Summary
Joe and Brett explore helplessness as a core ingredient of fear — the “cayenne pepper” that gives fear its most potent kick. Brett opens with the story of teaching his partner to base jump, where leaning into his own helplessness was the key to not getting in her way and letting her develop her own skills.
Joe defines helplessness as the visceral feeling of having no control over an outcome you don’t want — distinct from learned helplessness, collapse, or the story of being helpless. He draws a powerful connection between helplessness and surrender: both involve recognizing you’re not in control, but helplessness resists it while surrender accepts it. For self-reliant, high-capacity people especially, helplessness is the emotion they most avoid and the one that would most transform them. The episode covers how helplessness shows up in the head (thoughts of “nothing I can do”), heart (the emotional experience), and nervous system (life-or-death activation).
They discuss practical approaches — finding helplessness through your control patterns, using emotional inquiry, taking five seconds with the spiciest part of any anxiety — and how teams that can process helplessness together pivot faster, while teams that avoid it consolidate the feeling into one scapegoated member. Joe shares his own experience of closing a company he loved, where two days of feeling helplessness led to profound freedom and lessons that would have been impossible through self-recrimination.
Key Concepts
- Helplessness is the most potent ingredient of fear
- Helplessness is the gateway to surrender
- Feeling helplessness creates agency, not control
- Catastrophizing is helplessness stuck in the head
- Teams consolidate unfelt helplessness in one person
- The freedom is in wanting to feel helpless again
- Your most controlling patterns reveal your hidden helplessness
Key Quotes
“I don’t know any fear that doesn’t have some part of it that feels helpless and I don’t know any helplessness that isn’t fear. So I think of it more as like an ingredient of fear… the cayenne pepper of fear.”
“Helplessness is the recognition that you’re not in control and wanting to be in control. Surrender is a recognition that you’re not in control and being good with it.”
“The freedom is not ‘I don’t feel helpless anymore.’ The freedom is ‘I can’t wait to feel helpless again.‘”
“For somebody who’s super self-reliant, leaning into helplessness can be one of the most potent change agents for them.”
“If you do all this stuff to control your experience, to control the emotions, it will not work. It has to be a welcoming.”
Transcript
so today I wanted to start with a story uh about 10 15 years ago in the height of my base jumping career I taught my my romantic partner at the time my life partner to jump off cliffs with a parachute that’s not that’s a non-loaded situation right there yeah yeah very very non-loaded we could say um and also she was the first person that I ever taught to base jump oh wow I had done some coaching and skydiving and I’d informally mentored people but I’d never been with somebody from okay here’s step one here’s how you start here’s how you pack here’s the body position here’s everything and uh did that within the context of a relationship and all of the stuff that happens within a romantic relationship things like don’t tell me what to do but no no it’s your parachute no no don’t tell me what to do no let me just do everything for you no no um it was honestly a really wonderful experience for both of us to have had and also there was a lot of stuff that we moved through in it the thing that characterized the experience most for me was which is what we’re going to talk about in this episode was helplessness that feeling the first time watching her make that first jump and to to add to this she also did uh it’s hard to kind of describe this but so base jumping is an acronym b-a-s-e building antenna span like Bridges and Earth Cliffs and she did her first four jumps from each of those different objects which is not something people normally do they normally train from a bridge for a long time before they move to something more dangerous like a cliff so for each of these first four jumps in like four different countries uh we were just like both very puckered and for me yeah there’s just this deep feeling of this deep experience of moving with helplessness and one of the things that I learned was the more that I leaned into just allowing myself to feel the helplessness the less I got in her way and the more she was able to take ownership of the experience yeah and ultimately the less helpless I ended up feeling as she started to develop her skills and abilities yeah I just wanna I wanna say hey if you’re if you’re a mother listening to this uh that’s a huge key if you’re a father listening to this this is that’s a huge key that that feeling of allowing helplessness and raising your kids yeah all right right and that became a two-way thing in our relationship because I had a much higher risk tolerance than she had in jumping and so she moved through a lot of the okay well how do I love this person across the across the risk Continuum yeah too where there’s I can’t control what’s going to happen in the next 15 seconds there’s nothing I can do about it but I but there are things I can do there are ways I can show up so yeah yeah I just want to get in let’s just dive into helplessness and talk about that today okay sounds great cool yeah okay so so let’s start by talking about what is it yeah the way I think about it is helplessness is a component of fear so a lot of people will ask me what’s the difference between fear and helplessness and it’s I don’t think of it that way I would say that I don’t know any fear that doesn’t have some part of it that feels helpless and I don’t know any helplessness that isn’t fear so I I think of it more as like an ingredient of fear and there are some things where we feel it deeply like almost 100 percent helpless so that would be you know getting sideswiped by a car being overpowered physically situations where there was just this deep feeling of helplessness and and there’s some fear and then there’s things like am I going to make this presentation a good presentation in front of my managers which might have fear in it but and it has a little bit of helplessness there’s like oh I can’t control what they think of me or if they had coffee that morning or if they exercised um but there’s a much smaller component of helplessness inside of that kind of a fear so I think of it as a component of fear and and I would say the most potent like I would say it’s like the cayenne pepper of fear right yeah so so as a component of fear how would you describe it what it what is it like what is the what is that particular flavor of fear it is the absence of control or the the feeling the feel it may not be true that you have no control over the situation but the feeling is that you have no control over this issue the feeling is like it is yeah uh an experience of like oh there is nothing that I can do to change the outcome and it’s an outcome I really don’t want it’s that combination yeah okay so so we’ve got it as an ingredient of fear what is it not what are what what ways might people describe helplessness that we’re not referring to here yeah I would say some folks would feel helpless they’d say they feel helpless when they feel stuck and and you may feel helpless and stuck but you may also feel angry and stuck and you might also feel you know just a different kind of a different flavor of fear and stuck so helpless is not a feeling of stuckness oftentimes that’s um feeling of helplessness is very alive the feeling is very potent and like cayenne pepper like if you eat cayenne pepper you don’t feel stuck like you you feel movement so um so I would say uh though it can happen where that an overwhelming feel can make you freeze and there’s some feeling of stuck to that um so I would say it’s not that I would also say that it’s not like learned helplessness meaning that it like a limiting belief that thinks oh I can’t change something so the the interesting thing about helplessness is the more you allow the feeling the more um the more potent the more virile the more empowered you actually become in your emotional world but it’s that feeling of like I cannot do anything about it and it’s not stuck it’s not learned helplessness it’s not being a victim it’s not any of that stuff yeah so homing in on this we’re talking about the feeling the visceral feeling of helplessness not the story that I’m helpless or learned helplessness as the defense mechanism or you know collapse resignation or Detachment like oh there’s just nothing I can do yeah no none of that that’s right yeah the visceral feeling the cayenne pepper yeah and I would say it is the feeling that when it’s it when that kind of fear comes through and it’s it’s most potent it’s one of the things that we want to not feel the most it is one of the things in like a standard especially for people who are like super high capacity um or people who are become very self-reliant who feel like you know who are big change agents on the planet that feeling is like one of the most scary feelings and they’ll do everything not to feel it okay I’ll do this I’ll do this I’ll just try again I’ll be resilient because I do not want to feel that feeling again I don’t want to have that experience again so I am going to be self-reliant I am going to blah blah blah blah work it out and figure it out and do the thing and and so and for them it’s often the thing they want to feel the least it’s the thing that they can’t recognize that they feel the most they have a hard time recognizing that emotional experience and it’s a thing for self-reliant people in particular allowing themselves to feel that level of helplessness is one of the most potent change agents just much like if someone’s feeling stuck a lot anger can be one of the most potent change agents for them or depressed anger can be one of the most potent change agents for them for somebody who’s super self-reliant leaning into helplessness can be one of the most potent change agents for them yeah and it’s it’s really fascinating here because it’s actually like the first thing that we feel we come out of the womb and the first thing that that we are is helpless yeah I I imagine I don’t remember my moment of birth so I can’t speak from like episodic memory here but I just imagine that helplessness is pretty much a beautiful description of our very first moments and it’s it’s fascinating that we can find ourselves feeling estranged from that feeling when it really is at the core of our entire life yeah right like small in a big universe yeah yeah I mean yeah we have no idea when the bus will hit us if the bus will hit us we have like there’s just so many ways that you can look at your reality and recognize your own helplessness there’s some other things that are really fascinating about it as well which is like it is a close cousin to surrender like helplessness is the recognition that you’re not in control and wanting to be in control surrender is a recognition that you’re not in control and being good with it right which is one of the most relief states that that you could like a state that creates a tremendous amount of relief and so it’s a really interesting thing that they’re they’re very close cousins like both of them have the aliveness of oh I’m I actually can’t control the situation entirely one is just a severe rejection of that experience and and one is an acceptance of that experience yeah yeah so I love that it’s because the next question I was going to ask after we started defining it was like what happens what does helplessness do as it moves through us what happens when we feel it all the way through and one thing you just described there was this this connection to surrender yeah which often people talk about surrender and that is sort of I guess that can be conceived of as a as like an end state but helplessness is actually like the Gateway yeah that’s right yeah yeah when describe gender is an end State I would it’s more of a verb really yeah I mean it’s often described that way yeah it often be described as a verb too yeah and like what is it that you’re doing when you surrender what are you welcoming yeah yeah I mean or what are you not doing when you surrender I think that the yeah so so my experience is that when folks fully feel through their helplessness when I first fully fell through mine when I’ve seen like really high-powered Executives feel through their helplessness they become a lot more capable and they become a lot more uh Serene in their capacity so you know the in in a great example of this is 12-step program so 12-step programs they have the Serenity Prayer which is all about knowing what you um can control and not control and Having the courage to affect the things you can control and having the piece not to attempt to control the things that you um can’t control and if you think about the way addiction one of the ways that they the psychological kind of thing that they do for addiction one of them is to understand that you don’t have any control over the substance like that admitting that admitting that you are helpless in the face of the substance or if you’re an allen on the face of the alcoholic you are helpless in that and somehow or another weirdly as it sounds it is saying I am helpless to this which allows you to not be an addict to not be controlled by it and it’s the same thing it’s like as you allow that feeling of helplessness it allows you to see that there and and experience the fact that you have control but it’s not quite control anymore I don’t think we have a word for it in the in the in the human language it’s it’s not like you surrender say okay I don’t have any power over alcohol and therefore now I can control alcohol it’s I don’t have any power over alcohol and I keep on admitting that to myself and in exchange I am far less likely to drink okay so it’s a it’s a weird it’s a weird because there’s no word for what you get because you don’t particularly get control at the end of it but you see options you see Choice agency you have agency that’s right that would that would be good yeah you see the options in choice but it doesn’t mean that you have control yeah I’m curious to go into this a little bit from like the head heart gut perspective as well like where how does helplessness show up in each of these yeah that’s great helplessness in the heart is the emotional experience of like oh there’s nothing I can do we can all close our eyes and go back to an experience of like the most helpless we felt you know and when we do this in workshops you know a lot of people will go into that place where they were physically abused or where they got sexual molestation or they got into a car accident or like where the whole world was collapsing on them and there was nothing that they could do interestingly also often a precursor to Awakening is this experience as well which is like oh like part of the part of the journey into the identity um fading away and seeing like the truth of Who We Are the recognition that you have no control that you’re absolutely helpless um to the identity and helpless to the identity falling apart that you can’t actually protect it and and again it doesn’t give you control over the identity but it somehow allows you to have agency with the identity and so that’s the the heart is that that emotional experience the head literally there’s nothing I can do like that it’s the thought process of there’s like nothing I can do and the nervous system it is an extremely heightened state of the nervous system it’s like life or dead there’s a life or death when you’re when you’re feeling 100 helpless it’s like around life and death and whether that’s egoic death or physical death that’s where you’re gonna feel it yeah so so what happens if you if you speed bump the experience of helplessness and just skip over it or right or embrace it like what what makes it that we if it’s such a natural experience and we’re born with it we’re born into it yeah what makes us find distance from it or skip you know what makes it not just flow smoothly naturally it’s super uncomfortable like that confrontation is super uncomfortable and and we don’t want to like our egos or whatever don’t want to our identity does not want to experience its death as it turns out and so we just push it away and what seems to happen is the the more that that experience isn’t lived with in the minutia and in the large experiences what I notice is people are more likely to be controlling and more likely to live with like low-level anxiety often or have a Perpetual low-level anxiety perpetually feel under attack and so and and what I notice is and when people constantly lean into the helplessness they feel more and more agency you know there’s I don’t know now hundreds of tales but I think the most common one is Mandela who was like in a prison and he was physical abuse and pounding rocks and being made to be small feel small he was in a completely helpless situation and he by feeling into that helplessness he was able to have an open heart and to have agency and tablet he wasn’t able to stop being abused he wasn’t able to stop pounding rocks he didn’t have any over his situation but he had this deep sense of internal agency that came with it and and that’s and that’s what it does it’s that similar thing of of seeing through the I would say seen through the the the world of just like surrender does it’s like seen through the material world of and feeling into the the sense of agency and empowerment that can’t be controlled by the external world and if you don’t do it then you don’t have that sense of empowerment then you’re constantly chasing power then you’re constantly chasing control then you’re constant and it can all be taken away from you yeah yeah nothing could be taken away from him right like he was like it’s all been taken and here I am still here and came out of that situation and was empowered wasn’t beaten down yeah right yeah it sounds like there’s a acceptance component in it as well there’s a way that it that experiencing your helplessness feeling your helplessness Burns through some of the Illusions and fantasies of control yeah that are grasp on grasped onto what you’re attached to right so that you can find and connect to what’s actually here right now yeah and from there develop agency competence uh clear seeing yes the only thing that I will say there is that what the human mind when it hears that what it wants to do is it wants to say okay now I’ll accept the fact that I don’t have control which is just a workaround not to feel the helplessness it’s the same kind of thing as if somebody was going to say I’m going to surrender now it’s like surrender is something that’s constantly happening like that you it’s more of an acknowledgment than a doing and the doing is the opposite of it meaning um for instance the reality is is that we’re all surrendered to our brains having thoughts like we’re not controlling the next thought that we’re gonna have there’s Just Thoughts coming and some of those thoughts are like you’re wonderful and some of those thoughts are your whatever the thoughts come and you like you you’re not going okay the next thought I’m gonna have is this and then the thought after that I’m gonna have is this they’re just right and so we are in a state of surrender of that and it’s just whether we’re recognizing that or whether we are trying to do something about it and if we are trying to do anything including trying to surrender then then we don’t we’re not surrendered actually and it’s the same thing with with the experience of helplessness it is allowing the feeling of helplessness that creates the acceptance it is not becoming accepting that creates the creates the freedom and so a lot of people they just go to okay I’m gonna go and I’m gonna accept my helplessness and I’ll be all Zen about it but that doesn’t actually get you there yeah it’s another form of management correct that’s right yeah just another control pattern in in the avoidance of the feeling of the helplessness yeah a more subtle one in many ways a better one than other ones but still yes yeah yeah so what are some other ways that this might show up for people we’ve talked about like high-powered execs we’ve talked about you know teaching somebody to do something dangerous that you love parents so what I would say is that yeah I would say the important thing is that there’s a little bit of helplessness in every one of our anxieties and every one of our fears like there is actually truly something helpless so if if we are going into a meeting and we want people to think we’re great or think our presentations greater get agreement or whatever we do not have full control over that there is a part of that that’s helpless if you go into that helplessness and feel that helplessness it frees you quicker than any other way of freeing yourself from Fear and again it’s not freeing yourself like it goes away you know it’s not like it frees Yourself by going through and so it’s if you do it to manage your fear then it won’t work if you do it as a way to fall in love with your fear it will work and so so what what’s interesting to me is other examples are any place where you’re anxious so if you’re like oh wow I’m anxious that my girlfriend won’t love me if I say X Y and Z it means there’s some part of it that you’re helpless about like you cannot your girlfriend’s love for you you just can’t do it and so or I am really scared that the car is going to break down there’s some way in which you are completely helpless to whether that car breaks down or not and that acceptance of that so so it’s in every one of our fears and I think knowing that and going into that is is incredibly important as far as like full 100 cayenne pepper helplessness oftentimes if you have been trying I remember had a really deep experience of it when I had just given everything I could to this company I cared so much about it it was doing so much good in the world and I had to close the company and that feeling of just like oh my whole world collapsing everything I think I am collapsing how much freedom and how much spaciousness I had afterwards surprised me like I remember like it was literally like two days I went right into the helplessness and it was it was a bumpy two days but within two days I was like oh wow I just felt so much freedom and so much more capable of investing so many Lessons Learned whereas if I would have beat myself up what did I do wrong how did I who could I what I should have should have would have could have I shouldn’t have did it if I would have gone through that route the lessons would not even be half as potent or half as varied so but I’ve seen people do this when they’re like their whole world collapses it’s like the divorce the kids leave the business collapses they have that deep feeling of helplessness then too so how do we recognize and work with our helplessness first of all like notice where it is where we’re avoiding it because many places we’ve probably avoided it so well that we’re not consciously aware that it’s there and then once we find it uh how do we work with helplessness in such a way that we don’t go into any of the backwaters like the the story of the helplessness or the collapse around it or yeah acceptance as a subtle control mechanism yeah so ways to find it are pretty simple look for the places where you’re most controlling would be a great place um where you have that kind of controlling thing that you know creates a rigidity and an um disruption in your system is a great way to find it another way to find it is like I said like Whatever anxiety you have look for the place that has the most cayenne pepper in it like somatically feel where’s the thing that’s most scary here that’s another way I’d say another way is to what’s interesting is you don’t particularly need to feel it in every situation if you start feeling it in any situation you can find it relaxes in other situations just like if I move anger then anger moves more easily with like less um violence less friction to the system similarly if you move the helplessness and some of the key areas like you can go into your memory and just go oh when did I feel most helpless and you start moving those experiences then it kind of changes the way that it moves through you and the rest of your life so you don’t really have to find it in every location you can just once you’ve found it three four five six seven times and you’ve moved it it starts moving differently in your system and then you’ll recognize it far more easily so that’s how to identify it and just and to start the movement and the and the movement is literally to allow your body to have the fear release of shaking and and going to worst case scenarios and feeling all the experiences of that it is the recognition that you’re not in control and and to go into either the scenarios where you lose if it hasn’t happened yet or where you’ve lost so to speak where you’ve suffered that loss in some way or you suffered that trauma that in some way really important when you’re doing this that you have a lot of support around um a person who can be with you is really great um a person can be with you and not be in fear who understands that they’re there to be like a grounded support is a really really useful thing um for that we would never do a release like that in uh in a in a group unless there is like a very strong container of love and support so I think that’s really important to be able to do that and that prevents a lot of the backwaters what can happen is if somebody moves a lot of helplessness but they’re alone and they get caught in the past where they felt it and they can’t see the reality of today their nervous system gets overwhelmed um then it can be counterproductive for sure right which was going to be my next question here is for listeners who are just hearing this episode and they want to explore working with their helplessness allowing it what are what’s what’s a what’s one way that you would suggest that they could play with that in a way that’s not likely to lead them into opening up too much and getting stuck in it yeah and uh easy gentle approach is the um emotional inquiry that we talked about I think it was on the last episode but at some point and we can put a link to that audio um down there and um yeah so that would be a great way to just like be able to like put your feet in the water and and feel it and and that is not having a full release of it it is being deeply inquisitive and full of wonder about the somatic experience of it but it’s it’s it’s allowing it to be in your body but not it it will make sure that your body doesn’t get overwhelmed disregulated yeah that’s a that’s a good way um and the other way is just you know take five seconds with any time you’re feeling anxiety go to the spicy part of it take five seconds and just be like oh what’s the really scary thing here and go right into that just for five seconds and then go about your day that’s a really good way to start exploring it somatically go into it yeah yeah somatically that reminds me of sort of the practice where people go through and they visualize everything they’re afraid of all the way through their death and then all the way through beyond their death yeah and there’s a way to do that as like the story like visualize the thing I’m afraid of my company falling apart my relationship falling apart my kids getting on heroin yeah whatever those might be but then there’s also the the underlying feeling like if I visualize it and put myself in that position what does it feel like we can also do that backwards through our lives too yes and then do the emotional inquiry with what comes up there yeah the same thing can be found in many Traditions Roman tradition and and the the Samurai tradition they all had this experience of like visualizing your death emotionally in parts and you can visualize any negative thing I also recommend doing the opposite too which is like visualizing the whole thing working out perfectly well and having all those experiences because sometimes those are the more scary things the ego the ego dies either way like if if you if the worst thing happens the ego has to shift you know the self-identity has to shift and if everything goes incredibly beautifully the self-identity has to shift so both of them can be really useful right right and that that brings up a very important Point here which is how would what is the difference between doing this practice and catastrophizing which many people will do all the time and they’re like oh this isn’t going to go well oh that’s going to go to hell oh no yeah one is in the head one is in the head and one is in the body one is a thought process that’s uh created by an emotional state and the other one is an uh is is fully deeply feeling the emotional state all the way through so even if you catastrophize oh my God everything could blow up you’ll notice just if you hear even the way I said it you could hear my whole body thing oh my God which means I’m holding back the emotion so if you can even say oh my God everything is going to blow up and you allow yourself to feel the whole thing that can be incredibly healing so the catastrophizing that’s dangerous or creates less Freedom more rigidity is the one where you don’t feel it where you just yeah oh my God it’s gonna be horrible and then that’s what makes it Loop right yeah you just keep looping in it because there’s and there’s there’s a reason why those thoughts are coming up because your body wants to process this yes exactly and so it’s going to keep knocking on your door until you actually feel it so if you’re just letting yourself have the thought but constricting around the feeling then it’s going to continue correct and I also like the component of like remember to do this on the flip side too on all the positive things there’s a there’s an emotional yoga here of expanding the range of motion of how much you can be with how much you can experience from the range of helplessness to everything’s going great all the way in between so then whatever actually does happen even in the in the in those little moments like let’s say you’re giving a speech yeah and between each word there’s some amount of rigidity some amounts of self-censoring some amount of management and all of that can just relax if you feel capable and welcoming of the full range of the experience yeah then you’ll just have that much more freedom and I think the key there is the welcoming I know I’ve said it once but it’s so important I want to say it again which is if you do all this stuff to control your experience to control the emotions it will not work it it has to be a like welcoming like I can’t wait to feel helpless again the freedom is in is not I don’t feel helpless anymore the freedom is in I can’t wait to feel helpless again uh-huh great yeah I’d love to also ask about how this works in a team that’s a great question and there’s so many ways to think about that question there’s like what happens when an entire team feels helpless what happens when one person and team feels helpless what happens in a team where nobody allows their helpless feelings those are all different things that occur inside of a team typically if there is something that a team is not confronting if they’re in denial about something in the business or but in their objective one person will start feeling more helpless and they’ll start getting rejected by the rest of the team and then so one person’s holding the helplessness for the team correct consolidates in that person in that direction not feeling it yeah and then they reject that person that person goes away and then a new person in the team starts holding it so that’s a that’s that’s what usually happens with one person if the entire team feels helpless and and I’m assuming when when we say that that they’re not fully feeling helpless if the whole team’s just like oh my gosh this is never gonna work and they’re not processing that you like divest just get get out um because it it that becomes that learned helplessness that becomes that collapse that becomes um burnout like if I if I’m talking to somebody who is burnt out and not the burnt out like because I’ve just been working really hard for a long time I need a break but the burnt out of like the psychological burnout it is because they are not in that Serenity Prayer there that they’re using anxiety to motivate themselves over time because they feel responsible or for many dozens of reasons and so typically then that that’s going to lead to some sort of a burnout if it’s if it’s like being used as like I won’t feel helpless and therefore I’m going to motivate myself there’s there’s a burnout that’s going to occur for those people it’s going to be typically pretty bad in last year’s um so that’s that’s another one if a team can process is not scared of the feeling of helplessness then they feel it and then they pivot then they feel it and then they pivot and and there’s a lot more enjoyment and movement in the team and they’ll they they realize and they will confront things easily happily bad difficult things easily and happily because that they know that by confronting it and feeling the helplessness they’ll move into a truth and a better way to go very quickly so it’s like oh cool I get to feel hopeless because I know the other side of that I’m going to have a clear vision of how to move forward that’s going to work better yeah beautiful and I imagine that also applies to a family in many of the same ways there was this moment that I had with Esme recently Esme was going through something with her boyfriend and at some point I was like that’s my fault I’m like this is the way I raised you and because I raised you this way it’s creating this kerfuffle in your relationship and I’m really sorry for that and in that moment there was a helplessness that both of us felt like like it’s done I wish I had I hadn’t done it that way but I had done it that way and she was like it’s done and I love you and there’s nothing like there’s nothing but this that can be done about it and so we just sat there and looked at each other and then we cried for a bit then she told me you know she felt really fortunate that we could have that moment together and that was the end of it that was the end of the process and oddly just that in itself relieved the pattern in her so the pattern went away just in that like acknowledgment and and I remember thinking to myself how when I was younger and I was parenting her I was so scared of messing her up and I thought to myself man if I messed her up a hundred different ways and each one led to A Moment Like This totally worth it I can imagine the puckering I I don’t have a kid but I can imagine the puckering I’d feel if I went to if I was just like oh I’m sorry I I raised you this way and now you’re wrong it’s sort of the way that I’d be afraid of that coming off peace sorry I wasn’t saying he was wrong I I what I was saying yeah I could see that being the fear of acknowledging it oh yeah yeah there was definitely that moment of oh and it was like you’re in pain like this because I I I was not confident I wasn’t fully confident as a parent that’s me and I was scared of X Y and Z and so I did a b and c so there’s and I remember that moment where we just looked at each other and we were just like helpless in it and in tears and then that’s like a really great way of just feeling through that yeah wow that’s a really great way of also closing this beautiful episode on helplessness pleasure as always Brett it’s good to be with you you too and thank you everybody for listening don’t forget to send us any comments or questions you can find us at Art of accomplishment.com or on Twitter at Art of a comp take care all right