Summary
Ant Taylor, founder and CEO of Light (a live events technology company), shares his transformation from what his team calls “Ant 1.0” to “Ant 2.0” through his work with Joe Hudson and the Art of Accomplishment. Before the work, Ant describes feeling like he was “sprinting across a tightrope” — high-performing but at tremendous cost, prone to anxiety, terrible at stress management, dissociated from his body, and avoiding all emotions. His team could see it even though he believed he was hiding it successfully.
The pivotal moment came during a team facilitation when Joe told him directly, in front of his entire executive team: “Your anxiety is going to kill your company, and everybody in this room knows it.” Rather than feeling defensive as he expected, Ant experienced a profound release — his system recognized the truth and responded with relief. This cracked him open, creating a permission structure for his whole team to go deeper into vulnerability. The transformation cascaded: his vulnerability allowed his team’s vulnerability, which deepened their collective work.
Ant describes the practical shifts: moving from declarations to questions, reframing anxiety as a signal of unspoken needs or unset boundaries, developing what he calls a “No Doctrine” where his team leads with disagreement rather than burying it under platitudes, and learning that behind stress there’s always an emotional feeling that, when felt fully, transmutes into creative energy and joy. He emphasizes this wasn’t a single breakthrough moment but an ongoing series of experiments — “emotional base jumping” — that continues to deepen.
Key Concepts
- Truth lands as relief in the body, not as attack
- A leader’s vulnerability cascades through the entire team
- Anxiety signals an unarticulated need or unset boundary
- Leading with “no” gets to truth faster than platitudes
- Stress transmutes into creative energy when fully felt
- Everyone can see what you think you’re hiding
- Transformation comes through experiments, not epiphany
- Watching a leader fail openly teaches more than their success
Key Quotes
“Your anxiety is gonna kill your company and everybody in this room knows it.”
“Part of the lies our mind tells us is like nobody can see that I’m out here avoiding every emotion I have… and of course everybody can see it, everybody can feel it, it’s like the most obvious thing in the world.”
“I’m gonna go jump into that pit over there guys. Pretty sure it’s filled with snakes. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna get my ass handed to me. It’s going to be at least funny, possibly dangerous. But if I live, come with me.”
“I was so starved for this work… that was a release. I think I might have started laughing because it was just so much.”
“When we think about ‘no’ as an enabler — not something to be overcome — but something to actually point us collectively at something closer to the truth… an organization might be the sum total of its no’s and its speed to no’s.”
“At a cellular level it felt like stress had melted into fear, terror had melted into just release, and then the joy came in… and I could almost feel my body in that energy release moment.”
Transcript
this moment when you call the anxiety for me I didn’t know at the time it just triggered a different kind of I guess leadership style that was a little bit more like I’m gonna go jump into that pit over there guys pretty sure it’s filled with steaks I’m pretty sure I’m gonna get my ass handed to me it’s going to be at least funny possibly dangerous but if I live come with me welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease everybody welcome back to the art of accomplishment today I’m speaking with Aunt Taylor ant is the founder and CEO of Light how are you doing today ants I’m well I’m well it’s great to be here that’s surreal to be here having listened to your voice for a year yeah it’s real being here after seeing you in the art of accomplishment and on the zoom calls but never quite having any face to face and this is really the first time that we’ve I could say met exactly and um I’m always it’s all it’s always remarkable when Joe rattles off your resume um at the various badass shit that you’ve done I always want you guys to like pull up for a second and talk about like you’re a little bit of a thrill seeker right yeah I mean yeah a little bit you could call it thrill seeker but I it’s really hard to say what I’ve been seeking but that would be a podcast about me and maybe we could do that sometime but I really want to hear about you and tell me a little bit about about your story just just introduce yourself to our audience well I’m uh I’m the founder of light I’m I aspire to be the CEO of light it’s a big part of why uh I started doing the work with Joe um light is growing really quickly it’s a Live Events business it helps people get to more shows and helps more shows happen with a lot less risk and maybe you guys have heard there’s a little bit of a pandemic on to navigate the Waters of um of all of that treachery and keep the business growing which you’ve been able to do before that I had um two previous startup experiences one was a giant success one was a personal failure but a good success for the for the company but all in Tech all in advertising technology in New York one of the companies sold to Yahoo but the other company sold to Oracle and uh and before that I was in school in on the East Coast I grew up in um California in Berkeley um but very much consider myself uh an adopted son of New York City because that’s where I feel like I really came of age um and now I’m back living in California uh working on all things light all the time beautiful I heard you also played basketball at Princeton you’ve summited Mount Shasta and this is something we have in common you once scuba dived deeper than legally allowed in the blue hole in Belize and as we mentioned in the pre-call it turns out that both of us did it for the same reason which was one dive partner getting narked and sinking far deeper than intended and needing to be rescued when you get down to the Deep depths below the Sharks into the darkness all the beautiful things going on on the side walls they’ve warned you about getting marked but uh it doesn’t feel like you’ve lost your mind I think I was at like I’m forgetting it now so if I’m exaggerating this please forgive me Dive Master of Belize Blue Hole uh but I want to say I was that like it’s like accept a little bit like 140 right and it will even then only like for five minutes I think I like found my way down to 180 190 feet yeah okay that was way deeper than we went that last 50 is uh I can’t tell you for sure because I was basically blackout drunk but I want to say the emotional feeling of that moment was uh it’s pretty amazing yeah well I’m glad you made it back and also had the experience yeah and so I wanted to get into today what is something that has shifted for you over the course of all of this journey through you know diving and basketball and all of this all these businesses what’s something that has shifted for you personally that like personally in your in your Consciousness that has just shifted everything for your business I think that the things that are different um sort of daily in my life is a mixture of um I’m in my body a lot more I realize that my brain is um a fantastic survival tool but when it comes to thriving um maybe a little it can move a little slower than I want it to move so I’m I’m in my somatic system a lot more I trust my intuition a lot more I think I did the like the 20 to get the 80 benefit did the 2080 rule on uh radical self-acceptance and really understanding that the voice in my head was coming from a place of love if misguided for all sorts of reasons trauma and otherwise ultimately coming from a place of love and so getting to a place and really accepting who I am accepting uh what that voice is telling me and you know loving on it as it is trying to love on me has changed sort of my my daily practices and how I move through the world and I think the the last piece is just um embracing really embracing my emotions more that’s a constant battle against a lot of muscle memory the opposite direction um I was like a Class A avoider avoider impresario like I could just all sorts of tactics to get away from feeling for much of my much of my life but now with a lot more reps um really um see the power of embracing all flavors of emotion all the time not just for the emotion of it but for the truth this is behind it yeah if I can try to kind of hone that down and sharpen it a little bit it sounds like you’re describing having started from a place of kind of living in your head and in a mental space feeling so much separate from your body feeling like emotions are just kind of something that happens that are meant to be managed or sort of you know put out of the way so that you can continue to have your to meet your goals and coming into a place of embodiment feeling your body feeling your emotions including feeling noticing the voice in your head and just coming into acceptance of all of your parts and less dissociation so so tell me a little bit about how your life and your business looked prior to having this recognition yeah the one other thing I want to sound up before we get to that question is there was no Epiphany moment Carpe Diem let’s stand on the desk and scream and shout some breakthrough moment um in the work uh it was much more of a series of experiments and really kind of an ebb and flow of intensity that was just pushing ever wider pushing me ever wider into sort of Undiscovered Country and that that and that’s sort of sustained maybe we’ll talk at the end this summer I’ve got I’ve labeled this summer The Summer of resistance because for whatever reason this summer I just started to just reject like just push back on all and a lot of old stories but different but new stories um that were keeping me from the word but anyway just to say it’s not it wasn’t a single point in time breakthrough my uh beloveds at light um have coined an expression for pre-work uh that is simply ant 1.0 and I love this because I discovered this moniker kind of by accident when somebody kind of just slipped out and slipped out in like a meeting I was like oh I’m sorry what’s uh what is ant 1.0 you know again part of the part of the lies our mind tells us is like nobody can see that I’m out here avoiding every emotion I have and nobody can see that I’m managing myself and in my head and nobody can see that this anxiety is eating me from the inside out and of course everybody can see it everybody can feel it it’s like the most obvious thing in the world the way I came to the work actually kind of explains a lot about who I was at the time and we have a 24 7 365 business in some respects there couldn’t be a worse business for me to be in right our events happen all the time at night and we’re building technology by day um to make those things work and it happens all the time like when you go home on Christmas vacation you’re gonna go see you know shows with family and and so there’s no real time to kind of pull up but luckily enough someone had come to work with us for only a brief time but uh but she come on board Amy Vernetti is her name and one day I’m like banging away at my keyboard and she’s she’s like hey and she’s like a mile a minute kind of person she’s like hey do you want to like 10x your your life do you want to like be a game change CEO blah blah blah blah and I don’t even think I looked up from my laptop I’m just like banging away I’m like yeah of course that sounds amazing just sign me up no thoughts there’s a perfect complexity in that that moment like didn’t have enough time to pull up and ask like what what is this who is this what do you mean 10x wow and that sounds a lot like just standard pushy marketing I don’t know like like what was she bringing you like hey would you like to 10x your life I think um yeah there was a trust her but like that that wasn’t the point the point was the dissociation for me was even in the realm of like taking the right steps to to really um hit another level of performance personally and professionally um there was a relative Detachment to uh anything it was just like I’ve described it as a feeling like I was constantly sprinting across a tightrope destined to fall like you can’t Sprint across a tightrope something the wind could be off like you lose focus but there was just constantly this this notion of like I’m gonna Sprint across this tightrope as long as I don’t look back and as long as I don’t acknowledge there’s no net below me I have the best chance at getting within distance to leap out and grab the ledge on the other side that was my Mo and obviously if that’s super reductive and obviously missed a lot of of things so you know my 1.0 self was prone to a lot of anxiety really terrible at Stress Management um High performing High achieving No Doubt but at Great cost and the somatic feeling well at the time there was no somatic feeling let’s just put that could make that very clear except for the feeling of stress and yeah but like nothing that I like used as a dashboard right nothing right hardest I brought Joe in soon thereafter actually before I started the work I needed to do some team cohesion work with my executive team and uh there was nobody better at that moment than than Joe and I remember there was we were doing a view exercise and uh but one elected like really Elementary stuff just like getting in the flow of really understanding wonder I think and I’m sitting in the Middle with Alex my head of engineering and light second employee and he’s kind of throwing me softballs oh he’s trying to trigger me that’s what it was but he saw like just throw me softballs and I’m in the middle of the room and all my executives are paired off around me just like randomly it just sort of ended up that way and Joe did his annoying thing where he like Saddles up next to you and he’s like do you mind if I give it a go bracing for it by the time of course I’m Brash I’m like yeah dude whatever like shoot look shoot your shot good luck and he kind of leans in he’s like your anxiety is gonna kill your company and everybody in this room knows it yeah yeah yeah yeah feel that you can feel the the whole room was just like a man was at the shot the one thing I’d give myself credit for in all of this is I was so starved for this kind of this work like I was so ready to go that for me that was a release I think I might have started like laughing because it was just so much right like it was just like so let’s just Swan Dive into this and stop messing around yeah we laugh when it hurts too much to cry right yeah maybe it was over that actually God he was so full voiced about it so he didn’t whisper that right despite those in the middle but anyway that was a lot of the the pre pretty the work and look like some of the symptoms for me the like the life symptoms and I think I said to you the prequel like for this call to uh I’m still mining a lot of questions from for like my personal relationships the professional relationships is easier because that’s where I’ve done a lot of the work I think this the symptoms were pretty uh evident like I have this feeling of like something between a glass ceiling and being bound to some floor of achievements that I hadn’t really broken through I remember when I started light I had such imposter syndrome coming out of my last uh experience and really really all my experiences professionally because we had a lot of success some of it felt earned a lot of it felt like not earned in a weird way like it come too easy and there were a lot of things left kind of unknown that I wanted to learn and so when I started light I really wanted to drive every nail I wanted to learn every part of the process of building a company and so that had occupied my mental time in a great way but I still had a feeling of like being sort of bound like there was some upper limit of what I could achieve in the and I couldn’t put a finger on it like I couldn’t I was like maybe I should have gone to business school like my friends had done or you know maybe I should have taken a sabbatical and tried to write that novel I’ve always fantasized about writing or like like I hadn’t done enough to break up my rhythms was sort of the like the mental diagnosis the other feeling is like the that experience of moving through a dream in a dream scenario where where you’re running either from something or towards something but you’re it’s like you’re running in slow motion and you can’t make yourself run faster I don’t know if you’ve never had a dream like that but it was it was that feeling more and more you know not a present feeling but like a slow burn in the back of my the anxiety My Endless well of anxiety was that that kind of weighed on me so that was a symptom it’s just feeling kind of bound um anxiety was a big symptom and then a lot of just exhaustion I pushed my organization hard it’s a hard space that we that we do our business in there hasn’t been a lot of Technology Innovation in it for a lot of sort of entrenched reasons and we had endured through a lot of those things and gotten the company to a pretty kind of good level but you looked around I think everybody was sort of bleary-eyed and exhausted and if I was really honest that exhaustion stemmed from a lot of the way I moved through the world and through the company yeah so kind of what you’re describing there is you know at 1.0 you could see it fractally distributed throughout your organization your your avoided stress and you knew it was there everyone else knew it was there you had this belief that maybe others didn’t see it and if they saw it something bad would happen and it was better just to keep it hidden and pretend it wasn’t there and as a result one of the symptoms of this is that you kept feeling like you’re just in this morass as you’re moving forward and the thing the wins that you have just feel like they come too easy and then everything else just feels hard is it something like that something like that the wins came with light felt sweeter they didn’t come easy but I was addressing a lot of like surface level imposter syndrome stuff because there were essentially three of us then five of us and yeah about 10 of us building it so I felt I felt the wonderful dopamine hit of our successes but they came at the cost of a lot of exhaustion and there was a sense that like in that hamster wheel that you’re in in an early stage startup like every rev of the wheel you felt took the equivalent amount of energy there was no sort of force multiplier escape velocity where things just really started to spit and yeah someone that had to do especially you’re an early stage startup but a lot of it felt like it had to deal with with some of the 1.0 Tendencies yeah yeah okay so so let’s get into to how this transition started to occur and how you started to to allow yourself to see and feel what was going on inside you and starting with this moment with Joe tell me a little bit about that what you might have expected to feel if somebody told you something so direct and you know truthy in front of your entire team and what you ended up actually feeling yeah we could call that truthy I would say that was just some cold hard raw form truth served up in my face and so uh I think the listen you described that incident to anybody I’ve told this story of people like not doing kind of any of the like inner work and they’re just like they’re just like I had like I throw them into trauma you know they’re just like what you know like let’s do the CEO like those are your execs you know like that narrative right remembering to that time it would have been I would have expected to feel defensive uh to feel um you know enraged um offended hurt and frankly to have called it you know just like all right thank you facilitator that we’ve hired go yourself and uh we’re gonna we’ll take it from here right that’s kind of like the textbook whatever version of that experience but the release was and this was really the start of I think connecting like mind to somatic response which it took me so many reps to really get or feel the reality was to the word you used when I’m in the presence of Truth my entire system just feels an intense like ease and almost to the level of uh like a body high or like a tantric extended orgasm of uh like and it’s funny that I remembered almost verbatim because I think every word in what he said had such a like resonance not just to me but to that room of people to that community of people that come together to fight their asses off to make life a thing and it was all from Love it was literally love and what had been holding you back from recognizing this truth I mean the moment he said it you already knew it was true it resonated in your system and what had blocked you from from allowing this truth in that you already had known prior to somebody saying it from an early age um my sort of traumatic Early Childhood experiences taught me that to feel emotion meant to and certainly to express it meant um Anything could happen and that I would be physically you know in danger and so I think that cycle of like avoiding those types of avoiding that kind of early detection system or that that dashboard that we we all carry there’s more of a muscle memory I think going all the way back and then like I said there was again always this notion of a tightrope and of running uh across it and trying to get away from a past that you know was less than ideal and ignore the risks and pitfalls that live beneath and instead just trying to get to something where that’s all that all goes away which is a very and you think about it’s very childish kind of conception of the world and it’s like life uh but I don’t think it’s an uncommon one the only other thing I would add to what I said earlier is that I do think that there is um a lineage uh a historical lineage that feels familiar to me you know a lot of like my father’s family uh came from Eastern Texas uh in the time of the Great Migration and we never really talked about it frankly as a family but uh at my father was African-American and and we were all coming out of the south at a time when racial terrorism was if not legal then um you know the law looked the other way on and so there’s that feeling when I talk about sort of sprinting across the the tightrope there was also a feeling um that I think I learned in childhood around just working your ass off to get to a better place than uh the folks before you that you stood on their shoulders to do that and that um in some cases subjugating your emotions um and looking normal showing up whatever normal is right looking normal showing up normal and achieving I think all those things were factors in how I would have expected to sort of show up and and why it was so surprising that I didn’t so let’s get a little bit more deep into this into this moment when when this truth hit you and it landed in your system in a different way than you expected it felt like some form of relief I’m hearing that there was a like a gratitude for recognizing this this truth and also it was very activating for you how did that moment continue in the room just continue that story I wish I could like do a reenactment of the moment because uh I was talking to Crystal my chief of staff who is also deep into this work and um and sort of a comrade in all of it um and I remember her saying I think it was for like her second week at the company and I remember her the her description of was just like like what just happened but it also became a permissioning because honestly it wasn’t even like I took it in the chin and I just kept marching through and I showed the team they could battle this out it was not that at all it was more like it cracked me open and what flowed out of that was a deeper state of vulnerability that I think then allowed the team to show up and go deeper in their own vulnerability and I think getting a couple levels down into the work in community right Executives that are working 12 15 16 17 hour days together it meant that everybody could go it was sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy like I’m going deeper so you’re going deeper you’re going deeper so I’m going deeper and the deeper we go um the more benefit we get from the work yeah I can imagine that everybody everybody in the room who saw this moment with you also felt a similar moment the similar truth in them yeah and in in their role in the company and also in their lives and in their avoided emotions and their stress totally it’s one of the the great things I was reminded of with the AOA Hot Seat taste I loved those because it reminded me of the early work with the where we were all still kind of strangers to each other but I took so much from the stories of strangers who are in the work and doing doing the you know talking about things at the at the level that I’m thinking about them in this moment I mean this this started like a a daisy chain of moments that are all I mean humor for me is sometimes humor for me is a great tactic for avoiding um but for me humor is really in truth it’s a way to experience I think this work at an even deeper level and to experience the love around this work at a deeper level and so they set off like a daisy chain of moments of incredible failure by lights Fearless founder and CEO like incredible moments that have continued now for 18 months I remember we were doing uh work there’s an assessment called the Harrison assessment which is really about charting kind of sort of qualitative attributes but in the form of a paradox graph so the y-axis might be my ability to achieve and the x-axis might be my ability to manage stress uh and uh if I’m in the top left quadrant I’m a really high achiever who’s really bad at managing stress which is where I still happen to be I’m just working trying to edge my way to the right top right quadrant right where I can do both well anyway we’re doing this work as Executives and uh it wasn’t getting to where I wanted to go fast enough and I couldn’t figure out why and so we ended up doing a group session and this is almost it’s almost exactly a year after this moment and I had Joe come on and facilitate and what we realized is that we weren’t getting anywhere because I didn’t understand how to do the process myself so we ended up taking the three hours that we had allotted for all executives to for me to actively figure out how to make this thing work for me for three hours now make what thing work make this tool this Harrison tool okay really work for what the outcome which was more team cohesion understanding each other’s Tendencies understanding how it’s reflected against our prioritization we use the V2 model processor like to manage prioritization you know with the ultimate outcome that we’re all sort of aligned and we’re all chasing the right things with the right prioritization now this would have been a mortifying discovery for me you know greater than 12 months ago to realize that I was the problem in the room but now it actually became a super intense moment where my team got to watch me fail over and over and over again for three hours until I had that and there’s no way I can simulate that for them there’s no way that they’re going to get it better than to watch me struggle and find the thing whatever the thing is right in front of their eyes and so this moment when he called the anxiety I didn’t know it at the time it just triggered a different kind of leadership style it was a little bit more like I’m gonna go jump into that pit over there guys I’m pretty sure it’s filled with snakes I’m pretty sure I’m gonna get my ass handed to me it’s gonna be at least funny possibly dangerous that sounds like a contrast to walking through a dark Jungle full of snakes with no flashlights and lanterns and saying don’t worry guys there’s no snakes here just come along that’s the perfect foil uh which exposition I think it’s uh yeah look one I can do really well what I can do authentically one is authentically me the other one like nobody believed there were no snakes in the jungle they never believed them um and they became burnt out by it some of them left like you know someone said go yourself I’m not walking into that jungle I know there are snakes so tell me more about how how things have shifted since then you’ve you’ve mentioned now this Harrison assessment moment which was about a year after that that moment with Joe in the workshop and how else does this show up in the in the day to day if I described a little bit more about ant 2.0 I show up with questions more often than I show up with declarations I mean Wonder a lot more the questions are um yeah they’re so so important like you wake up with a to-do list versus you wake up and say what does the universe need me to see today or like what am I curious about today those are two very different days same stuff could happen very different days in terms of how I show up how does anxiety move through your system now I developed some hacks since then typically like this may or may not come be intuitive but like now I know that if I’m feeling anxiety many experiments on from this first one right that it typically means I’m not I haven’t articulated something I need either like a boundary hasn’t been set um I’m I’m in that state of like managing people or I feel like oh I’ve got to go do something to bring something out of this person or protect them from something and therefore I need to not talk about the things that I or the organization need so that I can make sure they’re okay um which does that ever work out like does that ever does anyone have any case studies of that working out like twice like it seems to work out in teaching us new ways to to do it differently yeah that’s right it’s successful for them in that respect but yeah so so now when I feel the anxiety I feel the anxiety I name it um there’s another person on my executive team Lawrence Prayer LP he’s also deep in this work for him uh he has a hack where he tries to think about anxiety as excitement just that just that slight mental model shift for him is a real shift in like the residents of what he’s dealing with that had been a big shift for me as well in Air Sports and base jumping which was when we had you know fear and anxiety and at an exit point somebody once told me and this was a big shift for me like the other side of the coin of fear is excitement and it reminds me of a tool that has come up through this work and I don’t know where it came from uh but there’s I think there’s even some studies on this but if you’re feeling anxiety you could just jump up and down screaming I’m excited I’m excited I’m excited and it’ll actually transform the experience from anxiety to excitement and then you have just the energy to go draw the boundary or or take the responsibility that you’re ready to take but you’re feeling anxious about or yeah yeah I think that’s totally right by the way I love that your example is base jumping and mine’s the data portion of my staff meeting I mean it’s it’s all emotional base jumping it’s one of the things I like to describe this work as to a lot of my friends so yeah it’s emotional base jumping it’s scared me more than actually jumping off of cliffs on many occasions yeah for sure so the anxiety piece I like his I like LP’s hack a lot um my hack is is to name it um to my team and then to find the need another part of my my two point x is um I started doing a simple thing like I want to be surrounded by people who make me stronger that was a weird one that like came out on another podcast I was doing uh in uh remembrance of the murder of George Floyd I did for 12 months on the last month I was talking to uh Takedra Mehokana uh and I said something about how we want to take a look at the board and I said that um yeah my criteria is like who makes me stronger um that has been an incredible um breakthrough for me the work I do with with Crystal my chief of staff with Caitlin Marie with my executive team LP I mentioned Wendy and others is really like inviting them into this work because I think as we do it in the community we do it at a deeper level we do it we make each other stronger so that’s been another piece of just like prioritizing my needs in that way another thing that’s been kind of a fun one is I love the I love no I love no so much that I have a no Doctrine oh what’s a no Doctrine it’s still under development but I’ve um it’s been in place at light uh for I don’t know six months I was discovering that people people are prone to platitudes and that there’s a lot of like sentences that go something like this I totally agree with that comment you made about base jumping and this being emotional base jumping and like I really see how how it is super scary like you’re standing on this this on Earth and then you’re jumping off Earth and then there’s like a dot and then they say but I actually think it’s more like skydiving so I’ve seen this and like this is exhausting like I want what’s after the butt because what’s after the butt is a no and inside of that no is a deeper truth a more robust product solution a better response to this client a strategy and you’re just not saying that because you’re I don’t know you but I know that like there’s some emotional story that you’re in that makes you think I need to hear a bunch of platitudes before we get to the middle so when we think about no as like an enabler not something to be overcome but something to actually point us collectively in a group of people at something closer to the truth that we that we started with that might to me an organization this is a little strong but I think an organization might be the sum total of its no’s and its speed to no’s its individual no’s and its ability to say to get to those no’s quickly and explore them when we collide with each other like when Joe saddles up next to me and the result of it is the comment he made to me that’s Collision that Collision unlocks a lot of energy that can be can take the organization to another level so I’ve Loved no I introduced it the no Doctrine as we lead with our no’s we just flip it you can do all the platitudes that you need to do to make yourself feel good on your emotional journey fine but just lead with the no’s and then I permission that no’s aren’t anything we try to overcome they’re not anything we try to um sort of break down they don’t even necessarily mean that everything has to stop we just we’re gonna get to the no’s as fast as possible and then we’re going to explore those yeah welcoming the no welcoming the no how has that impacted your ability to say no and what’s in there for you on on how you communicate yeah where I struggle um still is um I get into this thing of managing people and it’s really connected to my childhood I feel like I can’t say no feeling like I can’t something I’m gonna say is going to be misperceived and I’m going to lose connection with the person that I’m talking to that’s a big one for me yep presuming I don’t want to lose connection with other people if I don’t mind losing connection with you all day so for me the practice of the no Doctrine is um exactly that like if I can start with those then I’ve already set myself up I’ve already knocked out 50 of my proclivity to try to manage your experience of what I’m saying uh that’s what I still I’m still working at I would like to get back to the to that experience of stress within you and so you described a lot of the 2.0 ants being different from the 1.0 symptoms that you were experiencing and I’m still curious about this somatic experience of when stress arises now how is it different from when stress arose before when you were more dissociative so of course I still feel stress but I guess the point is um I feel the stress like you know then work out four times in a day rip out reactive emails to people and then you know all the things that we do and are crazy stress times um so I feel it and typically behind the feeling of the stress is an emotional feeling that we’re familiar with maybe it’s sadness maybe it’s anger or resentment maybe it’s like old stuff that when you actually sit with it you’re like whoa whoa whoa whoa you’re not eight years old so like what’s coming up like you’re good you’re here you made it so let me sit with that and love on that and let that kind of move I always say move through me and I don’t mean it like that it’s more like I had to let someone go and um I’ve called Joe right after and I said I’m feeling super stressed super anxious and like my life’s gonna end what the heck and he said sit down for a second close your eyes what comes up and it was old stuff he said all right sit with him young me and we had a conversation then I basically turn the thing off go outside and play and at that moment it was like at a cellular level it felt bad stress had melted into fear Terror had melted into just release and then the joy came in and it was like an intense body high and I could almost feel my body like in that like energy release moment not like a sigh like something had collided and now the energy was was flowing back out of me ready to be creative ready for adult connection ready for the next thing that to me is what sits behind the stress now every time that it comes up and of course I don’t nail that in a thousand but the on base percentage is getting better and at the bottom of that well every time is a truth an energy release then becomes creative and constructive yeah so what I what I hear you describing there is that before the shift the stress felt like something that was just going to get in the way and then after having a couple of really big release valves open up you started to build this the trust this faith that behind the stress comes energy creativity Joy and stress comes in all different types of flavors and somatic feelings and some of them are still stuck from our childhood experience our other life experience and we can start to develop a meta awareness of okay stress comes up feeling it transmuted into something else what it sounds like you just described is that you started to feel more alive than ant 1.0 in these moments when the stress came up it’s exactly More Alive yeah yeah that’s beautiful and thank you so much Ant for joining us and telling your story I resonate a lot with everything you said and it was it was really a challenge for me to keep this podcast about you because I kept wanting to be like wow there was this there’s this way that that resonates in me and uh I’d love to do another one sometime I remember that time Joe came into my team meeting and told everybody I was a stress ball because he’s a maybe maybe we should just close this episode with one you Joe Hudson let’s do it let’s do it all right three two one you Joe Hudson thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate us on your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com