Summary
Joe Hudson coaches Ali Abdaal, a doctor-turned-YouTuber and bestselling author, through two interrelated challenges: figuring out what to do next after achieving his major career goals, and his difficulty feeling emotions. Ali has just hit the New York Times bestseller list but feels a “what now?” emptiness rather than celebration, and admits the phrase “how do you feel” doesn’t compute for him.
Joe notices that all of Ali’s stated wants—in-person teaching, adventures with friends, health, community—are fundamentally about connection. Rather than prescribing career changes, Joe proposes a single organizing principle: “be 10% more connected in everything you do.” When Ali applies this lens even to the most mundane business task (filming sponsorship segments), it immediately unlocks creative ideas—reaching out to brands he genuinely loves, composing songs about sponsors. The shift requires no external change, just an internal reorientation.
On emotions, Joe teaches Ali somatic awareness techniques—noticing that lowering the chin increases access to feeling while raising it cuts emotions off. Through a guided exercise alternating between memories of love and sorrow, Ali discovers that his body does produce emotional responses (constriction, wateriness in eyes) but he’s trained himself not to notice them. Joe traces this to Ali’s childhood where being seen idle meant criticism—there was “always more to be done”—which created a pattern of replacing feelings with productivity. The session culminates when Ali imagines celebrating his bestseller by sending gratitude to everyone who helped and taking a month to read fiction, and tears well up—gratitude he’d never allowed himself to feel because “there’s more to be done.”
Key Concepts
- Connection as a career compass
- Ten percent more connected as a practice
- Chin position controls emotional access
- Success without connection creates emptiness
- “Always more to be done” blocks feeling
- Gratitude arrives when you stop striving
- Body awareness is just attention
- Love and sorrow share the same body
Key Quotes
“What if the goal was: be 10% more connected in everything I do?”
“One of the two ways we stop emotions in our body is raise our chin… if you look at a famous narcissist, their chin is up.”
“If you just keep 10% of your awareness in your body as much as possible, everything else will take care of itself.”
“Somewhere in your college experience you made the choice to have success over connection, and now here you are—you’ve got your success and you’re like, oh wait, I also want the connection piece.”
“It’s called gratitude. The tears—that’s gratitude.”
“I don’t even know if we captured it in the recording, but the very first thing you said was… the kernel, almost always, is the kernel of what is being worked on.”
Transcript
sometimes um I’ll be with like my brother and they’ll say like hey are you okay and I’m like yeah and they’re like because you but because you’ve got tears in your eyes right now and it looks like you’re about to cry and I’m like whoa and I’m like shit you’re right that’s weird hi Ali it’s good to see you again man yeah likewise I’m looking forward to this where where are you you have quite an interesting background it seems like you’re in a warehouse of I’m sorry or I’m in a Wei work in London right now I I flew in from New York this morning um for yeah to spend some time in London with the family awesome how I know you’ve been traveling a lot this year how has that been for you it’s been super fun yeah uh it’s been a a few months of kind of non-stop travel it was meant to be a few months here and there of like oh you know let’s do Austin for a few a few months and then La for a few months but because my book came out like last week it’s just ended up being a whole whirlwind of like book touring and podcasting and stuff so now things are finally settling down a bit it’s nice to be back in London for a little bit of stability that’s great yeah I know that feeling when I was a venture capitalist I would I think there was a one week where I was like on three continents in a week and it was just is quite brutal quite brutal yeah um uh so do you want to just tell everybody a little bit about you and and give everybody some backstory and then we’ll jump into a coaching session sounds good yeah so backstory uh hi everyone my name is Ali I am a doctor turned entrepreneur I guess um I worked as a doctor in the UK’s National Health Service for two years and while I was doing that I started a YouTube channel on the side which grew to like a million subscribers in that time which was insane and then I decided to quit my job uh and become a sort of online course YouTuber author type person and over the last six seven years now I’ve been making videos about productivity and personal development uh which is why I very much Vibe with your stuff Joe and um my book Feelgood productivity came out like last week and we found out yesterday that we actually HD the New York Times bestseller list which had been a goal for a very long time um and that was super nice but now I’m feeling a bit of a sense of like what now it feels like I’ve been building up for the last three years to this big sneeze and now and now the sneeze is out and now I’m thinking hm where does my life kind of go so I feel like this session with you Joe might come at a good time because I was Lally about this yesterday being like what what the hell do I want to do with my life now so okay so just to is that how you want to spend your time or is there anything else also that’s present that you would want to address in the coaching session not we might not get to any of them but just out of curiosity sure I mean one thing I was I’m very keen to talk to you about I’ve listened to a bunch of your episodes around emotions and I think I really struggle to feel my own emotions and that when people ask me how do you feel I’m like that that sent that phrase does not even vaguely compute okay great so then um so that leaves us with emotions and what do you want to do next great yeah okay so let’s let’s start there um what strikes me about you is that you probably always know what to do next as far as like like I I can’t imagine that there hasn’t there’s been like a month of you really trying to figure out what you’re going to do next instead of like you’re actually doing something next so I’m wondering how how right am I about that assumption or what what what might I be missing yeah that’s pretty spot on um from like high school I knew I wanted to get to med school med school itself is a conveyor belt after that it’s like you become a doctor and it’s conveyor belt and like literally the week that I took a break from medicine I got an email from penguin saying do you want to write a book and then that took over my life and now we’re three and a half years later where I have no clear next thing to do and it now feels feels like hm the the possibilities have opened up a little bit okay great and then so one of the things that has changed is the fact that like there’s no conveyor belt system here it hasn’t just been an opportunity that’s dropped and that that’s what you do next but what I also notice is that you’re also in a place in your life where I’ll say it like you probably have most of what you thought you wanted when you were in your early 20s yeah so um absolutely I I think for for a long time I was facing the goal of Financial Freedom and like four-hour work week and all that stuff yeah and now I’m kind of there so I’m like hm comes next what comes next right so no conveyor Bel so the rules of the game are are are have changed and now and just to some degree it sounds like there is just no rules it’s what do you want yeah so what do you want like don’t if you if you don’t think about it as like this is what I have to do next and you just think about it in Gross wants what do you want H I want I guess to continue to live life on my own terms to not go back to a day job um I really like teaching like that’s always been a thing that’s sort of lit me up inside when I can like learn something cool and share it with with someone else um the the making of YouTube videos itself as that vehicle for teaching less fun now I’ve had another been doing it for seven years but I really like the idea of teaching in real life I attended a Tony Robin seminar two of them and I was like whoa that doing stuff like that seems like it would be fun um so I think there’s something around teaching like and and also living life on my own terms so what what if anything would stop you from living life on your own terms at this point I have these um weird fears around money I think okay so hold on stop right there you stopped you closed your eyes you went inward yeah what happened there like tell me describe your internal process was that a let me stop and think and a whole bunch of thoughts move through your system was that like a you feeling your sematic experience what what just happened there uh you asked what’s stopping you from living that and then I was like H that’s a good question I said what would what could stop you oh what could stop yeah um and I’ve not been asked that in that form before so I was like what could stop me and then a yeah a bunch of like options seemed to present themselves and I did this I I did some like quick calculations and sort of pointed at like fear of running out of money or like wanting desire to make more money as being like a thing that like tie that like sort of ties a bunch of them together right so and and was that a intellectual fully intellectual process how sematic was it how emotional zero sematic 100% intellectual yeah right yeah apparently zero sematic but your body took a very particular form so like typically if I see you on doing YouTube or or talking to you in real life you can access emotion incredibly quickly not emotion excuse me in thoughts very quickly you can speak very quickly and you and I I know by the way that you’re doing it that you might not even know what you’re about to say but you can say it and like it can all make sense and it can and you haven’t even said it before it’s like Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam without any of that this that happened without any of the stopping contemplation so what what’s the how what made that different if it wasn’t sematic what made it different it’s happening again now just yeah yeah I I I I think what made it different is that I wanted to give a real answer and not just uh whatever was coming out of my mouth in like presenter mode yeah um and treating this like as if you know I’ve got I’ve got Joe Hudson here on the phone like let’s let me make sure I’m like giving something that that feels real rather than I think often in podcasts I’m I’m in like performance mode or or or whatever so I I I wanted to make sure I wasn’t trying to I wasn’t bullshitting myself I wasn’t I wasn’t I wasn’t bullshitting you here yeah so just to say what I noticed you say you said I wanted to make sure it felt I it feels like something real literally using the word feel and to do that you actually put yourself in your body went into a very particular position that was unique from this other position I I just want to mark that we’ll get to it later but I just want to mark it and then uh go back so so the big thing is that I’m now going back to the to the conversation we were having before which was that that there’s a money fear that you have that um that maybe I won’t be able to live life on my own terms if for whatever reason this money thing goes away and so my question for you then my question for you then is if that fear existed in your system before you knew what money was what would that fear be called some sort of fear of not being safe yeah so I want you to take take a moment and in and we that was the first way to ask the question I’m gonna ask the same question in a in a slightly different way which I want you to have the experience of lack of safety around money oh all this money might go away or I have to make sure I get I keep enough money just close your eyes and just tell me don’t even tell me just feel what it happens in your body when you think about it and now without a a single thought whatsoever Trace that to the very first time you felt that s that particular set of Sensations and what’s the story if any that comes up when you think about not think about feel this set of Sensations in your early childhood so what’s what’s happening inside you right now is it that you came up with the idea and said that didn’t make sense or you’re like nope it’s not happening or what’s what’s going on yeah I’m trying to vividly imagine the feeling of like running out of money and like I’m not like feeling anything I’m just like I I I I’m I feel like I’m sort of like come on imagine the feeling imagine the feeling like feel something God damn it feel something and it’s like right no yeah okay so do that again find the sensation of you looking for a feeling in not being able to get it like you’re doing what what is that like in your body not not the sensation of fear but the sensation of trying to get there and not get there yeah it’s a bit of a constriction in like my sort of belly button type area great so and I just want to teach you one more little itty bitty trick do the same thing again and and go ahead and feel what’s in your and now I want you to lift your chin up like lift your chin little more yeah like that great and now I want you to lower your chin and tell me what happens in your ability to feel in your body I feel like the the feeling is stronger when I’m sort of like doing this yeah yes that is that would be most of the literature would say that and what I noticed is when you talked about I love that literature peu you’re like literature that the the the uh when you did the first time when you were feeling into like the loss of money in your system your chin was doing this your chin was Raising and when you were like let me find the real answer your chin went down so if you watch back the video you’ll just notice and one of the main things that happens is that the one of the two ways we stop emotions in our body is raise our chin which is why a definition say of narcissism that some people have for narcissism um is um and narcissism is a very misunderstood word but uh is is basically not being able to feel your emotions and you’ll notice that like when someone’s acting like a narcissist in a movie they’ll put their chin up it’s kind of part of the part of the deal if you look at like a famous narcissist when you actually see them their chin is up so just say that the other one is holding the jaw it’s like keeping the jaw tight that’s another one that people use to not feel emotions is to to to clamp the jaw just just a sematic little trick for you um okay so it’s this kind of what you said was and I’ll stop going meta for a second we’ll just actually deal with the the thing itself uh so what you you’re in this new transition you have a uh you’ve got what you wanted so you have that experience and there’s no automatic conveyor Bel next thing that’s happening and there is this money fear that’s that drives some of what you want which is to be able to maintain your life and then the other part that you notice that you want is teaching but online teaching is not as as exciting as as as the idea of at least in person and then on a non-b buus level what are what are other goals that are just apparent to you if any I want to uh get into the best shape of my life take my health more seriously yeah um I want to host six mini adventures with friends family and put of connect people together those are the kind of big other ones what i notic is everything that all of your goals are connection connection to yourself or connection to others yeah incl including teaching in person is a far more connecting experience than teaching online yeah so thought that that way yeah so so if we if we if we assume that we I’m not going to say that that’s right by any church but if we assume that for a second and you think about your career give me five ways that you that the experience of your career could feel far more connecting connected more inperson stuff with my team like I really enjoyed it when I was in London we were all in person and now we’re kind of remote and digital nomading but like I miss hanging out with the team in person think definitely more real life teaching I used to do a lot of that when I was in med school and then sort of got away from it with the whole online world and I I’d like to get back to that h I’d like the teaching to connect more with myself in terms of the things that are alive for me in a given moment rather than the things that I think will drive clicks and views for the algorithm in a given moment yeah I like the idea of building a sort of online community type thing we’re sort of toying with this idea that seems like it could be fun and quite connecting and I like the idea of doing what the like doing like life coaching East types sessions with people but like helping them boost their productivity or like overcome procrastination or things like that that feels like oh that would be a fun way of doing content in a sort of connecting e type way that also then is really helpful for people to see sort of the behind the scenes of how I would coach someone to be more productive for example great and and out of curiosity how how much of that um actually excites you like you’d be like oh that’d be cool if that all happened or is those were just the that was the brainstorm how much of them excite you like if I could click my fingers and all those things happened how many would you be like yeah cool uh basically all of them um okay the working with the team in person one less so because I’m like I I also want to travel and do the digital nomat thing so it’s like this bit of logistical stuff around there but it’d be really cool to have the community to do some inperson productivity seminars to like do this coaching e type stuff and to make videos that I feel like making rather than videos that I feel like I should make because the algorithm or whatever wants me to right and and just on that part about the team if you if I set my fingers and there was like a 10day period every quarter where you all sat down and were together connected working together how how would that feel oh that’s great we’re we’re doing that already so yeah it’s so fun I look forward to those yeah okay great great yeah so so it seems like what I notice is your natural your natural your natural progression is is to move into something that’s more connective so here’s my question for you how do you connect more right now without changing anything that you’re doing meaning you’re not going to get off the podcast and like go and like sit in yoga mudra and do breath work like how right now do you connect more like right now in this moment correct yeah h the thing that’s coming to mind is sort of um a sense of connecting with my internal self or something and like trying to speak from the heart rather than from the head while we’re having conversation yeah sounds good yeah so I just want to note that means again putting attention into your body not just the intellectual process yeah yeah yeah and I’m like as you as you asked that question I’m like hm I’m like paying attention to like my feet on the floor and like oh yeah I’ve got my hands on the table and stuff right that sort of that thing that eot toll talks about is just like sort of feel feel what’s happening in your body and I’m like oh yeah I I don’t do that by default um right so that was a nice reminder so like yeah I’m sitting here right now and I want to note a it took no energy if anything I saw it take less energy from you and and you just said feel my body I I just want to keep on talking about the feeling as I see it come up yeah yeah so so if I could click my fingers right now and all of a sudden you were just 10% more connected in everything you did in the same way that you just became 10% more connected in sitting and talking with me so no ma nothing in your life changed as far as the practicalities and tactical what I do today but when you got on YouTube it felt 10% more connected when you interacted with your team it 10% wor when you’re writing your book it was 10 when you’re doing the next podcast interview how how exciting would that be that would be pretty freaking cool yeah it feels like so easy why don’t I just do that what do you think it would do for your career your money just to like to address the money fear what do you think it would do we obviously have no idea but if you were to guess if I were to put money on it it would grow the business without me having to think too hard about it because I’d be operating from a place of like connectedness or something yeah yeah t typically I noticed that as a public figure people want to be to be able to connect with you and so your connection your connection with yourself is a big component in that recipe yeah I was I did a live stream about an hour ago just on my second YouTube channel where I was just having a bit of a chat with whoever was there and people were like you know we want to see more of your life and I was like but I don’t know what would be helpful for you guys and they’re all like no just like talk about anything we want to hear about you like come on man um so that kind of speaks to this idea yeah exactly so so what if that’s instead of the career goal being like the typical goals write a book make x amount of dollars get enough clicks what if the goal was be 10% more connected in everything I do that would be really cool that would be very interesting to try out yeah yeah so I’m gonna ask this weird this really weird question give me just the thing about the business like for some businesses it would be billing I don’t think you do a lot of billing but like one of those rote things that your business does that hopefully you’ve outsourced or delegated at this point but but either way is something that your business does is just kind of wrote mundane non- exciting thing uh filming sponsorship segments for the videos and for the podcast awesome I want you to do two things one is I want you to think about how to do that in the most connected way possible not meaning as a whole system not just you being there doing the sponsorship but like the whole organization being deeply connected in that process and I want you to do it while being connected with yourself yeah I can think of some ways to do that yeah I love how quickly your mind just your mind works so fast it’s so cool to watch it so give me give me give me the ideas that just came just by doing that little experiment what ideas just showed up oh the ideas were like um working with sponsors and actively reaching out to sponsors that we really Vibe with um immediately Lululemon came to mind because like every piece of clothing I own is Lululemon and we just never bothered reaching out to them to be like hey do you do you guys want to work together and stuff because this something was holding us back and things that would be pretty connected um actively reaching out to all of the te companies whose stuff I actually use rather than just worrying about all the inbound from people who’s trying to convince us to use their stuff and you know all that and then if at one point I had the weird thought that like I would love to do sponsored segments where I I say a poem about the the thing or it like Rhymes in some kind of way or I turn it into a song while playing on the guitar and then a friend told me no that’s bad for conversions don’t do that and I was like okay I guess I won’t do that but actually that would be a way more fun and interesting way to do a sponsored segment if I’m like composing song plus chat GPT really helps with like rhing stuff these days so those things came to mind yeah great and totally as you know in this job it’s experiment after experiment is what you learn so it all sounds like great experiments yeah so look at look at just what happens so even you could take even the thing that is uh most mundane that you dislike the most put it through this goal about how does this become how do I do this in a more connected way while being connected thinking about it and immediate medely it Sparks this another level of creativity I mean you’re obviously very creative in everything you do to come up with that much content there’s just a huge creativity there but all of a sudden it Sparks this whole another level of creativity that right so that that same lens could be put at everything you do how do I buy camera equipment how do like everything you do there can be this question of like how do I maximize the connection sick okay I need to remember this somehow it’s recorded you’re fine 20 goal even now I’m just like sort of I’ve got my hands on the table and I’m just sort of like noticing my fingers on the table and I I never notied my fingers on the table but like yeah for the last like five minutes I’ve been like hm there there there part of me that’s like keeping that keeping some percentage of my attention on that while also talking to you and I’m finding that as that’s happening like my uh you know I was feeling a bit of like oh shit you know I hope this episode’s good enough for Joe to put on the Pod I hope I don’t embarrass myself all of that’s gone I’m just like we’re just having a chat now yeah yeah so one one technical hack there’s this great uh app called Yap um and it just reminds you I have a silent phone that does almost it makes no sounds the only sound it makes is Yap which is really great because then I don’t get bothered and like I would for you right now I’d put on that Yap chat the question would just be how do I be 10% more uh connected right now and that would just be this automatic reminder that happens the other thing that I’ll I’ll say is that as you move away from the brain and all the intellect stuff and you move into your body you’ll start to be able to trust that your body will catch stuff that you’re you don’t need to write on a list what like what if you’re all in the head then there’s a lot of like oh I have to capture this but if you actually allow it to hit your body and resonate in your body oftentimes that works better than a list because you write it on a list but do you remember to read the list and whatever you know happens yeah it’s the whole thing of like how do I make sure I remind myself to then like go on that Google doc or whatever the thing was exactly that whole thing yeah so I just say it is that as you’re start as you’re starting to learn about the feeling in the sematic world it’s it’s it’s uh detracting to then immediately go and write it down if it prevents the integration of it in the body so let it integrate in the body and then go write it down meaning like right now you are feeling what it is to be 10% more connected in our conversation together keep keep that keep the attention mention in the body and and then you’ll remember it more likely than if you write it on a list nice thanks yeah cool so the only thing that I see is the open thread that we have left is um uh and I’ll check before we go here but it’s just the the feeling piece of it um so any other questions about uh what to do next in your career is like how what what if anything is still open there honestly I think even just like running it through that filter of like what does 10% more connected look like I’ve you know I’ve got the answers I can yeah that’s not a CO yeah okay rock and roll yeah thank you easy peasy okay so then on the feeling of emotion stuff yeah so the the question I have for you is how much of it is conscious and how how much of is it that you’re not feeling your body and how much of it is that you’re not aware that you’re feeling how much of it is that you’re not feeling and how much of it is is feeling I’m not sure but sometimes um I’ll be with like my brother and they’ll say like hey are you okay and I’m like yeah and they’re like because you but because you’ve got tears in your eyes right now and it looks like you’re about to cry and I’m like whoa and I’m like shit you’re weird and then they’d be like how you feeling and I’m like I don’t know like I’m I’ve got tears in my eyes like I’m clearly and and then and then I try and sort of like reverse engineer like what that there must been something that’s come up that’s triggered me in some way but I would just have no sense of like feeling in the body any different to what I was like 10 seconds ago but now but I can feel like my eyes like sort of screwing up a little bit and like the you know yeah stuff okay so the body is doing something it’s there is an awareness thing that’s happening so I just a couple intellectual pieces on this the the first intellectual piece is if you take a kid who’s physically abused and you put a quarter in one hand and a key in another hand without them seeing it as an adult they won’t be able to tell you which hand has the key and which hand has the quarter because the the human system is really smart if something is too painful it cuts off and so most of us me me particularly in my journey I couldn’t have told you what emotion I was having at all and I wasn’t particularly expressive of them because emotions were way too painful there was too much emotional abuse and emotional abuse is a word that I think is I I throw it around very easily and what I mean by emotional abuse is um excuse me um what I mean by emotional abuse is that somebody held you responsible for their emotional state or somebody told you the emotions that you were having were not okay to have those are the two ways of like so jealousy would be a form of emotional abuse um don’t be so excited Johnny don’t cry Johnny whatever all those things would be forms I would I in my definition those would be emotional abuse and so the first step in in overcoming that is just learning to be aware of of of the emotional experience and for some people yeah and for some people um like for me the way I first started to learn that I was in fear is that I had binary thinking I was so aware of my thought process that I was like oh I notice I’m thinking black or white right now I must be in fear and then it was later that I learned oh this is the sematic experience of fear in my system so I I looked at the way my thought pattern showed fear before I actually learned how to feel it somatically but my body was in fear either way so I I just give that as a background that hopefully may be helpful so and I noticed that there’s a a way that you know being real you put your chin down you feel more you allow yourself to be in the body and last part if you have a practice of just that idea of like oh some of my attention is in my body while we’re sitting here talking together everything else will take care of itself like we don’t need to have a session if you just keep 10% of your awareness in your body as much as possible everything else will take care of itself really there’s no there’s no need yeah it’s it’s an it’s one of the most powerful practices but most people can’t pull it off it’ll the the transformation and change can happen so rapidly that they will that they will leave their body because it’s too much for them to to feel but but anyways just just know that that’s like the the the that’s the hack and I know you’re good at yeah so so if there’s anyone you’ll be able to do it um okay so now all the intellectual stuff is aside um what what what kind of a what kind of if right now you start balling crying just like weeping and crying over the fact that you weren’t allowed to have the emotions because as a child because survival was such a bigger priority and so your parents couldn’t see your emotional life and instead all they could see was preparing you to survive for instance I’m I’m not saying that’s true but uh how would you feel about well you just cried on this podcast and everybody and all your in your you know the two million subscribers all knew that you cried about this pain in your life how how what what would be the what would be your reaction to that that would be kind of cool if I had such a an emotional response to like a thing I’d be kind of intrigued okay yeah great so there’s not there’s not like a I need to be seen not sad or what what’s the emotion that if happened right now you would be like if any you would be like oh I I shouldn’t have done that on on a podcast anger fear sadness yeah excitement exuberance joy peace I’m I’m cool with all those um oh the the the only thing that comes to mind is like I wouldn’t want to say something bad about like someone I love in public on a podcast or something it’s like but there’s not much risk of that happening but any kind of em I I would love to express emotional emotions openly on a podcast that would be perfect okay great outside of the emotion that you just expressed for instance uh what emotion did I just Express yeah what what emotion did you just Express I’ll do it for you right here this is what like I would I would love to have a whole bunch of emotions on a podcast that would be great yeah that would be great emo yeah I guess that was like joy joy yeah oh my goodness emotions sign me up yeah right even some excitement in there I would say like it’s like there is right and so did you know that I was in excitement and joy when I did it cuz you were smiling and your voice went like louder and you moved around a little bit and stuff right which if you can’t if you’re on the podcast just listening you can’t you can see Ali doing this actually right now in his body he’s mimicking and you’re liter I don’t know if you were aware of it but you were literally like jolting and moving and smiling and so somehow or another your body knows how to do it when you’re even just talking about it yeah okay what’s your what’s your okay go ahead like I don’t have an issue with I think with experiencing positive emotions but it’s like okay no I’m I’m going to rephrase that I don’t I don’t think I have an issue with like feeling excitement I I I do often feel excitement but emotions like like love and or anything around like sadness or sorrow or like you those like those are the ones where I I’m I’m not sure how I feel if you had to if you had to tell me the difference between sorrow and love what would it be H I would say that love is sort of like this subtle positive glow and sorrow is like a subtle negative antique glow or something okay so we’re going to do one of the great things about doing any kind of emotional work is you can experiment like real time and it’s really great so what we’re going to do is we’re going to find a memory that brings up love for you and then we’re going to find a memory that brings up sorrow for you and when you’re going to catch one in your body then you’re going to catch the other one in your body and you’re going to go back and forth for a while and then we’ll I’ll ask you a question or two what um so come up with a memory you can share or not share doesn’t matter that uh the immediately brings up a a the feeling of love in your system maybe it’s a dog or brother younger sibling cousin yeah yeah okay so go ahead and and feel that like have that memory and just notice what happens in your system great that’s enough okay yeah and then I want you to think of a a a memory that sorrow loss of something or so I noticed that your chin just went up oh interesting memory of Sorrow I have this weird sensation of like oh you know I don’t want to go there but that’s weird but I do want to go there of course I want to go there um somebody taught you it wasn’t safe at some point or the world in general did so there’s a there’s a automatic reaction to it that is yeah great experience of Sorrow okay I’ve going to experience of Sorrow okay so bring yourself totally into your body again you’re a little bit out there you go okay now I want you to go back to love and now I want you to go back to Sara one more time back to and back to the memory of sorrow and now I want you to hold both of them at the same time both of those two Sensations simultaneously great so what if any difference did you find between love and sorrow and then what happened when you brought them together so for sorrow I definitely felt some sort of thing around like here I think um so you’re just for everybody what I’m hearing you say is like right around your is it below your belly button or above above my belly button just sort of like below sort of towards the bottom of my left kind of Rib Cage Great okay um like a sort of squeezy feeling there yeah I don’t really know I felt anything somatically for the love thing it did feel like that that feeling eased up a bit and so when I was going in between the two as like when I was thinking sorrow is like the squeez happened a bit more and when I was thinking love it sort of eased up and when I think saw the squeez and then it eased up again and when he said holding both at the same time I sort of I felt the squeez but I sort of took her sort of breath in and yeah then it was like the squeez was still there but like the the breath in was kind of like this like almost like this lightess at the same time yeah so and and so how much would you say that the love created a sense of spaciousness around other stuff besides just the squeez or was the spaciousness just H how much was the spacious or how much of the relief was just around the squeezy part how much of it was just general oh interesting now that you mention it like when I think of the love thing there’s a bit of like a sort of an expansion out sort of from I guess lower ribs kind of outwards a little bit Yeah but but I’m not sure if that’s just cuz I was taking a breath in maybe I don’t know yeah the the thing about emotions is that they do affect your muscles so a breath in you if you’re anxious you stop breathing like anxiety affects the breath love affects the breath Joy affects the breath it affects the body position it affects right so any emotion that we might have any emotion that we withhold requires us to uh constrict our muscles in a particular way so it’s what one of the things when people look at me coaching and they’re like how the hell did he just do that I can do it because I can notice oh someone’s head is up there they’re cutting off an emotion or they have this line right here in their forehead which means they have repressed anger or blah blah blah there’s all sorts of oh tells that people have in their body yeah so there there so anyway so there’s the idea that you breath in and emotion are different is not is not particularly you know the most effective way to look at it so if if so so the question I I the question I have is for you is um if you if you had to guess what made it that sorrow was something that you didn’t want to feel um so the the Sor I’m I’m not sure but the the sorrow experience I was thinking of was you know I had this big crush on this girl in my first year of med school and then she left the university for various reasons and I was like heartbroken and I genuinely felt pain in my body and I was like whoa and like she was like my best friend as well and it’s like I’m never going to have friends again uh and then I sort of talked to myself out of that by bringing to mind dozens of counter examples of say sit of that I actually did have friends and actually life was going to be fine and then like just sort of buried I think maybe buried that feeling of sorrow and sort of replaced it h if I if I had to if I had to psychotherapies myself replaced it with a drive to succeed um right a drive to like like you know this was very much unrequited love she wasn’t interested in me okay that’s fine let’s freaking like dominate the with my business and stuff um and then right she came back to University a year later and a female friend said oh you know the way you get a girl to be interested in you is to actively not be interested in her and so I was like all right you know at that point I didn’t have any affection for her then she seemed to like me and weird kind of dynamic and yeah but I don’t know so I just want to tie in somewhere in in your college experience you made the choice to have success over connection and now here you are you’ve got your success and you’re like oh wait I also want the connection piece yeah that’s interesting yeah just wan to yeah yeah yeah and so here here’s the next question for you what everything your mind told you is true you had friends you could continue to make friends you were going to this woman wasn’t required for your happiness all the stuff how would you have allowed all that truth to be there but not have it repress your sadness your sorrow yeah that’s all true but I’m fucking sad yeah I think at the time and maybe still to this day I thought of sadness as being not a good emotion to have um and I think all the stoicism Kool-Aid that I’ve been drinking was like well we can control our responses to things and like you know it’s just a story that you tell yourself so like you you just replace the story blah blah blah yeah um but I think if I were to have heartbreak or sorrow now I like the idea of sitting with it and I I I had friends in school in college who would like have like s songs playlist on Spotify and I’d be like what you have a sad song playlist like I mean yeah the music’s good like chasing cars is a good song but like and they be like yeah you know sometimes I’m feeling sad and I just like play the sad songs and I’m like that’s so doesn’t make sense because now you’re just wallowing in the sadness and they’re like yeah and I’m like what is wrong with you but I now kind of like the idea of like if I if I feel sad it would be nice to actually experience that and like wallow in the sadness in in air quotes what what what if it’s not what would be another word bes besides wallow H in indulge or Revel or oh experience or surf or enjoy yeah I like saber sa oh that’s nice Savor the sadness yeah yeah that’s part of the human right so just as clear there’s a distinction it’s true that if you make meaning of certain things it will create certain emotions in your body that’s there’s no doubt about it and you can change the meaning of something to change but you can also just have an emotion without a meaning it’s not required you don’t have to have a meaning yeah of course mammals who don’t think mammals who don’t have thought have emotions yeah or at least yeah much lesser thoughts at least you know yeah go ahead yeah go on one of the stories that people oh please there’s a bit of lag okay is isn’t there that thing that like the I I I don’t know where I was reading this but like you you you only experience an emotion for like 45 seconds and then to experience it for longer requires you to reinforce the story you’re telling yourself about said emotion I would say you’ve never experienced an emotion for more than a second a single emotion for more than a second but there’s never been a moment of waking in your life where you’re not having an emotional experience is more of my the way I would describe it there’s never a non-emotional experience that you’re having we’re constantly in an emot like we have an emotional thing happening like a like music in the background it’s constantly there as long as we’re awake and it’s never the exact same note or the exact same instrumentation and Note and everything like I’ve experienced sadness thousands of times but it always has a slightly different seasoning to it okay or it’s a different combination it’s like a little more sadness and a little less anger or whatever yeah yeah so I’d say that’s more of the as far as telling the story to indulge it there is something really really important about that which is you can be stuck a story and then stuck in an emotional Loop for sure so if I’m helping somebody learn how to express their emotions which is not something you can do on a podcast um I might use a story to get them into that emotional state but I I don’t want to reify the story is true all the stories are false the story that your sadness was going to last forever and that she hurt you and that she didn’t want you and it was unrequitted and that you had other friends every single one of those stories had some falsehood to it it and there was no full truth in any of the stories and so if you believe in a story it can also stagnate an emotional experience they they’re they’re very related that way but just as easily you can have a similar emotional experience as for instance for me um I had the kind of reoccurring emotional experience of I can’t get my dad’s love then I moved away from you know which which was a longing and with an unrequitted in it and then you know I moved away my dad wasn’t there it wasn’t reoccurring so I just went I can’t get money and it was just the exact same emotional experience but instead of not being able to get my dad’s love it became I can’t get money and so so you can you can have that you can have a a a a rut of an emotional experience and then change your story around it to maintain the emotional experience the reason that those the the other side of it is told so well is because most people who are really really good at describing shit can see how the thoughts affect their emotions not so much how their emotions affect their thoughts because they’re more intellectually based there was a thing that came to mind as you were saying that this sort of um I can’t get my dad’s love I I can’t get money um in that I feel like I have this constant sense of there is more that needs to be done yeah um like you know we got the call yesterday like oh congratulations you’re a a New York Times bestseller and I was like you know my my brother was asking how do you feel and I was like hm I feel a sense of relief that like the work that we put into this has paid off but it wasn’t a sense of like oh okay I can chill out now it was like well there’s always more to be done you know there’s we we don’t have any recurring Revenue product so like let’s build this Community thing and like you know like what are the goals like let’s get after it you know there was this weird kind like and I think I’m a pretty happy and content guy but I have this conal of like dissatisfaction of like no there’s always more to be doing yeah and almost a I find it hard to take a break and like give myself permission to Simply read fiction or like just lie down that just do nothing because there is there is more to be done in terms of building up our monthly recurring revenue and all that crap to get where to get to a place of okayness I think to get to a place of safy just to be clear I have to be not okay to get to a place of okayness Yeah by by definition somewhat but yeah cuz if if I was okay then it’s like the reason to do stuff would be for the connection which would be quite a fun reason to do stuff for the connection for the fun of it rather than because there is a lack or a scarcity or a thing like yeah yeah yeah there I see the click that’s it a and you were mentioning I was mentioning my dad is that was that relation did you notice that too that somehow that was part of for you to be okay with your mother or father that there was always something that needed to be done is that why that triggered that now that you mention it yeah okay yeah yeah yeah I think the sense of maybe I’m over therapizing myself but like I remember when like growing up we could never let our mom see us like me and my brother I I could never let my mom see me playing video games because if she did there was always something else to do there was always a chore in the house that needed doing or like some homework that needed doing or shouldn’t shouldn’t you be starting for your exams type thing yeah um and obviously that’s now different but it’s still a sense of man I can’t continue playing bers Gate 3 because there’s like brainstorming to do about the next video or like building a landing page for the next freaking course that we’re doing or or whatever right yeah yeah yeah exactly the same that’s a hell of a 4 Hour Work week yeah love love the I work right so how does that relate to um I don’t have time to feel because there’s something that has to be done I don’t have time to be sad over this woman because I have to be successful like how how how much does that relate yeah it relates in the sense of I you know people often say you know you should celebrate the wins and there’s part of me that says screw celebrating the winds there’s more to be done right yeah what would celebrating your win look like having just hit the New York Times breast Celler what what what would if you were to celebrate the win in the most connected fashion possible what would it look like it would look like firstly sending thank you messages and gifts to everyone who’s helped along the way and secondly chilling out for a month and just like binging a great fantasy fiction series that would be super fun that sounds really nice yeah yeah that would be nice what was the emotion you had during that experience when you were thinking about it your face changed color a little bit your eyes did something I have a bit of like wateriness in my eyes that’s so so strange a sense of like wow it’s it’s called gratitude it’s called gratitude yeah the tears that’s gratitude oh is it okay nice yeah just so you know um yeah it was like a sense of like oh I just didn’t even remotely think that that was an option because there’s more to be done but now that I’m thinking I guess that is an option let’s say you let’s say you did it let’s say you did it for a second let’s say you wrote all those notes you spent that time in a deep gratitude for each of the people and you showed them that gratitude and you like totally checked out with fiction for a certain period of time at the end of two years would you be further ahead or farther behind definitely further ahead yeah yeah that’s how important the emotions are to your productivity to actually like to stop and say is all we did was say what’s the most connected way to do that you connected with yourself immediately the emotional experience of gratitude sh showed up which showed you a path at least of working with other people and gratitude of giving yourself rest damn this is some good stuff man thank you thanks for I seen you do this on other people and I was like I wonder what going on here yeah wow so cool it’s not just to be clear it’s not me doing it to you but yeah it’s it’s me following you my experience of it is far more me following you than yeah it’s so cool to experience anyone watching or listening to this like this is pretty cool stuff you started you what what the interesting thing is I always know where the thing end for anybody listening to this just like a quick little thing I don’t even know if we captured it in the recording but the very first thing you said was I just finished the New York Times bestseller list and now I’m thinking what do I want to do next and so the the very the very first thing you said was the colonel always almost always is is the colonel of what is being worked on just it’s just a a fascinating thing it’s like people it I’m and that’s why I follow you you bring that up and I’m like oh that’s what we’re here for right like so that you you know it I don’t know it that’s so cool love it total pleasure thank you so much a pleasure yeah it’s been wonderful