of self and, and self possession? When one of the companies I loved was failing.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  That was, and that became a much better ground for me to discover myself at that moment in my journey than sitting and meditating.

• 30:33Rich Roll?

  At some point in your venture capital career, you realize that it's really a, an, an education in human psychology and human behavior, right? And this, you're starting to realize like these worlds are, are congealing. Like your effectiveness as a venture capitalist is correlated heavily with your ability to understand people and kind of solve their blocks and help them kind of actualize their ambitions.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  That was because I was a bad venture capitalist, not because I was a good one. Meaning like great venture capital is you invest in people who don't need you.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  And I invested in people who needed me. I invested in not people who I thought would be able to take care of everything. It was like people who have potential, they had a good idea. And I had a personal part of myself that was still trying to save my alcoholic dad. So I was like finding people to save. And so my portfolio did not do as well as if you would have hired a whole bunch of people who don't need you. And so then my only way to save the portfolio was to coach, was to coach them and to coach them into being successful.

• 31:45Rich Roll?

  So with this awareness, like, how does the idea of coaching come to pass? Like, how, how did you kind of square that equation?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  I didn't, I, I just started helping out some entrepreneurs who I had invested in and the work got out. And I just took all those years of stuff that I had done and applied it to.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Apply it to business.

• 32:08Rich Roll?

  There's something intractable in the human mind about the idea of of kind of transcending the daily pain of living, like if we can just outpace it, if we can, it's always around the bend or the promotion or the next thing. And then there will be that opportunity where we won't have to deal with uncertainty and pain. And, you know, I think that's a sort of a driving force behind so many of us. And that's, you know, that's a denial of reality on some level.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have a phrase that says, joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome. And so not only is it a denial of reality, it is the exact opposite direction in which you have a joyful life.

• 32:53Rich Roll?

  Elaborate on that because there's a lot packed into that. That was one of your kind of 30 in that viral tweet where you had those 30 point, you know, 30 points. But this is like a portal into, you know, a deeper conversation around how we manage our emotions.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you look at kids, they're just joyful a lot of the time, like you little kids, they just have a tremendous amount of joy. And the more they get told not to be happy, not to be, don't be so excited, don't be so sad, don't get angry, don't be mean, don't have a temper tantrum, don't, right, like, which is basically sending them the signal, you are not enough. You are not, there's something wrong with you. Your anger is wrong. Your sadness is wrong. Your, these things, these emotions that you have are wrong emotions. And the more that those happen, you can just watch it in children, the less joy they have. And the more that they open up, if somebody starts feeling

• 33:55Speaker 01

  them, the more joy they have, because it's like we're a dock with like one place for the boat to sit. And then the like, The anger's not moving because you're not allowed to get angry. So there it is. And there's no place for joy to park.

• 34:09Rich Roll?

  And that messaging from parent to child is really about the parent's discomfort.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 34:16Rich Roll?

  It has nothing to do with the child.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah, I can. It's very cool. Like if you ever get on an airplane and a kid starts crying and you're in the front of the airplane, you just get up and you look around at all the faces and you can like point to who wasn't allowed to cry as a kid. Because they're just

• 34:31Rich Roll?

  They're so uncomfortable.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  They're so fricking uncomfortable. That's right.

• 34:35Rich Roll?

  And so in your own parenting, you have two daughters.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Two daughters.

• 34:38Rich Roll?

  How old are they now?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Twenty and seventeen today.

• 34:41Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, she's a she's

• 34:44Rich Roll?

  Just like for people who are listening and not watching, your whole like composure just changed. Like you just you just lit up like.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I'm so in love with my daughters.

• 34:58Rich Roll?

  Share the story about your experience, uh, you know, kind of parenting them through this, uh, kind of total self acceptance of their emotional states. Cause I think that's

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is

• 35:10Rich Roll?

  Powerful.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is my wife again. This is my wife is like, is the creator of all good things in our life. She found this thing called hand in hand parenting. I cannot recommend it enough. It is without a doubt, the most powerful spiritual work I've ever done. Was parenting in the way of hand in hand parenting. It's like five very simple, easy tools. It's a beautiful process. But part of it is that you not only allow your kids to have whatever emotion they have, you actually encourage it. So if like they're like, I want a cookie. I want a cookie. You're like, yeah. I really hear that you want a cookie. I'm sorry that you can't have a cookie. Ah, like you just like really allow them to have like this full thing. And what you'll notice is that kids.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  They're disconnected, they're out of themselves, they'll have this big emotion, and then they'll be like a connected, loving kid again. It'll just like whack. And if you don't do that, then you'll just start to notice that your kids are just like getting cranked up and they're just never well-connected. They're just like, they're kind of always on an edge. And so, my wife, at this point in our marriage, my wife had a whole bunch of weird ideas in my mind to how we were gonna raise our kids. And I said, "No, she would have to fight." And then I'd say, "Okay," and then she would be right. And so by this point in the marriage, and she brings hand in hand home, I'm like, "Okay, you're the CEO of the house, and you're just right most of the time. So I'm gonna

• 36:44Speaker 01

  agree to whatever you tell me to do for three months. And if after three months it doesn't feel right, we'll change course. We'll have a talk about it." And so she brought hand in hand in, and I just saw the change. And we had a two and a half year old at the time, Esme, and I just saw the change. It was just like unbelievable. And she just, and I also noticed, "Oh, I don't want to sit with that temper tantrum. I don't want to sit with..." I like, because I wasn't allowed to have them as children. And so, in the process of learning how to sit in unconditional love with my daughters,

• 37:18Speaker 01

  I learned to sit in unconditional love with my own.

• 37:21Rich Roll?

  So your daughters become your teachers?

• 37:23Speaker 01

  My dau- oh.

• 37:23Rich Roll?

  Because they're reflecting that discomfort back onto you for you, for self-inquiry.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, just a couple of stories to like make it like, I was once with my eldest, she's like three and a half years old. She wanted something at the Whole Foods. I was like, "No," she just goes for it. She starts a tear. And I was committed at this point. So I'm like, "Right now, let's go." And I like, get on the floor. I contain her so she can't like pull stuff off the shelves. And she's just yelling, screaming in this store. And I live in this kind of hippie town, and this old hippie woman came by and she's like... Are you okay? You know, looking at me like you must be screwing up somehow. I know how to raise kids. Are you okay? My daughter's like, ah, I'm just having my emotions. And then this is like when I'm right back into it. I was like, okay, like, like even on some level, she's consciously

• 38:13Speaker 01

  knowing what's going on. She sees it. She knows that there's relief on the other side of this. And to this day, she'll call me up and, you know, two days ago, she called me up. She goes, I really need an anger release. Like, I really need to move some anger. And um, because she'll notice, oh, I'm starting to feel stuck. I'm starting to feel resentful. That means I have anger that needs to move. And so because of that, she also deeply learned how to listen to herself. So I can give you countless stories of both of my daughters, where their friends got into trouble, they didn't, you know, not trouble like from a parent, but got in trouble in real life because they were just, they, they were listening to themselves. So like, I'm not doing that thing.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Because they, they didn't have any message that you shouldn't listen to yourself. Like that, whatever this is, it's true for you in this moment and you can move and live with that.

• 39:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's a tremendous amount of emotional maturity for a young person and a capacity for emotional self-regulation through just permission to feel however you feel. So you're, you're not repressing anything. And I think the key piece there from the, the parent perspective is the non-judgment piece, like allow them to do that. So when you're in the Whole Foods and that woman's judging you.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:32Rich Roll?

  Like, I just felt myself like judging my, yeah, she's right. I'm a bad parent. I should be doing something. This public display of, you know, chaos.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:42Rich Roll?

  So much gets, so much gets like provoked, you know?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 39:46Rich Roll?

  Like deep old stuff.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And, and, and so the, the kind of cool experiment with my daughters is both of them are really good at receiving love. Both of them are really good at like expressing and sharing love and like, yeah, I mean, my daughter, uh, she just was in, uh, she was just in like a spring break scenario.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Her friends were out. She had the intuition not to do what they were doing. They got in this massive accident. She was the only one who spoke English. She went to the hospital, translated,

• 40:23Speaker 01

  and like was there for them and translated for the doctors, translated. She just like did this whole thing and gets on the phone with me and just starts bawling and just cries. And I'm like, oh, it's so great. I'm right there with you. And then she's like, okay, I gotta pull it together. I'm gonna do some stuff. She goes, you know, calls me back like next day, bawls for a while. And she's like, I just miss you and I love you. And I, at the end of this thing, I want to spend a day with you. Can we make that happen? Yeah. There's just a way in which like, and when I'm with her and both daughters, there's just so much love that and there's nobody trying to avoid it. Because it didn't come with like a caustic thing. Or we got better

• 41:07Speaker 01

  at making it less and less caustic, I think is more accurate. But yeah.

• 41:10Rich Roll?

  That's really beautiful. I suspect it's easier to like, parent a child properly. Well, it's difficult, like to do that right. You're gonna make mistakes. But like, I would imagine, like, parenting a child in that way, into adulthood, whatever emotional problems that they may have later in life are going to be knots that are easier to untie than, you know, the typical person that you work with who comes in with all kinds of, you know, it's like, you're trying to untie like a massive knot at that point, right?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:47Rich Roll?

  When someone comes to you and they say, you work with all these successful people, like, you know, I've done all these things. I'm, I don't know, I just can't like, I'm unhappy, or I'm, you know, unable to be present in my life, or I'm dealing with depression. Like, what is the process by which you begin to understand what their core malfunction is? And how to address it?

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't ever see it as a malfunction. And the way my approach is a little bit different is that

• 42:19Speaker 01

  My job in that conversation is to speak to the part of them that knows.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  And to like have a dialogue with that. So I don't really listen to the story very much. I don't really listen to the thing that they've told themselves a dozen times. Like, that's all clearly not helping. You've told yourself that a dozen times, nothing's changed. So that's not going to do us any good. And I, so my job is to like really connect with the part of them that knows, that has that clear understanding, because we all have it. We all have our true north. Just like I trusted it in my daughters, right? I trusted in, in my clients. And my job is to potentially, you know, to be a road sign every once in a while and to ask questions that allow them to see it themselves.

• 43:04Rich Roll?

  So what would be an example of one of those questions?

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Everything is usually pretty specific to the person in the moment. So if you like go online in the, and I have all these YouTube videos of me coaching people live in front of like audiences and online audiences. And I, you'll notice I hardly ever ask the same question. But generally, one type of question that I would ask is, they would tell me a story about themselves and then I would show like direct evidence that that isn't true from the conversation that we've just had. And then ask them to fill in the gap for me. So for instance, you're scared of intimacy.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  However, you share your entire life story with an audience of people. How do you make sense of those two things would be the type of question that I, I might ask. Or I might ask, you say you're scared of intimacy, but you're sharing this with a whole bunch of people that you don't know, an extremely large audience.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  If it's not intimacy, what, what do you think you're actually scared of? So it would be something like that. That would be like a typical way that I would do it, because I'm getting the wisdom from them, even though their story doesn't correlate. So to start showing them this distinction between.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  That.

• 44:32Rich Roll?

  The story that I manufacture around my life or the people that you work with, it's it's just a it's just a narrative spun by my brain that's attempting to, you know, overlay it with some kind of rational logic. But like, that's an obstacle to the solution. The solution is really like, forget about all of that. Like, you have to transcend that and start to like, on a somatic level, like, feel into yourself. And these are, you know, skills that we weren't taught and certainly aren't emphasized or prioritized in modern developed society.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's also, the weird thing about our stories is that every epiphany is a rut waiting to happen. So like.

• 45:16Rich Roll?

  Wait, every epiphany is a rut waiting to happen.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:21Rich Roll?

  Does that mean?

• 45:21Speaker 01

  So let's say I'm 18 and I feel powerless. Right? It's really important for me to have this epiphany of I have choice. I can choose and I can make my life what I want it to be. That's a really important epiphany to have that like, oh, like I get to make my life. At some point, that epiphany stops serving. It becomes control freaky. It becomes like stressful. It becomes, and a new epiphany is required at that moment of, wow, I can't even control the thoughts that I'm having. This is, this is, this is all a gift. Every thought I've ever had is like one that I can't control. This must be a gift.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  That becomes a new epiphany that serves for the next part of the journey. And and to have flexibility to be able to actually understand I do have choice and to understand that it's all a gift becomes the integration of those two things. But the the idea that creates a lot of relief in our system will at some point limit us.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  And so that's the limitation of whatever story we tell ourselves. And oftentimes, because it created so much relief, we start identifying with and say, no, this thing is really important, instead of being able to see the truth in different sides of things, which is where the freedom comes. And there's this, I think it's a Tibetan saying, it says, "Sky as wide as the mind and action as fine as barley flour." And what it's pointing to is that can you see, can your mind be so wide that you can see the truth in every perspective? But that doesn't change how you do things. There's only one thing you could possibly do.

• 47:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah. That's a lot to take in. Yeah, I'm just trying to let that settle. In your case, an example of that would be self-reliance.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:16Rich Roll?

  Initially, you know, this is a lever for growth and perhaps you even self-identified with it at some point. And then it runs its course and it becomes an impediment to your growth.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:29Rich Roll?

  Because it's cutting you off from connection and community and depriving you of that, which is, you know, basically required in order to feel whole and to be more self-actualized.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  And to take whatever mission I have in the world to another level as well.

• 47:56Rich Roll?

  All of these, you know, kind of wounds that turn into superpowers ultimately become Achilles' heels.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:03Rich Roll?

  And the identity piece is huge. When we identify with them, it becomes this, that's, that's like the meta-story of like who we are. And in order to grow, we have to disabuse ourselves or detach from that identity, like shed a skin.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:18Rich Roll?

  And, you know, kind of wander in the desert until we find, you know, a more fitting skin for the next growth spurt.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly how I see it working.

• 48:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  And then it, there's another piece to it too, is like, there's a question that you can get into, especially for like, The mind for to find peace. There's a question that I got into, which I've now refined to. The question is like, what am I essentially, which, and the reason I use the word essentially is like, it would have to be something that I've been since the moment I was born till this moment. So I'm not angry because anger is come and gone. I'm not my thoughts because my thoughts come and go. I didn't even think for the first couple, three years potentially, right? So what am I essentially? Because if you identify with that, it's a whole different thing than identifying with

• 49:11Speaker 01

  the person in recovery or identifying as the husband or identifying as the capable person or the self-reliant person. All of those have limitations. But if you're going to identify with what you are essentially, then you don't give yourself that limitation. And you you become far more effective.

• 49:28Rich Roll?

  And the answer to that question is?

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Not an intellectual one. It's something that has to be discovered. I ask myself that question 10 times a day for like a decade. Yeah. And it's, and it is not an intellectual answer.

• 49:42Rich Roll?

  Is there a way to put words to it?

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, in Lichesha Lichen, I think is like the one, the one that they use in the

• 49:52Speaker 01

  is like the part of me that sees you as a part of you that sees me loosely translated like the thing that that which is behind your eyes looking out. That which is aware. There's a lot of ways people have tried to point to it.

• 50:07Rich Roll?

  That the I am that idea and the, I mean, it conjures the notions of oneness and, you know, questions the notion of identity itself or individuation.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 50:17Rich Roll?

  And that becomes a deeper.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:19Rich Roll?

  You know, probing of what is consciousness and what is reality.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:24Rich Roll?

  Fundamentally, right?

• 50:25Speaker 01

  But what it does on the effect, on the effectiveness level, like on the just like art of accomplishment level. What that does is if you're not identified, I'll give you an example of what this does. Let's say you are a programmer right now. You're a computer programmer. AI has just absolutely changed your world.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Half the companies that are there today won't be there in six months. I work inside of companies like OpenAI where it's a different company every three months. Everything is changing so rapidly. If you're identified as anything, you're screwed. Like, if you don't have the emotional fluidity to grieve and move and change your identity from programmer to software conductor, or from, you know, inspire of of other people or whatever, like if you can't change that identity, you're in a in a hurt situation and in any kind of high changing environment.

• 51:27Rich Roll?

  It's like an accelerated crash course in the notion that anything you would, you know, attachment is suffering, right?

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:36Rich Roll?

  You know, on a kind of like hyper intense scale. And I guess the silver lining in that is it's compelling people to, you know, confront surrender without having to, you know, become an alcoholic or have some other kind of like personal crisis because the the sort of landscape or the tectonic plates under the, under, under our feet are shifting so quickly that you have no choice if you want to sort of survive and be able to get up in the morning and function.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes. And so that's one way that it helps. The other way that it helps is like, okay, now I'm going to do emotional fluidity. I'm going to like learn my emotions. I can see that I'm not those. So all of a sudden they become less scary.

• 52:18Rich Roll?

  Or when you realize like, oh, today's not like yesterday. I feel all this fear, like to just be like, oh, that's interesting. I feel afraid. What is it? What is that telling me? Or like, what can I, what can I learn about myself? Like having a healthy relationship with your own shifting emotional state.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I mean, and that's the kind of cool thing is when you start having that emotional fluidity, those signals become incredibly clear. So the anger tells you I'm not holding a boundary. I'm, I'm, there's a determination and or there's a determination in my life that I want that I don't have. You know, the fear is telling me that I'm either trying to move into a Into a bigger room that there's, I'm being called into something bigger, or that there's some way I'm not taking care of myself. There's a, there's an action I'm taking that I'm, that I want to be taking that I'm not taking. These are like, every one of these emotions actually has a really direct signal.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Once, once enough fluidity is there, that you can start, you start getting excited for the emotions. You're like, oh, cool. I'm angry. Where's the boundary I need to draw?

• 53:27Rich Roll?

  On this subject of improvement versus understanding, like, this gets at the crux of kind of the personal development industrial complex. You know, like the whole self-help industry is kind of premised on this notion of brokenness. This sort of shame-ridden, you know, guilt-provoking idea that there's something wrong with us. And, you know, we need to read these books or listen to these people or go on a spiritual, you know, odyssey to, you know, quote unquote, fix ourselves. So, talk a little bit about how you think about this.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Makes me sad. Yeah, I think that, like, the,

• 54:11Speaker 01

  there's an interesting thing. It's like the thought that you're broken creates most of the brokenness that you're trying to solve for.

• 54:19Rich Roll?

  Say that again.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  The thought that you're broken creates most of the brokenness that you're trying to solve for. Right? So if I took somebody who's deeply ashamed of something, like just shame in itself creates like massive stagnation. So, for everybody in the audience as an example, here's something I can tell you about yourself. I can tell you that there's something that you've been telling yourself that you should or shouldn't have been doing for the last decade if you're 30 years old. And I can tell you that thing hasn't changed. And the reason that the thing hasn't changed is because you're telling yourself you should be different. Cause that should is a form of shame. Shame creates stagnation. It's not a way to actually create transformation.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Nobody has like shamed themselves into like any kind of lasting transformation.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  As a matter of fact, the quote I love on this is shame is the locks that keep the chains of bad habits in place. And so, so there is a certain level of shame that is, I need to fix myself. I am broken. The avoidance of that shame is the cause of a lot of the behaviors that people are, right? I should stop, I should stop using porn. That's shame. If you didn't have that shame, probably porn would not be as useful or as attractive to you. Like what you worked in the room, the 12 step rooms is you're like working through that shame that came with the alcoholism.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  That relieves the alcoholism. So the idea that you're broken and needs to be fixed is often the biggest issue that is creating the things that you, that you look for, look at as evidence that you're broken. The thing I like pointing to people is like, if you can't go into the past, and you can't go into the future, you have to be right here in this moment. Please tell me what's wrong with you. Like, what's the problem with you right now?

• 56:25Rich Roll?

  There's no problem right now.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  So how the fuck could you be broken? Like, it requires a false, it requires like a memory or a false future to be broken. And so just the self-awareness. And the other thing that's interesting is like, well, let's look at a oak tree. There's an acorn, it turns into a sapling, turns into a young oak, it turns into a senior, you know, old oak. Like, which one's the perfect oak? Which one's the broken oak? Which one's the not complete oak? Right? And so we look at ourselves like, we're not the 100-year-old oak tree, so there must be something wrong with us, as if evolution ends, as if, like, as if our evolution could be complete.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Okay, I am now complete and fixed. There will be no more evolution in me. Ridiculous.

• 57:10Rich Roll?

  Nor does the oak tree compare itself to other oak trees.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 57:14Rich Roll?

  I mean, this is the root of much of our suffering, right? And the brokenness, you know, becomes this identity, you know, that calcifies us.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 57:23Rich Roll?

  But we convince ourselves that it is a kind of launchpad for growth. Like, oh, my, like, I'm on the, you know, I'm gonna fix this thing. And this is worthy of my time and attention. So that I can become better. Like, it can come from a, like, a good place.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:40Rich Roll?

  But the underlying premise you're saying is not just flawed, it's completely incorrect.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's also just dirty fuel. It's just, it's just a very inefficient way to get to where you want to go. Like, if, if you are on a transformational journey, that's, that's, that's like, effective, you're never gonna end up where you think you want to go. You're always gonna end up someplace far better than that. Because as you transform, your idea of what's possible will transform. As you transform, your idea of what's great and good, you will transform. As you transform, your ability to love will transform. So your idea of what perfection is today is like a shadow of what is actually available to somebody.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  To my life, I went through a long stage of constantly trying to better myself. I'm so glad that never happened. Because the thing that I have found is so far greater than, than anything I could have possibly imagined when I was like 25 years old, beating the shit out of myself. Like, I had no idea what was available. I had no idea that, like, I could love my daughters the way that I love my daughters. Like, that was, I couldn't fucking even conceive of that reality.

• 58:59Rich Roll?

  But it's a function of surrender as opposed to some kind of pursuit. Is this what you're saying? Like, because I'm thinking about this notion of brokenness as being motivation for transformation. And if you disabuse somebody of that and say, there's nothing wrong with it. Right now, everything's, everything's perfect right now. Everything is exactly as it should be. Like, how does someone engage with transformation from that perspective? Why transform? If everything is just perfectly fine right now.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  That assumes you have a choice. Like, that's like the oak tree, like, why grow? Why, why, why put out some more leaves? Why, like, why stretch to the sun? Like, it's our nature. Like, a three-year-old isn't like, I need to improve, and yet they improve. You know, like, there's more transformation from zero to seven years old than there is in any other time in our life. And there's never the thought, I have to improve myself.

• 59:56Rich Roll?

  I have this thing that I believe, which is that, you know, we're here to grow and evolve. Like, this is, this is our kind of like blueprint and mandate. And that everything that happens, that our small brains label as good or bad, you know, without any, really any kind of, you know, data points, like, we just decide this is good and this is bad.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:00:17Rich Roll?

  Every single thing is an opportunity for transformation.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:21Rich Roll?

  For growth, for evolution, if we can perceive it as such, you know, instead of saying, well, this is terrible, and, you know, I hope that never happens again. And you're saying, the way in is through, like, trying to find a way to suspend your judgment and approach with curiosity and understand that, like, it's, it's always grist for growth.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Rich Roll?

  It's there for the taking.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I use the word wonder over curiosity, just because curiosity is like you're looking for an answer. And wonder, you can be in the awe of it a while. And I find that wonder is a more effective, efficient modality than curiosity. Curiosity means that you're, there's a you needing to figure it out, instead of just like, whoa, check that out.

• 1:01:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Whoa, check that out.

• 1:01:05Rich Roll?

  But curiosity feels more accessible to me than wonder.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Rich Roll?

  Like, I'm intimidated by wonder. Like, I'm like, I'm the guy who's like, you know, all of my wounds engineered this incredible life that I have, right?

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Rich Roll?

  And here I am, unable to, like, be present for it or actually enjoy it, thinking, well, what was the point of that? And now I'm like, I want to experience joy. I want to experience awe and wonder and be present with the people that I care about and really invest in my relationships. And instead of just being, you know, captured by the next, you know, responsibility or just being anxious and feeling urgent all the time about the next thing that I have to do because so-and-so is waiting, blah, blah, blah, right?

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Rich Roll?

  And wonder comes up a lot, like awe and wonder. And I'm like, You know, when was the last, when was the last time I like, how do I, how do I access that?

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56Rich Roll?

  On a very practical level, like curiosity is like, I can make a choice.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Rich Roll?

  But wonder feels like something I have to really, I guess I would have to inhabit a certain state to make it possible. But I can't just decide to be in awe of wonder.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  But there's like a super easy, practical way to like, get into wonder really easily. If you'd like to know it, it require like a two person thing.

• 1:02:20Rich Roll?

  Please.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  So give me any, is like a, just like a simple game. You give me any question that you're in in your life and it needs to be in the form of a how or what question.

• 1:02:34Rich Roll?

  Wait, say again, what kind of question?

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Any question you have in your life right now, like what makes it that I have a hard time with intimacy? What, what makes me scared of love? So it just needs to be an actual question that you have in your life. And then I'm going to respond with a how what question? And then you're going to respond with a how what question? And then I'm going to respond with a how what question? And then you're going to respond with a how what question? We're just going to go back and forth for a couple of minutes and just see what happens.

• 1:02:56Rich Roll?

  So, okay, so I present you with a question that I'm struggling with, basically about my life.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Whatever question you come up with, I'm gonna, what's the question that that brings up in me? And then you're gonna be like, what's the question that that brings up in me? We're not answering each other's questions. We're just, yeah. And they all have to start with how or what.

• 1:03:17Rich Roll?

  How or what? Okay.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if your brain does that, that's fantastic.

• 1:03:23Rich Roll?

  Me, what does that mean?

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  When you kind of do your 404, we're like, uh.

• 1:03:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 1:03:29Rich Roll?

  What is interfering with my ability to actually enjoy my amazing life?

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  How would you know if you were enjoying your amazing life?

• 1:03:45Rich Roll?

  This is fucking me up.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  That, that, yeah, that, that.

• 1:03:50Rich Roll?

  Cause like, I know what I want to say, but it doesn't fall into that.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  How or what question?

• 1:03:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Rich Roll?

  How can I return to the experience of feeling joy that used to come easy when I was younger?

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  What makes joy need to be easy?

• 1:04:13Rich Roll?

  All right, first, I'm just trying to understand the question. What makes joy? Wait, what makes joy?

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  Need to be easy?

• 1:04:26Rich Roll?

  What are you doing?

• 1:04:29Rich Roll?

  I don't even know what's happening.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  That's wonder.

• 1:04:31Rich Roll?

  Right now.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  That's wonder. That's wonder.

• 1:04:34Rich Roll?

  That is fucked up what you just did. That's some kind of weird sorcery.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  It's, that's wonder.

• 1:04:44Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you were playing by a whole different rulebook with that. I was assuming, I was assuming the ground rules here.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:52Rich Roll?

  And you were like, you were playing like four dimensional chess with like my.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  We've had literally hundreds, thousands of people run that exercise in small groups and one on one. It consistently, if people do it, they think they see their whole problem differently. They see a set of solutions differently. And they've never tried to get to a solution. They've only been trying to ask how a questions. Because wonder is far more efficient than curiosity or driving to an answer.

• 1:05:23Rich Roll?

  That's super interesting.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Because it requires you to go outside of your normal pattern of thinking. That's, by the way, that's how our work is. Like when we do courses, we, it's not me sitting there talking. It's people doing exercises like that to learn. How to, it's all experiment. That's what we do.

• 1:05:43Rich Roll?

  It's a pattern interrupt. I mean, basically to experience our wonder, you have to transcend your intellectual like mind. And I'm living in my head all the time. And so that's like a leap, right? And so the only way you can do that is to like, you know, like shoot an arrow into like my whole like rubric. Right to like, be like, wait, what is happening? You know, to like shake it up. One of the transformations that I'm trying to make right now is.

• 1:06:09Rich Roll?

  To live with a little bit more ease, like I have this thing around suffering. Like if I, if I'm not like bleeding out on the table.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:17Rich Roll?

  You know, like I just didn't work hard enough and you know, it could have been better. And then the inner monologue, et cetera.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:22Rich Roll?

  And so I've constructed a life in which I sort of volunteer for suffering and suffering is grist for growth and it's been this, you know, powerful lever for transformation in my life. But you know, I've, I'm the hermit crab who's outgrown that shell right now. And it's very uncomfortable that for me to be like, well, what would it be like to create something, write a book, do a podcast and not have that heaviness or that burden or that like imperative that it must, that it must be like hard and I have to like push and push and push, otherwise it lacks value.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm a little confused by that because it seems like being vulnerable and receiving love are hard. So it seems like your natural disposition should be to put that, like go after that. What, I'm confused.

• 1:07:14Rich Roll?

  Meaning, say, say more about that. I'm confused now.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  I, I, my work here is done.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  You said being, doing one act of vulnerability every day, sounds like absolute hell. Some version of.

• 1:07:31Rich Roll?

  Not that bad, but like uncomfortable.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Great. Well, you're the guy who suffers, so go do it.

• 1:07:36Rich Roll?

  Right. And I should say like, I actually have, it's, you know, I haven't mastered this, but I've come a long way. Like I have, you know, like I, I have a far healthier relationship with all of these things, but I'm recognizing that there's still growth for me there and I want, and I want to grow in that way.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Rich Roll?

  And I can see the light at the end of the, at the end of the tunnel and, uh, and you know, life is, life is better there.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  What stops you from trusting that it'll just be there? If anything? You've already made it halfway.

• 1:08:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's, it's fear of rejection. Or, you know, a sense of imposter syndrome, probably.

• 1:08:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  I can, I could coach you, but we're not gonna go there.

• 1:08:21Rich Roll?

  No, we're not doing that. This became way too indulgent for, you know, self indulgent. I promised I wouldn't do this and then here we go. But anyway.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  At some point, if you ever want to do a coaching session, I'm happy to do that.

• 1:08:32Rich Roll?

  Dude, believe me, like you're the, you're, you're the guy. I think you're the guy for me. Final thoughts? What is a common misconception around those ideas that you would like to correct the record on?

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've said it, but I'll say it again, which is

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  understanding yourself is a far more efficient path than fixing yourself. And just notice, I would say like for most people, you can do this, not everybody, but most people you can do this. You do a hundred things a day and you pick three that make you bad. But like, take a look at the other 97 and just notice the inherent goodness in it. Like notice like how inherently good it is to like dedicate to this podcast, to bring this out into the world, to treat me with kindness and connection when I get here, to operate with curiosity towards me, to bring

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  people who, who, who could change lives into people's lives, like notice all the other things. Like, that's what I would say to a lot of people. It's just like, you notice those three or four things a day. See what it's like to put your attention for a week or two on all the things that prove you're inherently good, rather than prove that there must be something wrong with you.

• 1:09:54Rich Roll?

  I appreciate you. Thanks for coming today.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  I appreciate you too. What a pleasure to be here.

• 1:09:58Rich Roll?

  It's great. If people want to learn more, where is the best place to direct their attention?

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  I'm told I'm supposed to know. I would say.

• 1:10:07Rich Roll?

  This is your self-promotion moment.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Go to, go to artofaccomplishment.com or go to the podcast, Art of Accomplishment. Those are great ways to get to know us.

• 1:10:17Rich Roll?

  All right, man. Well, please come back and share more. I feel like I just tipped out around the surface of this. So I, I, I really got a lot out of that. Thank you, Joe.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Pleasure. Pleasure to be here.