Summary
Joe and Brett explore the principle of “embracing intensity” — the practice of allowing whatever emotional experience is present rather than resisting or creating intensity. Joe distinguishes embracing intensity (welcoming what’s already there) from creating intensity (manufacturing challenging situations), noting that while creating intensity can be useful, only embracing intensity is a reliable principle for transformation. The willingness to embrace intensity is, in Joe’s view, the single best leading indicator of how much transformation someone will experience.
They discuss six benefits of embracing intensity: improved decision-making (since all decisions are emotional, willingness to feel any emotion clears decision-making), curbing addictive and unhealthy patterns (addictions require avoiding a feeling — if you’re willing to feel anything, there’s no reason to reach for the addiction), breaking repetitive life patterns (we recreate painful situations to avoid the underlying feeling — fully feeling it stops the cycle), increased sensitivity to self and others, greater effectiveness (willingness to approach what’s uncomfortable makes you more productive), and increased joy (emotions that flow freely make space for joy, which Joe calls “the matriarch of a family of emotions” who won’t enter a house where her children aren’t welcome).
Joe also explains that the discomfort of most emotions — positive or negative — is actually the resistance to them, not the emotions themselves. When emotions are welcomed rather than resisted, they change character: sadness becomes grateful grieving, anger becomes healthy determination, and the entire emotional landscape becomes more fluid and alive.
Key Concepts
- Embracing intensity versus creating it
- Willingness to feel any emotion improves decision-making
- Fully feeling the avoided emotion stops the repetitive pattern
- Joy won’t enter a house where her children aren’t welcome
- The discomfort of emotions is the resistance, not the emotion itself
- Embracing intensity curbs addictive cycles
Key Quotes
“The person’s willingness to embrace intensity will mark the amount of change that they will feel in their life in the short term — it’s a great leading indicator.”
“Am I bracing or am I embracing? That’s the felt sense of it — how much am I allowing my experience to occur and how much am I resisting my experience.”
“The joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome.”
“The discomfort of most emotions, negative or positive, is the resistance to them — it’s not the actual emotions themselves. Sadness in itself is quite joyful.”
“As soon as someone fully falls in love with the feeling they’re trying to avoid, the pattern stops. It’s the quickest way to stop a negative pattern in your life.”
“There is no real intensity in an action — there’s only an intensity in a feeling, physical or emotional.”
Transcript
foreign the person’s willingness to embrace intensity will Mark the amount of change that they will feel in their life in the short term it’s like it’s a great leading indicator 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 I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson Good morning Joe hey how’s it going doing well it’s actually afternoon here afternoon oh yeah morning here morning there Hawaii California yeah yeah I hear you’re taking your daughter on a road trip yeah yeah she just got 15 and a half she got the learner’s permit and I was like hey uh how do you wanna how do you wanna learn to drive she was like let’s drive across country so we’re gonna drive from California to New York oh wow yeah I’m really I’m really excited for it because I you know you get these moments with your kids especially as they get older where you get to like really deeply sink in with them on on a topic and and those road trips are the best way to do it three days ago I’m sitting in this uh Cafe you know covet’s opened up sitting in a cafe with my 12 year old and we’re talking about embracing intensity in this Cafe where she’s like trying to figure this out like what what do I mean when I say to her like oh like hey you’re running away from a feeling there like lean into the feeling and we’re having this conversation it’s just like one of those epic conversations you have with your kids every once in a while and there was this lady who was sitting near us and it was like watching her jaw just like Drop like what the hell is happening like how is this conversation happening between a dad and a 12 year old it was really amazing and it was that conversation actually which is the reason that I said to you hey let’s talk about embracing intensity is that when you told her that she’s going to be doing this drive all in one go in like 36 hours no different daughter the younger daughter is oh okay the embracing conversation oh yeah the 12 year old’s not doing the driving yeah no and that wouldn’t be embracing intensity that would be creating intensity yeah an important distinction big distinction yeah yeah so this this is something that comes up a lot in our courses as as a principle for ESF and kind of a principle for any of the courses and it’s one of the things that really uh kind of attracted me with my Air Sports and like kind of extreme like adventuring background which is like okay yeah I’m brace intensity yeah let’s do this so like can you for the audience Define what it what do you mean by embracing intensity as opposed to what I just suggested on the road trip you know creating an intensity so embracing intensity assumes that there is never a moment when there isn’t some intensity to embrace that there’s really nothing to create in the situation so and I use the word intensity so that people don’t think like it’s difficulty because I find that when people once people really move through embracing say their anger or their sadness or their fear that they find it’s more challenging even to embrace things like peace and joy and to allow that in so the intensity is really about the thing inside of you right now that has some discomfort or it’s it’s like being asked to expand in a way that is slightly uncomfortable and it’s it’s embracing that and I think the the best way to think about it is if you just close your eyes for a minute and take a deep breath and you say am I bracing or am I embracing and that’s like the felt sense of it the felt sense of it is like how much am I allowing my experience to occur and how much am I resisting my experience yeah that kind of points to an important thing where the concept of creating intensity like if people are learning as they they go through these courses and they do this work and they find there’s a lot of intensity in them and so then they’re like when there’s intensity that must mean there’s growth so I’m going to start by creating intensity and you could tell like if you’re if you’re creating intensity and not just letting it come up there is a bracing to it it’s like okay here it comes ready for this intensity right also I mean I like creating intensity every once in a while don’t get me wrong I think it’s a really useful tool but it’s not a principle to live life by meaning well I mean you know what we’ve done in some of these courses and it can be quite intense and so I don’t steer away from creating it but it’s not that’s not a Surefire way for transformation but what is a surefired way for transformation is embracing intensity as a matter of fact I was sitting with a whole bunch of CEOs and we were discussing what do we want to be able to measure and I said well one of the things I would love to be able to measure is transformation in different ways and they’re like What’s the leading indicator of transformation in your mind I was like oh the the person’s willingness to embrace intensity will Mark the amount of change that they will feel in their life in a short term it’s like it’s a great leading indicator this seems like this is one reason perhaps like one of the benefits of embracing intensity what are reasons why we might want to drift towards living in this principle yeah it’s funny because my daughter asked me the same question when we were sitting across she was like what are the reasons and I came up with three and then as we were talking there was a fort that showed up so I’m going to give you the three because those are the only ones I remember and then we’ll see if the fourth one shows up in this conversation as well but it’s incredibly good for decision making it’s incredibly good for Joy like increasing the amount of joy that you feel and it’s incredibly good for um Effectiveness oh I have the fourth one has come that is really good at Effectiveness and it’s really good at curbing unhealthy patterns so those are the reasons to do it okay so you’ve got like making decisions let’s let’s start with that first one then can you elaborate on that further yeah this one I think I’ve even talked about in a different podcast but it’s basically our decision making is actually an emotional situation it’s not an intellectual one we’re not making an intellectual decisions so you know in 2012 the guy wrote a book um called Descartes air where he shows that if you take the emotional center of the brain out of a person they’ll cease to make decisions even if their IQ stays the same it’ll take them a half an hour to decide what color pen to use or four hours to have lunch so what that means is we’re making decisions as a way to feel what we want to feel means that we want to feel good and we want to feel loved and we don’t want to feel like a failure and we don’t want to feel shame so we make decisions based on that and we’re using our logic to figure out which way we’re going to feel so the key to Great decision making isn’t logically thinking it through or being non-emotional it’s actually being completely willing to feel any emotional state so if you’re doing something if you’re scared to take risks because you’ll fail or you’re scared to speak your truth because you’re scared you won’t be loved or if you’re more commonly scared to take a risk because that much the joy of success would be overwhelming to you and you’d feel like it’d be taken away from you so you avoid that feeling of accomplishment which seems antithetical to people but it happens all the time then if you’re willing to feel all that stuff and you learn to embrace all that intensity then you make decisions far more clearly so there seems to be a link here between emotions and intensity like for for many of us to feel an emotion is intense and to feel more emotion feels more intense and this is our common pattern and tends to be that we suppress it at some point yes before it reaches some threshold that we’re afraid will be dysregulated or like lose our there is no real intensity in an action there’s only an intensity and a feeling physical or emotional so you know if you were jumping off a cliff and you didn’t have any emotional experience it wouldn’t be intense with or without a parachute outside of maybe the wind on your face and like that that experience and we know psychologically speaking that we make decisions based on the feeling that we get from the decision making and particularly if I if I have this right see if I can remember it correctly that it’s the avoidance of negative feelings that is more powerful in our in the way that we make decision make then the positive reward even though positive reward will change Behavior quicker if you look at the way people act it’s like trying to avoid negative feelings is actually more powerful yeah it’s a really good one I mean looking back in my life the times where I felt in the flow with the with the universe were the times that I was just following what I actually wanted and the times that I was avoiding what I didn’t want or emotions was when I found myself feeling the most lost and disconnected and so like back to decision making something that’s really important for decision making is being context aware so you can decide like okay who am I going to hire for this particular role and then you could also ask yourself what’s important about hiring somebody and something we talked about in the feel over figure episode in the AOA series was how our emotions create the context in which our logic works and so becoming aware of what that context is oh I’m afraid of my business failing I’m afraid of being perceived as a failure I’m afraid of being abandoned I’m afraid of my partner leaving me recognizing the context within which we’re making decisions helps us process that underlying context to allow us to make a different set of decisions because we’re aware of the underlying pattern yeah just intellectually that’s true and and then on a more physical or emotional level what is also happening is the more we embrace it the more sensitive we become to it and the more sensitive we become to it the more aware we we are of it so when I first started and we’ve had an episode about this too I think where it’s like you didn’t think you felt fear for a while and then you’re like holy crap I’m feeling it all the time and it’s like it’s the same thing with my world it was like I’m not feeling that emotion and then oh wow I am feeling it and so you just become more and more sensitive to these emotional states from embracing intensity yeah yeah so we’ll make that a sub category number five for for reasons is that increased sensitivity is amazing because it’s not just a sensitivity towards your own but it’s your sensitivity towards others so you’ll be in a conversation and with the counterparty say in a business situation and you’re so aware of their emotional state because you’re so aware of yours and it’s it’s like an incredible thing to be able to hang out with people and be aware of that in a way that allows you to create healthy amazing relationships yeah it makes you more perceptive to you know the energy in the room yeah yeah exactly so so moving on to what’s something along the lines of curbing addiction or stopping unhealthy patterns yeah so the thing about all addictive Cycles is that there’s a moment where you’re feeling something that you don’t want to feel that you move to the addiction right so it’s like I don’t want to feel the want for a cigarette would bring me to the cigarette or I don’t want to feel the negative voice in my head brings me to or the shame that the negative voice in the head brings to me I don’t want to feel that therefore I’m going to move to television or I don’t want to feel out of control so I move to anger but if you’re good with feeling all those things then there’s no reason to move to the addiction and there’s no reason to particularly have the shame around the addiction so if you just feel into it it really helps curb negative behaviors so this this is speaking to addictions but also it can be any kind of behavioral patterns that we have so like drama triangle patterns like I’m not willing to feel my helplessness so I try to avoid that by solving everyone’s problem and infantilizing them right yeah so that’s the second way the second way in which it curves negative behavior patterns isn’t just the addiction it’s the it’s this thing where if I am used to be if I got taught from my family hey I’m going to be emotionally abandoned then I’m going out into the world trying to avoid that emotional abandonment that feeling of emotional abandonment and the way that I’m trying to avoid it I’ll recreate it so for instance I used to when I was recreating the pattern of emotional abandonment I would get angry whenever I saw that I was starting to get abandoned as a way to avoid feeling that feeling obviously the anger made more people abandon me because who wants to be around someone who’s yelling at them and therefore I’d invite it in if you just go oh I’m gonna feel that I’m gonna feel that abandonment I’m gonna sit in that I’m gonna learn how to make friends with that learn how to fall in love with that then you don’t really recreate the pattern over and over again because what’s happening in our system is like it’s like we’re a cell that’s trying to get back to homeostasis and if we weren’t allowed to feel something we’re going to recreate that negative pattern in our life over and over and over again until we feel it and then once we felt it then we don’t have to recreate the pattern and so you see this happen all the time and people recreating the patterns all to avoid a Feeling as soon as in my work all the time I see this as soon as someone fully falls in love with the feeling they’re trying to avoid the pattern stops the negative pattern it’s the quickest way to stop a negative pattern in your life yeah yeah so it brings back to a metaphor that I’ve had for emotions which is that they seem to be the way for our nervous system and for ourselves to self-organize itself back into homeostasis and the avoidance of them is these patterns we’ve learned like an electric fence with a dog where you teach the dog that if it goes near this edge of the property it’s going to get shocked and eventually the fence can be turned off and the dog just won’t go there even though through that fence lies freedom and each of our emotional movements is the system trying to find homeostasis and to the extent that we avoid them we’re blocking it yeah and I like the the idea of the electric fence too because if you actually touch the electric fence it’s uncomfortable but it doesn’t actually harm you right and what’s different than with the emotions than electric fence is that the emotions actually become more and more comfortable that they change and so one of the greatest things about embracing intensity is that when the emotions are welcomed they feel very different in the system that the discomfort of most emotions negative or positive is the resistance to them it’s not the actual emotion themselves sadness in itself is quite joyful I remember in AOA once where somebody was talking about how they learned to enjoy their own sadness and how it like opened up this Floodgate of sadness and moved all this trauma out of their system similarly like you can have a deep joy for it and it and it changes it’s like sadness doesn’t look the same way it’ll go from maybe like poor me to just like a deep grieving in gratitude anger will move from uh maybe like a passive aggression or like a to a like no this isn’t gonna I’m not gonna allow this to happen right now so as we learn to embrace the intensity those emotions become so much more fluid and they become and they change and they’re so much more comfortable and they don’t take control of us the way that resisted emotions do yeah yeah it’s interesting that resistance is really about the dissonance like if If part of our system is trying to move towards homeostasis in One Direction and the other part of our system is pushing against it in an equal and opposite direction not wanting it then not only does it persist but it’s also just increasing stress fractively throughout our body and our emotional system and our thoughts yeah wow yeah I haven’t thought of it that way but exactly that’s cool yeah so I guess that’s benefit six so we’re on yeah is that it changes the way your emotional experience is far more fluid and I guess that would have impact on your body too like a lot of the diseases that come that are associated with Aces like adverse childhood experience scores a lot of that just comes from there being a lot of chronic dissonance in the emotional and physical body definitely in the musculature like you can tell there’s lots of people did it um the guy who invented micro expression that whole Theory his teacher I understood this as well but you can look at the way somebody holds their musculature and their musculus you’re holding is based on what emotions they don’t want to feel and you can tell so much about a person just from that and you’ve seen this with like ESF you’ve seen it so that like you see someone’s face completely change as it releases yeah so that that brings us to I guess the fifth one so we’ve gone through improved decision making we’ve gone through uh getting out of unhealthy patterns including addiction we’ve gotten to feeling more intensity more more sensitivity including to things like Joy positive emotions and positive experiences yes and then Effectiveness it seems like all this sort of comes together in Effectiveness yeah I would say Effectiveness and joy there’s another way that it increases the joy in our experience but let’s do Effectiveness first ineffectiveness so I would just say we’re more effective when we can do the things that are uncomfortable for us so one example of this that I think is like quite obvious is when you’re working with somebody and you say okay we’ve got this new project that we’ve never done before they’ll do the things that they know how to do first instead of doing the things that they don’t know how to do first that’s really really common and it’s the least effective way to go about doing it in MIT they have a principle that says you look at the part of the problem that you understand the least about and you start your work there and it’s the same in a CEO of a company like it’s the thing they don’t want to look at that if they look at it and they’re they’ll be most effective if they look at that first and so it’s the same thing in a marriage if you are have a marriage and there’s that pink elephant in the room like to approach that and to talk about that and to feel into that immediately as quickly as you can will make you more effective have a better marriage be happier be better to each other be more loving and so if you’re willing to feel and embrace the intensity then you’re far more willing to go into the thing that everybody else is avoiding and you’ll be more effective for it okay yeah that makes a lot of sense and and coming back to Joy because I I was sort of combining Joy with increased sensitivity as a category but then you say there’s something more to it what was that yeah so I I think like my most repeated phrase is this phrase that says the joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome and somebody else once told me it was kind of like it was like you have like one or two docs in your port and one emotion can be there at a time so if you don’t if you’re not fluid then Joy never has a place to come and Park so that’s what I’m speaking to I’m basically speaking to the fact if you embrace the intensity and you don’t repress it then you don’t get this like low level of the unfelt emotion sitting in your life all the time and then you’re moving in your natural state which is joyful and loving and so I see this all the time and it’s why when people have these big emotional movements they feel all this relief they feel all this joy in the short term but it’s also long-term people who are joyful are people who can cry easily people who are joyful are people who can like are very fluid with their frustration and anger who can let their fear move through them really quickly it’s not people who have repressed the fear like we all can close our eyes and think about oh that person repressing the fear they’re kind of anxious all the time they’re not joyful and that person who’s repressing their anger they’re kind of depressed or they’re angry all the time depending on how they repress it if they repress a bike or they repress a bite I’m such a bad person like either way you know or the people who repress sadness all the time it’s like they’re that need for Perfection and and that rigidity that happens in their system and their whole body so they have that Joy just happens naturally when everything else is moving fluidly yeah it seems like everything happens more fluidly if everything’s moving fluidly everything in your life whether it’s whether it’s Joy or whether it’s motivation or connection or swiftly moving on from something that’s not working yeah definitely there’s as compared to like not feeling it and trying to manage it all the time you know there’s this great saying that I learned in Venture Capital which is the amount of the amount of effort it takes to create a deal is the amount of effort that you need to maintain it basically if you have to do a whole bunch of work to try to get the deal done then you’re going to have to do a whole bunch of work to make that deal successful uh that’s so true yeah it’s true and and not just adventure and like creating a project in a company and similarly it’s like if you have all this effort to keep your emotions in line and in check and you know you have to hold muscularly and emotionally and mentally it’s like that’s a lot of effort being put towards something that isn’t effective that isn’t joyful so what are I’m curious to get like three integration questions from you that can help people recognize if they are embracing or embracing their intensity or creating it or embracing it yeah well the best one is right now are you bracing or embracing are you embracing or bracing that I think that’s a great question and I I asked myself that question for there was a time when I asked on myself that question like 10 times a day it was like this beautiful question that I just like loved asking myself um another great integration question would be like go and feel go and have a moment of feeling an experience like that you don’t want to feel have the feeling of Abandonment or and sit with it for like a good like 10 15 minutes and then ask yourself like what what was so bad about that what made it that you didn’t get destroyed by it have the experience that you’ve been avoiding your whole life and then ask yourself what made it that I could survive that what made it that I I possibly even feel better after I felt it so that’s another great way to integrate this work third way to integrate the work I would say uh what are the emotions and I think feeling them more than labeling them would be good but what are the emotions that I don’t want to feel that sends me into my bad habits those would be the three yeah beautiful thank you Joe awesome thank you Brett good to talk to you again yeah you too all right I’m gonna finish packing for the road trip we’re truck is halfway packed all right get to it all right have fun thanks see ya bye 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