Summary
Joe and Brett discuss how business can serve as a spiritual practice — a path of self-discovery rather than just a means to an end. Joe argues that aligning business with who you truly are is “like sweeping thousand dollar bills off the floor.” The formula involves three prongs: embracing intensity (going into difficulty rather than avoiding it), deepening connection (with self, others, customers, employees), and discerning internal alignment (noticing what feels off and correcting it).
They explore why business is uniquely suited as a developmental tool: you can’t fool yourself easily because the rubber hits the road every day, there’s no false separation possible (you can’t retreat to a cave), and there’s less room for spiritual navel-gazing because results are visible. Joe gives examples of how second-guessing, conflict avoidance, and defensiveness in business all trace to the same emotional patterns that show up in personal development work.
Joe also discusses the art of business — that business is a creative expression like a symphony, constantly changing and affecting everyone who interacts with it. The episode touches on how gratitude in business meetings shifts problem-solving from “what’s wrong” to “what’s right,” and how moving from power to empowerment transforms leadership.
Key Concepts
- Business alignment is spiritual alignment
- Embracing intensity in business reveals what you’re avoiding
- Business prevents spiritual bypassing
- Treating business as a means to an end eventually destroys it
- Business obliterates ego the same way parenting does
- Gratitude reveals solutions that criticism hides
Key Quotes
“If you really get the concept that business can be a self-discovery journey and that the more ways you find for your business to be in alignment with who you are, the more successful you can be — and when you see it, it is like sweeping thousand dollar bills off the floor.”
“You can fool yourself into a somatic experience. You can fool yourself into a state of meditation… Business, the rubber hits the road every day.”
“If your business is a spiritual practice, it is the ends. It is the means and the ends. And so that’s what allows you to fully be engaged in a way that doesn’t burn you out.”
“Being defensive in business is horrible for business because you’re not listening to great ideas, you’re not being open to other people’s wisdom, you’re making it so other people don’t share their wisdom with you.”
“Every single thing that I see stops a client in their business or slows the client down in their business also slows them down in their relationships and in their self-development.”
Transcript
when I talk about this podcast to people I often have a hard time telling people if it’s a business podcast or if it’s a spirituality podcast or if it’s a relationships podcast because we sort of cover all the bases but really one of the things that I love about what we’re doing here is that it really just points to how they all come from the same place yeah I’d love to have an episode that I could just refer somebody to to be like this is what I mean check this out oh wow I don’t uh okay how about how about if we do one that is all about business as a spiritual practice I’m not sure if we can do something that like ties them all together at least my brain can’t comprehend that at the moment but I could definitely say like oh how business and personal development can go hand in hand and and what makes them go hand in hand in hand so well yeah great yeah let’s stick with that seeming dual axis then of like business and spirituality because I think often that feels like a dichotomy for people and in this episode let’s kind of weave those together yeah that sounds awesome yeah yeah absolutely I think the way that I would want to start that is to just say for those who are in business you know some and who are as old as I am somewhere in the 70s there was this concept that there was either a business you were either a business person or you were an environmentalist and you couldn’t beat both and then the beginning kind of like in the 90s started showing up like hey we can do both of these two things and then you know even companies like Walmart like by the early 2000s they were doing some amazing things for the environment they were doing things like um what was it was like telling Barbie that they needed to shrink their boxes so less containers would need to be shipped across the ocean they were saying we’re only going to sell um renewable uh sustainable fish they stopped selling certain kinds of light bulbs because they took too much energy they did all this stuff and and I remember talking to the CEO who was in charge of that I believe his name was Lee Scott and he said it was like sweeping thousand dollar bills off the floor he said it was just so easy to make money being a you know environmentally conscious and so I I want to start off by saying it’s the same thing here that I think that if you really get this concept if you really get the concept that that business can be a self-discovery journey and that the more in a more ways you find for your business to be in alignment with who you are the more successful you can be and it and when you see it it is like sweeping thousand dollar bills off the floor it can be incredibly profitable and deeply aligned so I want to start off that way just to kind of give that metaphor out there so that when you listen to it you’re listening to it that way like oh this is something that can really help you be successful in business yeah beautiful I imagine I imagine listeners would love to be sweeping thousand dollar bills off the floor do they really exist I’ve never really seen that I don’t know I think they’re in circulation technically okay maybe he’s at home and do that in a way that feels aligned yeah yeah 100 bills it actually kind of goes the other way it is finding what’s not in alignment putting it into an alignment which allows for the for the for the money to come is typically how it works or in my experience is how it’s worked yeah okay so I heard you just use the words alignment and we originally kind of opened this speaking of spiritual practice so I want to kind of dial in a little bit on what you mean by spiritual practice yeah so yeah that’s a great question geez it well first of all it’s an incredibly loaded term typically anything that you say in this realm like you can say like spiritual practice loaded term you can say like closer to God and it’d be like a loaded term you could say self-awareness it’s a loaded term so just depending on what your background is somehow or another these are all loaded terms so yeah let me give it three different ways to to describe it the first one is um there’s just this human development theory that says as we mature assuming we don’t get stunted with trauma as we mature our brain moves in certain ways we move from um seeing ourselves as very like individual into seeing ourselves as part of say an ecosystem or part of everything that we see time in a very short period of time like a little kid who’s like can’t get excited about birthday party that’s a month away to an adult who is lucky if they can see four or five years out so that they don’t sign that really crappy mortgage and then maybe you start seeing time as far as Generations or maybe you start to see the uh that Infinity is in the depth of a moment it’s not in a length of time and so that development developmental path and and and spiritual traditions and religious Traditions that would be Spiritual Development it would be how do we um and the other way to say it is how do we evolve through our nature how do we become ourselves how do we be authentic how do we the the path of development that is just our natural path of development that requires some attention but doesn’t really require a tremendous amount of doing or rowing or that kind of stuff like effort so that’s that’s what I’d mean by Spiritual Development it sounds like a fine-tuning of your experience cleaning up the like both the efficiency and the enjoyment and the alignment and and the flow in your experience and in your relation to yourself into the world and that that might be the thing that we’re talking about showing up in business synergistically yeah I don’t those are some of those are like more like symptoms the way I would just say it is that as we learn more about ourselves there is a maturation that occurs as we understand who we are more there is an evolution that occurs and that evolution is something that is been tracked and described by Tibetan Buddhism or Christianity in certain sects of Christianity or modern psychology does it in human development and it’s very it’s a it’s pretty clearly it’s pretty clearly laid out in these different ways none of them do it exact justice but yeah yeah and the result is eventually more joy the result eventually is more alignment The Vault the result eventually is more peace Etc yeah okay so I kind of hear you describing the spiritual as Evolution and the practice as the awareness and the the practice the spiritual practice is like bringing the awareness to your evolution yeah yeah that’s that’s beautifully said better than I clearly clearly better than I just said it yeah that’s it yeah okay then uh let’s move on to what do you mean by by business because this can also be yeah this can be a trigger word it also can be very broadly applied it could also be yeah the business I mean it in that very broadly applied there I mean the the getting crap done in life you know it doesn’t mean running a company it might be being in a job um you know the Tibetans called it skillful means or the translation is skillful means and so they would talk about the spiritual practice of like chopping wood so it I don’t care if it’s marketing something or if it’s starting a business or if it’s being an artist it’s like all that is what I mean by business it’s what I mean is just like when you’re getting crap done in the world when you’re creating stuff or making stuff or or producing stuff yeah okay so the merging of these two is sort of bringing awareness to our evolution in an applied way applied to the crap we’re getting done yes applied to how we are showing up and where that actually impacts the world around yes and the experience we have while doing it yeah that’s right that’s right beautiful yeah okay so what’s the if we were to kind of lay out a basic formula for a business as a spiritual practice what would that look like yeah so the basic formula is the same as everything that we talk about here actually like anything that we’ve said on this podcast can be applied here but um but specifically it’s about embracing intensity it’s about going into the difficulty that presents itself rather than running away from the difficulty that presents itself it is about um get learning to be more and more in connection with ourselves and others and it’s about Discerning internal alignment and moving towards the alignment instead of away from the alignment for the short-term gain or for the or for the fear no so that’s generally what it is that’s the formula and that works particularly well in business so just like as an example you’re running a company to not ignore the thing that is the the thing that’s difficult going and spending time in the thing that’s difficult creating connection with your customer creating connection with yourself creating the connection with your managers the people who work for you is going to make the business more efficient and really noticing everything that feels out of alignment and putting it into alignment just will increase that efficiency of the business similarly same way internally is like oh the emotions that I run away from can I embrace those in that intensity that’s going to do a tremendous amount uh can I learn to be more connected with myself or others is going to teach me a tremendous amount about myself as is the embracing intensity as is the internal alignment oh that didn’t feel right I need to address it oh that didn’t feel right I need to speak it all those same things happen whether you’re working in a business or whether you’re working just with yourself they apply in meditation for instance you’re sitting in meditation you have a difficult experience can you embrace the experience can you connect with the experience can you connect more deeply with yourself in that with no effort as it turns out and then and can you can you notice the places that aren’t in alignment and can you allow them to to become in alignment same thing so we’ve got these kind of three prongs of this formula embracing intensity connection internal alignment what are what are some examples some other examples of what that could be applied to or where in your life you might look to see symptoms that could be breadcrumb traced back to where where this could be applied where this formula could be applied now so let’s say for instance you and or your company is having a hard time making decisions there’s a lot of second guessing going on a decision is made and then 10 people tell you you know wait let’s re-question that decision or you internally in your own head are constantly uh second guessing all the decisions that you’ve made or taking a tremendous amount of time making a decision because you’re constantly second guessing it before you make it that means that there is an emotional experience you’re avoiding so you can really use embracing intensity in that moment you can ask in a business context what are the really hard questions what are we trying to avoid what are we really trying to get to what’s got us scared how are we not being courageous um connecting and is really internally connecting with what you’re scared of connecting with your fear learning how to love and embrace that will totally change your decision making same thing with that company like how do you whatever the decision is on how do you connect with the people that it affects how do you connect with the customers it affects how do you get their input or recognize that connection and how to how to nurture it and similarly with internal alignment second guessing usually means that there’s not an internal alignment to find out what that internal alignment is or isn’t and doing the work there similarly if there’s a lot of second guessing inside of a company usually the alignment looks like I want I think this is what we should do but I don’t want to get in trouble it’s like typically and there’s often been a lot of second guessing and there’s a whole bunch of leadership guessing exactly so that’s an example the other examples would be like conflict avoidance that we just talked about or obliteration of ego all of those things like being defensive in business is horrible for business because you’re not listening to great ideas you’re not being open to other people’s wisdom you’re making it so other people don’t share their wisdom with you it’s you’re making it so customers don’t share with you you stop asking customers all of that is defensiveness that is a protection of ego if you allow your business to constantly shatter your ego by being non-defensive and and feeling all the things and letting yourself be wrong and letting yourself be right when you are even when people disagree all of that work is a disintegration of ego so that’s another example is just it’s all it’s every single thing that I see stops a client in their business or slows the client down in their business also slows them down in their in their relationships and in their self-development and so there’s this really great way to use business as a tool to see yourself more clearly yeah yeah and widening widening that uh definition of business to to something like a family you’ve I’ve heard you describe that you know the role of a kid the role of a child is to obliterate the ego of the parents and one of the one of the roles uh and so in the business of raising a family not to say money making business but the in the in the sense of like the that you’re doing yes then the obliteration of your ego is the thing that will unravel that second guessing it’ll unravel that conflict avoidance allow you to receive more information and see it more clearly with less bias yeah yeah and that’s the thing just to be clear about that part so let’s say the second guessing in the ego obliteration um a lot of people think ego means I’m super sure and so I’m the greatest and I know what decisions to make and Eco is really any way that you define yourself and so if you define yourself as unclear and scared and and that gets annihilated then the second guessing is gonna stop and you’re going to be more free there’s going to be less ego and and you’re going to be more capable of getting things done yeah um yeah so what are the benefits of of this practice of this form of path compared to say other other practices and what would you just describe as other practices that might be different than this yeah I mean there’s hundreds of practices um you know whatever somatic practices or meditation or therapy or any of that stuff they’re all practices towards the so I would say one of the some of the benefits of of using business as a Avenue for spiritual growth is that you don’t get to fool yourself very easily in it like you can fool yourself into a somatic experience you can fool yourself into a state of meditation and then you know a little kid comes up and bothers you and you’re like get out of my way kid and then uh business it’s like you you it’s the Rubber hits the road every day every day your your you know things are going to go wrong how are you gonna how are you gonna let your ego dissolve in the face of things going wrong every day is going to have some level of discomfort in it and so there’s something real about it you can’t fool yourself as easily um that’s one of them uh another one is that uh oftentimes there’s this thing that happens in spiritual practices where someone’s like if I could only just meditate all the time then I could you know be happy like especially people who are on the search they have that thing and one other thing business uh it just doesn’t allow that sense of false separation uh you don’t say more on that you don’t get to yeah so if you’re like I’m gonna completely separate and hang out in a cave then your business is going to fail so and and so there’s you don’t get to have that um that fantasy and be consistent with your practice whereas you can meditate two hours a day and think to yourself oh if I could only just give up this life give up my wife give up everything and hang out in the cave then I could be happy that like that sense of false separation is just doesn’t get to be there so that fantasy doesn’t get to live there it’s it’s very real every day yeah though it does seem like there are cases where a business especially one with a large moat and a lot of momentum and like a lot of market share can survive for a long time without that but eventually the rubber hits the road same thing for years of countries uh a couple notable ones in our world right now where some right rubber is hitting the road in a major way and they also might not be seeing it at all right right you can absolutely get away with being horrible at business for a decade if you have like a really well established product or whatever um however if you’re using business as a spiritual practice if you’re if that is your consciousness there like you are going to get signal constantly that what you think is working isn’t working and you’re going to get signal constantly that there is no separation between the two you’re gonna see how you treat yourself affects your company you’re going to see how you treat other effects your company you’re going to see how you can let go of control affects your company same if you’re an artist if you’re really using it as a spiritual practice you’re going to see how your relationship to yourself changes your art you’re gonna get to see and and you’re going to get to see what happens to your art when you’re in constriction with yourself and you’re going to get to see what happens with your art when you’re in flow with yourself and so it’s it’s just constantly there you don’t get to pretend that they’re separate um so what yeah what are the benefits yeah um there’s a little less Naval gazing there’s a I’ve noticed that there’s like these backwaters and traditional spiritual practice where you can like kind of agree with the words and the terminology of a practice and you can get lost in the scripture if you will and instead of actually the felt sense of what’s happening for you and that can allow a lot of Naval gazing it can be a lot of like a kind of a really beautiful form of narcissism of constantly thinking about yourself in the process but in business if you constantly think about yourself you’re gonna fail so so there’s something really beautiful about that the business keeps it really real and therefore there’s like less time to be solipsistic and and if you are you’re going to see the effect very quickly if that’s how if that’s how you’re looking at your business and and this is exactly why it’s like sleeping sweeping hundred dollar thousand dollar bills off the floor is because if you’re looking at your businesses as a spiritual practice you’re going to notice all this stuff really quickly you’re going to do something about it really quickly if you are not if you’re doing it for power if you’re doing it to win if you’re doing it to make a name for yourself all this stuff all the stuff that all the places you don’t Embrace intensity it’s a lot easier to fool yourself it’s a lot easier to say oh well the business is going good so everything’s good when you look at the folks that are constantly wrestling with their business and opening it up and you read what they’re talking about oftentimes they’re they’re seeing their business as a practice when you really look closely and so it really allows you to continue sharpening your sword so to speak rather than to Let It Go dull because you’ve made it a great a great example of this is they did this study with a whole bunch of tax records I think it was European study I think it was a Dutch person and and they basically looked at what tax events affected businesses and death of children really affected the market cap of businesses and divorces and mother-in-law’s deaths even yeah all these things affected businesses but one of the things that affected businesses dramatically like I think it was a 10 reduction in market cap is if the CEO built a house that was over five thousand six thousand square feet something like that and it’s the idea of like yeah I know right and it’s like oh I’ve made it or my Attunement is towards something else and because the business wasn’t the thing the business was a means to an end and so my focus can be pulled away from it whereas if business is a spiritual practice it is the it is the ends it is the means and the ends and so that’s what allows you to like fully be engaged in a way that doesn’t burn you out and engaged in a way that you don’t want to you know run away from it I remember I was recently at a um a group of people doing online courses and a lot of the people’s you know fantasy was oh I could work five hours a week and then the rest of my time I can do what I want and I was like how is this not doing what you want right like like there’s no means to an end here for me this is very much about it’s the practice and it keeps me engaged yeah right yeah I love the the pointer to when people have succeeded in business when it was a means to an end and gotten what they wanted than the yeah business suffers and Falls away and the practice here is to like is exploring what was that initial motivation what was the power I was seeking what was the money I was seeking what’s the safety or the love or the validation or the acceptance I was seeking and it would be really bad business not to look at what’s the most direct path to that yeah yeah that’s right the path the that we’re talking about yeah yeah there’s this beautiful thing that happens which is like if your business is a spiritual practice then you it’s a lot harder to do things like burnout it’s a lot harder to do things like not pay attention to yourself it’s a lot harder to do things like having cross motivation or to suffer you know an employee that doesn’t feel great and to all of those things create just better businesses hmm which then I imagine the objection that might come up is well I can’t do everything as a spiritual path can I like do I want to have a a business that makes bombs as a spiritual path like what is what is it right how’s that look or a business that just does not feel at all like it’s doing something for me personally as just the way that I need to operate to make money for my family or that’s the story yeah to me there’s two questions there the first one is what would I say to folks who are like I can’t do this and build a business and the first answer I’d be like would if you don’t want you don’t goodness gracious like like if you don’t want to have a spiritual practice don’t don’t do it because of some sense of should or have to or because it makes your business better like that that won’t work don’t do it second thing I would say is that you know I have I work with a lot of a lot of you know CEOs who have created billion dollar multi-billion dollar companies and they have like thousands of people working with them and they started those companies and they’re like I can’t do that I’m like how is it that you got to like I can build a multi-billion dollar company in eight years and then the idea that it could be a spiritual path that’s just like no that’s not possible like what the hell is like how does your mind pull that one off and they do usually what you do they check on they see all right yeah it was just this limiting perspective so um so so those are the two things I would say there as far as like what are the like what are the downsides of this I think the biggest one is it can be really um it’s like it’s a it’s like like level up mode right it’s uh uh there’s there’s a word that my daughters use for this but it’s like like hard mode and um and or extreme mode or whatever it is but there’s there’s a lot of distractions there’s a lot of reasons not to focus on your spiritual practice and business right you get the 10 phone calls in a day about a customer being upset and this being done and that other thing and this emergency it’s like it’s like oh how am I disconnected with myself right now is a is a advanced move um so that’s one of the things so I I often see that business is a as a as a spiritual practice or as a developmental tool is really well served by having some time for me it’s usually you know just time completely away from the business where I can focus on my own journey and my own internal state which is the second one um the second one is that um it is is that like there needs to be a certain amount of time to be able to focus on your internal State you know like if I just sit with myself for 20 minutes it’s a different thing than if I sit with myself for three days or five days or ten days and there’s discoveries that happen with a length of time and so oftentimes business seems to tell you that you can’t have the time to do the work um but there’s a necessity for time to do some of this work um and there’s so that’s also a really important thing being able it takes away the time and attention that some of the really most valuable practices are are needed for so that’s the downside yeah yeah and I think perhaps an underlying fear that makes all of those the case the way that it feels like it’s hard mode and it’s really intense and that there’s always distractions you could go into and why there might always reasons not to take the time is because ultimately on this path your life as you know it may and or will completely fall apart and you’ll find something else that is more in alignment and sometimes it can be a really circuitous path sometimes it can be more direct yeah but ultimately some brings you into falling flat on your face faster making more mistakes sooner feeling the uncomfortable feelings at a faster clip than you might have then you might have uh previously thought you wanted to yeah I think the thing about that is that can all happen and it can look like your radical success while it’s occurring meaning that like it’s not so much that your world will fall apart it’s your idea of the world will fall apart or your yeah who you think you are in the world that will fall apart so sometimes your construction of the world yeah exactly so sometimes everything looks exactly the same but everything is entirely different and sometimes actually you pivot off of one business to a whole different business and the whole way that you do business has changed and and you end up making less money but you’re 10 times as happy and then that happiness is contagious which and allows you to make 20 times as much money it’s just it is a circuitous path for sure but but what it is is it creates deeper alignment more joy more happiness more flow yeah it just doesn’t look the way your mind might want it to look yeah so with that I want to ask what are the tools from the podcast and from this work that folks can use to get on or deepen into this to deepen into business as a spiritual path every single one of them every tool every podcast has an application to how you would use it for business whether it’s obvious or not um Let me give a couple of examples just as a way to to think about it the one of them is like is gratitude is a big part and so I think we talk about this somewhere along the line but you know we used to start all of our business meetings with gratitude and because it allowed us to solve problems not just from a what’s wrong how do we fix a point of view but from what’s right and how do we grow it point of view which created a lot more solution sets than we had when we were not doing gratitude as an example also gratitude creates more connection more feeling of Team cohesion all of those things have a use because if you notice almost all of our work has to do some part with ourselves in part some part relationally and all businesses is is people’s ideas and people’s relationships that’s what business is at the end of the day there’s some capital um but that came from people’s ideas and people’s relationships maybe you could also say people’s decision making so anything that affects that is going to affect your business uh so that’s one example um another example is uh this recently it comes to mind is Empower over power um I was talking to a whole bunch of leaders and and I was sending getting them through this visualization to sit into their meetings that they’re normally sitting in and I was naming the reality in the meeting that they might not want to pay attention to things like people were more concerned with them that people wanted to please that the people were rebelling against them that um people wanted to make sure that they were happy that people were passive aggressive to them but not to other teammates like I was giving them the whole reality of what it is to be a leader that there that more conversations happen about you than any other person on the team you know like what does that feel like and I was asking them to visualize it and to feel it and really allow that in to their system so that they could move away from power and into empowerment and there is one person in the in the group had this radical realization she was like oh I was doing all this stuff to make people happy and now I actually see that they need me to tell them what makes me happy for it to work and her whole business changed it was crazy how quickly her business changed like like it literally went like you know she got rid of two people and then changed the way that she was leading and told an investor that they needed to like you know settle down a little bit and and started being more directive but still listening to everybody’s feedback and just changed everything really quickly and that’s just one example of like moving from empowerment to power and how it can affect your business so yeah every one of the tools has a has some relationship to to how you can run your business yeah well we’ll link to the episodes you just mentioned in the show notes on gratitude love over defense and Empower over power yeah and so so given of course that we call this work the art of accomplishment how how does the art piece of that relate to this luckily I used art as an expression at the beginning which is you know even if you’re doing art that’s doing something but I would like to think about it the other way which is for me business is very much an art form meaning that like just as like a painter paints they need pigment a businessman creates a business and they need Revenue like that’s generally the thing that they need to make there art form and and the only other art form that’s kind of like it is like a symphony and the fact that every conductor is going to do it differently over time your business is going to change and move and it’s going to have a life of its own unlike something like in the plastic Arts where it’s just solidified and that’s it which makes it a really cool art form and you can have a business that puts light in the world or you can have that creates darkness in the world you can create have a business that cuts trees down or plants trees so that business can be this really amazing expression of you it whether you like it or not it is an art form it is a creation that is being made and that creation that is being made is affecting people who interact with it and and that’s the same thing art is and so for me um the art form that I want to do is the art form of self discovery of of self-realization I want the I want to create a piece of art that allows people who interact with it to see themselves more clearly and to see how joyful their existence is if they allow it to be and so but your art form might be different and it might not again it might not be about self-discovery or spirituality or any of that stuff it might be you know about winning and that’s great like if that’s what your art form is I say I go for it and when you’re 40 years old and miserable as hell you know it might be that that was a strategy all along for self-discovery and eventually exactly as a parent right right or maybe it is fully in alignment and you’re happy as as I’ll get out so whatever it is it’s it’s great I I just follow that I trust that a lot more than you know some prescription that I would give yeah ultimately following following what comes to you is going to be a much faster path than domming yourself into being a different way because that’s supposed to be what you are yeah exactly yeah awesome awesome thank you Joe what a pleasure pleasure to be with you as always yeah thank you everybody all right oh hey and um these days we’re on Twitter uh and not just art of a comp but Fu Joe and I think we’re on LinkedIn now or we will be on LinkedIn soon so yeah check out the show notes for all those links uh we’re on Twitter at Art of a comp and Joe is at at Fu underscore Joe Hudson and I am at air Kistler air k-i-s-t-l-e-r and you can find us at Art of accomplishment.com to check out our courses and our community and send us questions and check out how you can deepen into this work and get more involved all right cool thanks everybody all right thank you foreign