Aug 8, 2024 · 1h 18m · lennys-podcast
How embracing your emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (Art of Accomplishment)
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Executive coach Joe Hudson joins Lenny Rachitsky to discuss how embracing emotional inquiry, transforming the inner critical voice, and prioritizing genuine enjoyment can dramatically improve leadership, productivity, and personal fulfillment.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 18% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 2.8 Guest teaching 5.7 Guest disagreement 1.8 Lenny pushing back 1.6
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 38:04 Do not take my advice
Joe forcefully stops Lenny from characterizing his frameworks as advice, repeating multiple times that listeners must test things experimentally rather than blindly accepting them.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 32:14 What the hell? That doesn't sound rightLenny directly challenges Joe's premise that avoiding an emotion actively invites it into one's life, calling the mechanism counterproductive and questioning how it functions.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 20:03 Welcoming emotions versus non-judgmental awarenessJoe reframes Lenny's meditation-based concept of non-judgmental awareness, explaining that true emotional fluidity requires somatic expression and actively welcoming emotions like children in a home.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 19:44 Lenny connects emotional processing to Vipassana retreat practiceLenny introduces insights from his ten-day silent meditation retreat to synthesize Joe's concepts with established non-judgmental awareness frameworks.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core Obstacles: The Critical Inner Voice and Emotional Avoidance | 2 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Lenny sets the stage by asking what commonly holds ambitious tech leaders back. Joe establishes his core thesis around the critical inner voice and emotional avoidance. | |
| Sponsor Break: WorkOS | 2 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Lenny asks if simply telling the critical voice to shut up works before high-stakes situations. Joe explains why suppression fails neurologically and introduces the experimental approach. | |
| Embracing Emotions and the Practice of Emotional Inquiry | 4 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Lenny draws on his experience from a 10-day silent meditation retreat to suggest non-judgmental awareness. Joe clarifies the difference between passive awareness and actively welcoming emotional sensations somatically. | |
| Questioning Assumptions and Releasing Shame Around Identity | 3 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Lenny asks how people misdiagnose their core issues during coaching. Joe explains that people live in outdated self-stories and shares how releasing shame around labels like being an asshole eliminated defensive behaviors. | |
| Why Emotional Avoidance Attracts Conflict and the Power of Stance | 3 | 7 | 2 | 4 | Lenny pushes back with incredulity when Joe claims people invite the exact emotions they attempt to avoid. Joe reverse-engineers the conflict cycle of conflict-avoidant CEOs and relationship fights to demonstrate his point. | |
| Sponsor Break: Coda | 3 | 7 | 4 | 2 | Joe forcefully rejects Lenny's use of the word advice and insists listeners treat everything as an experiment. Joe then redefines enjoyment as a direct measurement of efficiency rather than an indulgence. | |
| Authenticity Versus Self-Improvement: Aligning with Natural Evolution | 3 | 6 | 2 | 3 | Lenny asks how to reconcile radical self-acceptance with the desire for self-improvement. Joe distinguishes between natural intrinsic wanting and shame-driven improvement cycles. | |
| Decision-Making Mastery and Establishing Core Guiding Principles | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Joe details how establishing five core personal principles like embracing intensity streamlines and automates decision-making. | |
| Optimizing Team Dynamics and Five-Star Meetings | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Joe outlines his five-star meeting framework and explains how organizational culture serves as a measurable leading indicator of business performance. | |
| The 7-Minute Daily Felt Gratitude Practice | 2 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Lenny asks for a single high-impact daily practice. Joe outlines the rules of the 7-minute partner felt gratitude exercise and shares his own financial turnaround. |
Statements from this episode (23)
Hudson: The internal critical voice hurts real success and blocks enjoyment
“So oftentimes the critical voice in the head says you need me to be productive, but it's usually a huge detriment to being able to really be successful. And even if you are successful with a really critical voice in your head, you never get to enjoy it.”
Hudson: Leaders fail by suppressing emotions instead of harnessing them
“Another really big one that are in a large category, I would say is their relationship with emotions is all facada. They are, Either trying to pretend they don't have them or compartmentalizing them or trying to manage them rather than harnessing them and fall…”
Hudson: The repetitive critical voice in your head is always wrong
“Every single time the voice in your head is, is wrong. So it's not the critical voice in your head. So to be specific, I'm talking about the voice in your head that is critical and repeats. So, you know, there's the voice that says the same thing over and over…”
Hudson: Fully understanding any problem immediately reveals its solution
“If you understood the problem there would be no question about the solution. You can't, if you fully understand a problem, you know, the solution.”
Joe Hudson: Neurologically, purely logical decisions do not exist
“There's no such thing as a logical decision. You know, that idea is like, I'm just going to be logical and just make a logical decision. It doesn't neurologically, it's just untrue.”
Joe Hudson: Overwhelm stems from unexpressed emotions, not workload
“When people feel overwhelmed, it's usually not the amount of crap that they have going on in their life. It's the fact that they have emotions that they are not Sitting, feeling, or expressing.”
Joe Hudson: True joy requires welcoming all other negative emotions
“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 Like a very joyful life is a life where all the other emotions are deeply welcomed, not accepted, not non-judgmentally aware of.”
Hudson: Trying to avoid an emotion inevitably invites it
“Every way that we go to avoid a feeling becomes the way that that feeling gets invited towards us.”
Hudson: Emotional stance matters more than exact words in difficult conversations
“It's really where you come from. It's the emotionally where you come from. That's the important part. Not, not as much what you say.”
Hudson: Increasing enjoyment of your work directly increases energetic efficiency
“What's efficient is if at the end of whatever you did, you feel like you have more energy, like you're stoked, like, oh, I can't wait to do this again tomorrow. That that's efficiency is that you've actually used the least amount of energy to get something don…”
Hudson: Billionaires spending millions to engineer enjoyable lifestyles still fail
“There's people, you know, a lot of the people in my circles, because of who I coach and everything, they're billionaires and they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try to arrange a life that they enjoy. And it doesn't fucking work. So they actually…”
Hudson: Learning to enjoy current tasks precedes doing what you enjoy
“If you learn to enjoy the things that you're doing, you're going to naturally start doing the things you enjoy. If you only do the things you enjoy, you will not learn how to enjoy what you're doing very well.”
Hudson: Framing actions as 'shoulds' leads to psychological stagnation
“The reason I do the should thing is that as soon as you say you should, and then you don't, then you can fail. And if you fail, then you're less likely to try it again. That's why the should just, it ends up usually in stagnation”
Hudson: Drill down six levels to verify candidate problem-solving claims
“If you really want to interview somebody,
And they claim that they've done something. You ask them like kind of six levels down.
So you improve sales. How did you do that exactly while we improve the pipeline? Okay. How'd you do that exactly? Well, we made t…”
Hudson: Conflict-avoidant leaders cannot build top-tier teams
“If you're conflict avoidant, you're not gonna be able to make an a team because there's nothing that is alive. Doesn't require tension. A cell requires tension. Breathing requires tension. Playing pickleball requires tension. A good team requires tension.”
Hudson: Start internal meetings by asking team members what they fear saying
“Some of our meetings are started with what are you scared to say? Because we want to embrace that intensity because we know that if we lean into the thing that we're trying to avoid, our life is going to get better. Our business is It's gonna get better.”
Hudson: Personal operating principles should be capped at five
“If you're gonna do your set of principles and you wanna do them on your own, the main thing I would say is keep it to five. I wouldn't even do six. I don't do six, but I keep it to five and I would test each one of them for like five days.”
Joe Hudson: Meetings and decisions are the atomic structure of a company
“The atomic structure of a company is the meetings and the decisions.”
Hudson: Striving for 5-star meetings surfaces every organizational problem
“What's required to make every one of your meetings five stars? And if you do that, that that's one of the things we'll do inside of a company is like work with them to figure that out. If you do that, every single problem with your company will come to the sur…”
Joe Hudson: Team culture is a measurable leading indicator of business performance
“If that's true, then it's measurable and it can be a leading indicator. And it absolutely is. Like if you really pay attention to the culture on a team by team basis, it's an amazing, very effective way to drive results, but also a very effective way to know w…”
Hudson: Daily seven-minute felt gratitude practice will rapidly transform your life
“And if you have a full body sensation of gratitude and you experience that for seven minutes a day, it'll change your life dramatically, really quickly, really, really quickly.”
Hudson: Daily gratitude helped clear $40,000 in debt within three months
“I was in like a big 40,000 dollars in credit card debt or some crazy shit. And we just did it. And literally was a three months later, my credit card was debt was gone. Six months later, I had 60,000 dollars in the bank.”
Hudson: Directing gratitude toward areas of perceived lack is transformative
“Doesn't matter if the thing that you feel like you lack is time or the thing that you feel like you lack is love or the thing that you feel like you lack is money. If you can really do a gratitude practice on the thing that you lack, that's there's a superpowe…”