Summary
Joe argues that to triple your intelligence you have to stop thinking of intelligence as purely intellectual. In AOA’s framing there are three intelligences — head, heart, and gut — and because they interact, working on one improves the others. He walks through each. Intellectual intelligence grows when you abandon black-and-white thinking and learn to see the truth and the falseness in every point of view; school trained us to find the one right answer, but real intelligence sees what’s right and wrong about every answer, which reveals more solution sets.
Heart intelligence is emotional, and Joe defines it not as reading the room but as the capacity to understand and fall in love with your own emotions. Avoiding emotions shrinks empathy and, crucially, destroys decision-making — neurologically, removing the emotional center leaves people unable to decide anything. Most of our decisions are made to feel better or avoid feeling worse, so until you can welcome all your emotions, your available solutions stay severely limited. Nervous-system intelligence is about fight-or-flight: a hyper-aroused system does black-and-white thinking and imagines a “false end” (get fired, then homeless, then… nothing), which collapses access to intelligence. The way to settle it is pleasure — you can’t be in fight-or-flight while taking pleasure in something as simple as the next breath.
Most people in our society operate almost entirely from the head, so simply gaining access to the heart and gut roughly triples their intelligence. Joe illustrates with a CEO of 2,000 employees whose self-reliance kept him from expressing his wants; once he let himself feel his wants, new options for goal-setting opened up and his whole company shifted — “not because he had an idea, but because he felt an emotion.” He closes with a somatic trick: we have neural nets in the head, heart, and gut, and simply placing your attention in one of them lets you speak from a different intelligence.
Key Concepts
- Head, heart, and gut are three intelligences that triple your capacity
- Intelligence is gated by the emotions you won’t feel
- Fight-or-flight collapses thinking into binaries and false ends
- Pleasure settles the nervous system back into intelligence
- Seeing truth and falseness in every view expands intelligence
Key Quotes
“If you start thinking about intelligence not just as intellectual intelligence, but you also think about it as emotional intelligence and nervous system intelligence, then you’re going to have a whole bunch of new levers to pull.”
“Until you can learn to enjoy and welcome all these emotions, you have a very limited amount of solutions that are available to you.”
“If I take the emotional center out of your brain… you stop making decisions.”
“Anytime you’re in fight or flight, you do binary thinking.”
“You can’t be in fight or flight when you’re in pleasure.”
“Just having access to your emotional intelligence and your nervous system intelligence immediately triples your intelligence.”
Transcript
If you want to 3x your intelligence, you have to think about intelligence in a whole different way. We’ve all heard stories about that really brilliant person who pisses everybody off. Their life is limited, not because they’re not intelligent, but because they emotionally can’t connect with people. Or we all understand the person who’s really smart, but they don’t have any self-control. They don’t understand how to actually work with their will, and so they’re super smart, but they’re on a couch playing video games all day long because they don’t really even understand their own nervous system. And so, if you start thinking about intelligence not just as intellectual intelligence, but you also think about it as emotional intelligence and nervous system intelligence, then you’re going to have a whole bunch of new levers to pull, and it turns out that as you pull one, the other ones are deeply affected. The way we talk about this in AOA is that there’s the head, the heart, and the gut, and they all interact with one another. And as you work on one, they affect the others. So, let’s get into the intellectual intelligence. Intellect on its own doesn’t really get you anywhere, but there are ways to improve it. And the best way to improve your intellectual intelligence is to start to see the truth in all points of view, to start to see the falseness in all points of view. So, often times our intellectual intelligence is limited because we have black and white thinking. We think this is right and this is wrong. Right? But if you look at science over time, what’s happened is that we thought this was wrong, we thought this was right, and then the next year something else is wrong, something else is right. This is how we learn is to understand that there’s a correctness in everything and there’s an incorrectness in everything. And often times, the way school has taught us to deal with intelligence is to figure out what’s the right answer. But what’s really important is to understand what’s right about every answer and what’s wrong about every answer. So, for instance, you have an intellectual intelligence that’s talking to you as a voice in the head, most likely a critical repeating voice in the head. But you just keep on thinking it’s right. And that really limits your thought process. Like, I’m bad for smoking. That’s right. But is it right? How can you see what’s right about that? Yeah, you are hurting yourself by smoking. There’s no doubt about it. At least the amount you’re smoking. And you’re also finding that moment of relaxation. And that relaxation is good for you. How’s another way you can find that relaxation? Smoking might be bad for me, but it might be worse that if I stop smoking, then I’m going to start doing something else that’s really bad. So you’re always looking for the truth and the falseness in every thought process. You see more solution sets. When you say something’s wrong, then you can’t solve the problem in all the ways that it might work if it’s right. So that’s how you really work on your intellectual intelligence. Obviously, there’s all the traditional ways that you can go as well. You can just like do brain teasers and you can, you know, learn math. You can do all this stuff that’s going to help increase your intelligence. But the most effective way that I have found is to just start seeing the truth and falseness in everything because it allows you not to get stuck in these very binary thought processes. The next is the heart intelligence. And the heart intelligence is the mammalian intelligence. It’s the intelligence that is the the intelligence of emotion. It’s what we focus on in the connection course and it often determines how much we can connect and how deep of relationships we can have and how we connect with one another. So most of the people think about emotional intelligence as can I read the room or can I read myself? And the science is pretty clear here that those aren’t even correlated. Meaning, my capacity to read a room doesn’t mean that I have the capacity to understand myself. And so that’s one way to think about it. I think about emotional intelligence in a slightly different way, which is can I understand my own emotions and fall in love with them? The more you can fall in love with your own emotions, the more you don’t resist other people’s emotions, the more you can see other people’s emotions, the more you can see yourself that you don’t resist yourself. So often times emotional intelligence is limited because we’re avoiding emotions. So we’re saying, “Oh, I don’t want to feel that way, so I’m not going to hang out with that person. I’m not going to see what that person says. I’m not going to feel what that person feels. I don’t want to deal with your your anger. I don’t want to deal with your sadness. I don’t want to deal with your fear. So I’m not going to I’m right? Which allows you not to be empathetic and compassionate or read them in the moment. Or you’re doing the same thing to yourself. I don’t want to feel that thing. I I have to avoid that, which means you’re really not understanding how you’re operating in the world. But the worst part is is it totally destroys your decision-making capacity. So we know neurologically speaking, if I take the emotional center out of your brain, what happens is you stop making decisions. Meaning it’ll take you a long time to decide even what color pen to use. It’ll take you even longer to decide where you want to have lunch. And so even though your intelligence would remain the same, you could be wicked smart, but you just can’t make a decision. And so your whole life falls apart. So if you want really great decision-making, it’s not because you’re intellectual or you’re devoid of emotions, because you can’t be devoid of emotions. In fact, think about how many decisions you made so that you could feel better or not feel as bad or feel loved and not feel rejected or to feel like you’re doing well instead of feeling like you’re a piece of Like how many decisions have you made to just avoid that anxiety and jump on your phone? Like how how many decisions are you making just emotionally? You can see that it’s like all your decisions are made this way. And so until you can learn to enjoy and welcome all these emotions, you have a very limited amount of solutions that are available to you. If I don’t ever want to risk feeling like a failure, I’m not going to ever take a chance. If I’m not going to take a chance, it means I’m not going to say hi to that woman in the bar, I’m not going to start the new company, I’m not going to ask my boss for a raise because I have none of that available to me because I’m so because I so much don’t want to feel just a single emotion, which is just a set of sensations that comes and goes. So, that’s the emotional intelligence. If you really want to expand your emotional intelligence, it’s about falling in love with welcoming all of the emotions. And that helps your ability to see others, it helps your ability to see yourself, and helps your ability to make great decisions. Now, for the nervous system. So, we have great studies that show that when kids are hyperactive nervous systems, when they’re super tracking because they’re living ghettos where there’s a lot of crime and violence, their capacity to learn is completely stunted. If you go into organizations where people are anxious all the time and they’re all worried about their job, it might help their decision-making for a short period of time, but pretty soon that starts killing their decision-making. And it’s actually when you think about that like 100-year-old company where everybody’s anxious all the time and they’re deteriorating and they can’t get it back, they can’t even with all the advantages and all the money, they can’t rebuild the company, it’s because that fear is so deeply in there. So, nervous system is very much a fight-or-flight type of situation. And when we are in fight-or-flight, what happens is our brain does two things. One, it does black-and-white thinking. It says, you can do this or you can do that. You can buy the car or not buy the car. You can date the woman or not date the woman. You can get married or not get married. And none of that is true. You can get married in one way. You can make get married in another way. You can get married with the agreement that I’m going to live in separate houses. You can get married with the agreement that we are going to live together 1 month out of every 6 weeks. You can get married in a way that you say you have you can have extramarital affairs. There are tons of ways that people get married. And you don’t have to pick one of them. But when you are in that fight or flight, it’s marriage or not marriage. So you’re not thinking about, oh, how do I get married in a way that’s going to feel great to me? So anytime you’re in fight or flight, you do binary thinking. The other thing that happens when you’re in fight or flight is that you think that there’s a false end. If I do this, I’ll get fired. Okay, so you get fired, then what happens? I don’t I’m not thinking about that. I just get fired. Okay, well, what happens after that? I’m homeless. Okay. Well, what happens if you’re homeless? Okay, you’re homeless. What’s going to happen? If you start thinking that through, you’re like, I I’m a college educated. I’m not insane. I’m probably going to be able to get a job somewhere. Okay, and then I’m going to get a job. So we just keep on thinking that there’s this false end that happens. And so what people have done for centuries, whether it’s the samurai or it’s the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, or if you’re like Marcus Aurelius, you think about, oh, I am going to actually visualize my own death past the moment of death into deterioration into the ground into becoming organic matter. Because if I can look through the end of death, I can even not be scared of death. If you can be in non-fight or flight when everybody else is in fight or flight, you have so much access to your intelligence that nobody else has. So the way to work with the nervous system is learning pleasure. Meaning, you can’t be in fight or flight when you’re in pleasure. So how do you take really great pleasure out of the simple things in life? I’m not talking about like I have to do a massage that’s like a forehand and massage while I’m doing yoga at a like relaxing spa while I’m getting a facial. I’m talking about just now. Right now, can you take a little more pleasure in watching this video? Can you take a little more pleasure in the next breath that you have? And that immediately, you can feel it settles your nervous system, which makes you more intelligent. So, those are the ways to work with each of the forms of intelligence. Now, most people only have one of these intelligence that they’re really focused on, and it’s usually in our society head. It’s not only head, but it’s usually head. And so, just having access to your emotional intelligence and your nervous system intelligence immediately triples your intelligence. So, let me give you an example of this. I’m working with a CEO of a company who’s got about 2,000 employees. And in his world, his job was to make sure that all the employees were happy. But the employees kept on feeling less and less safe. We did some work together. We went into his childhood. We saw that in his childhood, he was very self-reliant. And if you want to watch a video on self-reliance, you can find one below. He was very self-reliant. And so, what he was doing was not asking for his wants. He wasn’t asking for help. And what that meant was that all of his employees didn’t know what he wanted. By not sharing his wants, he was making his company far less effective. So, there’s this weird moment, right? Where intellectually, he understood that goals were important. He got it. But emotionally, he didn’t understand how important it was that he had wants and that he could express them and feel them and understand them and present them to other people. That was an emotional movement. When he allowed himself to feel the wants, all of a sudden, all these new options opened up for goal making. And so, he became far more intelligent and had a huge effect on his whole company, not because he had an idea, but because he felt an emotion. He allowed himself to feel that deep wanting. So, that’s what a different kind of intelligence can get you. That allows you to see solutions that you cannot see if you’re only working with one form of intelligence. And that expands everything, right? One decision like that can be the difference between making or breaking a company. One thing like that can be the difference between a great marriage and a and a shitty marriage. And so, your intelligence far more than triples when you start to understand that you’ve got a head, a heart, and a gut, and that you can work your intelligence on all three levels and get the life that you want. Now, there’s no perfect way to do it, but there is this weird somatic trick. It turns out, neurologically speaking, that we actually have a brain in the head, that’s the human-sized brain. We have a brain in the heart, which is like a mouse-sized brain of neural net. And we have a gut, which is like a cat-sized brain in the gut. So, we actually have neural nets in all three places. And we know that they talk to one another. And there’s also probably all sorts of things that happen in the brain as well, but somehow or another, there’s this weird thing about if you just put your attention in a place, you can access a different intelligence. And so, think about it this way. I’m just going to ask you a question. Put all of your attention in your head, all of your attention. Tell me about your mother, one sentence. Okay, great. Now, put all of your attention in your heart. Just rest there in your heart for a minute. And now, tell me one sentence about your mother. You see, it’s just that simple. It can just be that simple as just putting your attention there and speaking from that place. I cannot tell you why it works, but I know it works consistently for a lot of people. >> Mhm.