Summary
This is the foundational introduction to VIEW — Vulnerability, Impartiality, Empathy, and Wonder — Joe Hudson’s communication framework. Joe emphasizes that VIEW is fundamentally a state of mind, not a technique. He traces its origins to a consultant named Case who had an extraordinary ability to help people have breakthroughs and to sell authentically, but who insisted “it’s not the technique.” After Case’s death, Joe traveled the world finding other people with similar abilities and discovered what they all had in common: this particular state of mind.
The episode breaks down each component: Vulnerability is speaking your truth even when scared. Impartiality is not trying to achieve a specific outcome — more like a Sunday drive than a commute. Empathy is being with someone in their emotions without losing yourself. Wonder is curiosity without needing the answer, living in the openness of the question with awe. Joe explains why techniques like NVC get “weaponized” when the underlying state of mind isn’t there, because micro-expressions, mirror neurons, and body language reveal the true internal state regardless of words used.
Brett and Joe discuss the neuroscience — how being under attack neurologically prevents curiosity and learning, how all decisions are ultimately emotional, and how wonder literally dissolves fear (you can’t wonder about a lion’s weight and be terrified simultaneously). The practical payoff includes teams hitting performance metrics after years of failure, dissolved loneliness, deeper security, and conflict becoming a source of better solutions rather than something to avoid.
Key Concepts
- VIEW is a state of mind not a technique
- Vulnerability is truth plus fear
- Impartiality is wandering not commuting
- Empathy is being with not in
- Wonder is curiosity without needing an answer
- How and what questions open conversations
- Communication techniques get weaponized
- Wonder eliminates defensiveness
Key Quotes
“If you see this and view this as a technique it won’t work. And if you see it as practicing a state of mind that allows for the technique to work… then you can have a tremendous amount of success with it.”
“Vulnerability is to speak your truth even when it’s scary.”
“Impartiality… it’s far more like wandering than it is like goal orientation.”
“Wonder is… a lot like curiosity except for you’re not looking for the answer.”
“If you actually stop and say what am I curious about, what do I have actual deep wonder for, then the fear that you have dissipates.”
“The magic of it is that it allows all of us — it creates the environment where all of us can be the best that we can be.”
Transcript
foreign if you think about it this way it’s like if you have a conversation with the person and at the end of that conversation they feel like they understand themselves better they understand their business better they want to continue to have conversations with you 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 my name is Brett Kistler I’m an adventurer entrepreneur and a self-exploration Enthusiast I’m here with my co-host Joe Hudson Joe is a business coach who spent decades working with some of the world’s top Executives and teams developing a unique model of human patterns that underpin how we operate with ourselves each other and the world a good entry point into this model is a mindset called view vulnerability impartiality empathy and wonder through understanding and cultivation we learn to easefully drop into the view State of Mind deepening self-awareness and increasing our connection with the world around us to learn more about this podcast or courses visit art of accomplishment.com come there are so many approaches out there for deepening communication and interpersonal skills whether in the realm of the personal or the professional these Frameworks are often composed of learned strategies and techniques that offer prescriptive style adjustments that may be directionally correct but most fall short of pointing to the root conditions that facilitate true depth in human connection what if the key ingredient at the core of strong communication is not a strategy but a state of mind and how can we cultivate a more connective way of being through practice in our relationships as they are right now these are the questions behind a practice we call view which we’ll be covering in this five part series so Joe what is View oh practically it’s a way to have conversations it’s a communication methodology that allows your conversations to be far more effective and by effective I mean more connected more intimate and more productive from anything from sales to product development to conversations with your husband or wife or co-worker and it’s particularly good at creating like I said more connection but also it’s really good at embracing any kind of conflict or having difficult conversations so practically that’s what it is but realistically it’s it’s a state of mind it’s it’s communicating from a state of mind yeah I’m practicing that state of mind okay what do you mean by realistically to answer that question I have to really talk about how the whole thing came about and the way that it came about was you know I was um an investor for a while and and I hired this consultant at some point and this consultant had this amazing capacity he had this capacity to do two things one he could sit down and have a conversation with somebody in a very short period of time they could have a breakthrough where they would see themselves in the world differently and in a way that gave them more freedom and more capacity and he also had this great ability to sell he couldn’t sell what he didn’t believe in so he always sold stuff that he really cared about but he could sell and and I would watch him sit with somebody who was absolutely the opposite of him and characteristic and he would just ask questions and he would end up selling whatever it is that he was there to sell like about 80 percent of the time I would say generally he had an 80 hit rate in both of these two kinds of conversations and I would say to him wow how did you do that and he goes it’s not the technique okay you can’t do this if you’re trying to learn the technique I’ve tried he was he was this guy was a character’s name was case and he would just be like you can’t learn it it’s not a technique that’s what he would say and um anyway so case uh got ill with cancer unfortunately um has passed away but he wanted a very particular technique of healing that you can only find in California so he came to California and he lived with my family we became very close we were very close before that and I would watch him have these conversations every day and and I’ve learned a lot through osmosis and I I had already been 20 something years of self-discovery so a lot of it made sense to me but when he passed I was like I know there’s other people who can do this and and I knew like one famous person who could do you know could have a similar kind of set of conversations and I was like I’m gonna go find out what makes this tick and so I went around the world looking for people found people and realize what they all had in common and what they all had in common was was view what acronym of view and I’m sure we’ll get into for a second in a second but the but the the main thing is that it is the state of mind that allows it it is not the technique and so that’s why I say realistically it’s the state of mind because if you see this and view this as a technique it won’t work and if you see it as practicing a state of mind that allows for the technique to work if there’s a technique even needed there’s definitely a technique that helps um then you can have a tremendous amount of success with it and not just the success of like wow now I can have good conversations it’s it’s success in like oh now I talk to myself in a different way oh now I am in a um a frame of mind and I have a perspective that’s more open more free more loving yeah and come to think of that I’ve seen some of the some of the aspects of this work in other places as techniques and they just never seem to land quite as deeply and uh this this state of mind concept seems to really be key here uh can you explain a little bit more about that neurologically and physically when we communicate there’s a lot of things going on besides what we say there is our body language there is the empathy that’s happening via mirror neurons there’s intonation there’s micro Expressions there’s so many things that are happening outside of language and as animals with mirror neurons we know that that’s happening whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not there’s some part of us that has the awareness of this stuff and they they can’t be faked micro Expressions can’t be faked it is a representation of what’s actually happening in your system on an emotional level and on a nervous system level and so if you are using it as a technique it can’t work because the actual state of mind is going to shine through in these other non in these other non-intellectual ways and and so if you think about that for a second it’s like this um it’s a very cool thought process if you if you see people they learn these great techniques that are out there like a non-violent communication or something like that and all of a sudden they’ve been weaponized you just see them being weaponized right it’s like you see all this communication training go south I mean if you’ve done communication training you know you’ve done it and then it’s gone South right and if it’s because it’s the communication is a natural out point of your state of mind and it can help you change your state of mind but if you just focus on it like I’m practicing a state of mind and that communication comes out of it it it’s just far more successful can you give us an example of that yeah so uh let’s say your boyfriend or girlfriend wants your undivided attention and you don’t particularly want to give it to them you want to watch like the soccer match or you want to watch uh ER or whatever it is but you decide like oh they’re going to be pissed if I don’t or oh my God I’m gonna listen to the shit forever if I don’t so then you give them your attention but it’s unwilling it’s it’s full of resentment it’s it’s frustrated let’s just say and inevitably you’ll be paying attention to the person who asks you to pay attention and then they’re going to start getting frustrated now you don’t really want to be here and you’re like well what the hell you know I just I just stopped what I was doing to give you the attention that you asked for now that’s not good enough like this is right who hasn’t been in this conversation yeah exactly that’s how it starts and it’s because you’re you it’s obvious and everything besides your language that you don’t want to be there paying attention and so it doesn’t feel good because we know it and that that’s what I mean if if the state of mind isn’t oh I want to pay attention to you it will never work if the state of mind and the communication is I’m trying to get something out of you which is the antithesis of you then it’ll never work no matter what technique you use and then then sometimes we actually are duped by believing somebody’s intentions that aren’t true through you know whatever whatever techniques they’re using so how does how does that work how does it work when uh when somebody’s state of mind doesn’t shine through their state of mind maybe if they’re like a sociopath so they’re not they’re not actually having a very particular kind of experience when like a very natural Human Experience when they’re talking to you uh outside of something like that then it’s really two things that happens when you can’t sense this from other people one is that you have something you want to believe and they are giving you that so we’ll believe a lie if it rhymes with the truth that we want to believe you see this in mass media all the time it’s like okay cool they said that and that that that rhymes with what I believe so I’m gonna buy into that or sales people you know our infomercials yeah you could be rich and without any effort oh I want to believe that so you can so that’s part of the ways that we get duped is that we’re actually basically duping ourselves and the other thing that happens is that if you study trauma and I just don’t I don’t mean like huge trauma that also is true like you know like a war trauma or a car accident trauma but even like the minor traumas of always being criticized by somebody who is supposed to be nurturing you when we hear somebody that reminds us of that trauma then we’re not actually hearing them we’re not actually with them or with the person or people who like helped us get that trauma into our bones and there’s this great data on that about how you’re kind of not in the same time and space when you’re moving to trauma you know and you you see this with War veterans all the time in a major way right where they think they’re in the war even though they’re you know on their living room sofa it happens in minor ways all the time and so in those places then we’re not really aware of the person’s intentions so those are the two main ways it happens yeah like there are those times when when somebody starts acting like a child and it’s like wait a minute okay they’re acting the age they were when the thing that this is mapping onto occurred to them exactly that’s exactly right and and it’s why like you can learn really duplicitous sales techniques and they work you know one out of eight times because you’re just basically fishing for the fish who wants that bait and so you can do that and it looks like it works but if you’re authentic and you’re actually in a deep care for the person then it works a lot more effectively and there’s great studies on this of like what are the best sales techniques and you see that like they did this with car salesmen it was a like I think it was even used car salesman and they were like who are the most effective car salesmen and there was good car salesman and really good car salesman and then there was these just unbelievably great salesmen like just in numbers and the cases of those unbelievably great performers it was because they actually cared about their customer they saw it as a relationship those relationships came back over and over again and they saw their job as to really help that person be in the right vehicle and people knew it and so it worked like the numbers worked far better than the whatever it is one in eight and they would I think it was something like I I can’t you can’t quote me on it but it was something something like three times the performance of an average car salesperson so what does Vue stand for yeah the acronym it’s uh V is the vulnerability I is impartiality e is empathy and W is Wonder so that’s what it stands for vulnerability impartiality empathy and wonder and that’s really describing the state of mind right and there’s some techniques layered on top of that not much and they’re not necessary if you’re actually in that vulnerable impartial empathetic um and full of wonder state of mind so it seems sort of like almost like ways to check that you’re in the state of mind if you’re in the state of mind that these point to then you will be having vulnerability and partiality empathy and wonder yeah it’s like that it’s also like they’re great ways I use these four ways to describe it because they’re great ways to sink into it quickly you know so if you’re not there what are what are the best techniques what are the best words reminders to get you there quickly yeah that makes sense okay so let’s go through each of them what do what do each of these mean to you so vulnerability is to speak your truth even when it’s scary that’s what it is to be vulnerable is to be actually very much yourself in your truth even though you’re scared of the result or the potential result uh impartiality is not trying to achieve an outcome for yourself or others so it’s like it’s far more like wandering than it is like goal orientation um empathy is to be with a person in their emotions and wonder is it’s a lot like curiosity except for you’re not looking for the answer there’s a lot more awe and wonder than there is in curiosity but you’re definitely not looking for the answer vulnerability sounds a lot like weakness for a lot of people and so how do you come up with this definition for vulnerability yeah I think the reason that people think being vulnerable as being weak is because they get confused with uh the difference between being weak and feeling weak so when we are vulnerable there’s often a visceral response in our body is an emotional response a nervous system responses like oh I’m gonna get weak I mean I’m I’m being weak and I’m gonna get attacked I think you’re gonna you’re gonna get that um when you’re being vulnerable especially for the first you know 10 or so times so I think that’s where that confusion comes from vulnerable the reason I describe it this way is if you’re not in your truth you can’t be vulnerable right so if you’re not if you’re not in your truth and you’re there’s no exposure if I’m pretending to be somebody else and you attack me for being somebody else is like well they’re not really attacking me they’re attacking someone else it’s so that’s the truth part of it and then the second part of it is even when it’s scary and so being in Our Truth isn’t scary if we don’t think we’re gonna get attacked being in Our Truth isn’t scary when we don’t feel like somebody will judge us being in Our Truth isn’t scary when we aren’t scared of the consequences and so vulnerability is being in your truth even when we’re scared of those consequences and it’s and it’s really the opposite of weakness It’s actually an incredible form of strength and it’s a very deep practice Yeah like it can take you a very long way if you if you practice it on a daily basis yeah it reminds me of the uh the definition of courage which is that uh courage isn’t the lack of fear courage is the willingness to feel fear yeah yeah not overcome it but feel it that yes so right yeah that’s it so that’s that’s vulnerability um yeah let’s get into impartiality yeah which is I mean it sounds impossible like and especially in business I mean theoretically you could just be completely impartial in your entire life and how would you get anywhere that you want to go yeah that’s the Assumption it has to be some partiality right yeah so there definitely is some partiality there’s no like if you really really pay attention every sentence that we have has some little bit of an agenda in it so it’s very asymptotic in that way meaning that it like we can keep on getting less and less partial but we can’t become completely 100 impartial um but what I’m talking about here is the difference between getting in your car at a very specific time to get to your job at a very specific time and making sure that you get there and getting in a car and driving around following what feels great to follow in that moment and wandering kind of like the old-fashioned Sunday drive that’s what I’m talking about so in that case one is highly partial it is let’s get in the car let’s get there let’s get there on time this is the route I want to take and I don’t want traffic and blah blah blah blah blah and one of them is like I’m partial in the fact that I want to take a drive but I don’t care where I end up and I am here to enjoy myself and so that’s that’s the thing and the reason this is so important is because we feel when somebody has an agenda for us and we resist it and just tell a two-year-old to do something and the nature of them isn’t no right so the more agenda that we have and you feel with like a sales person all the time they really want you to buy the less you want to buy even if you buy you’re like no it’s like stop trying to sell me um that’s what I mean by agenda and with business what’s interesting is everyone thinks that you need to be highly partial to be good at business you you do have to have a clear intention you do have to have a clear goal there’s no doubt there uh how you get there if you’re really highly partial it’s going to slow you down and because there might be 10 ways to get there that are better or quicker or better for the people who are getting you there so impartiality is actually far more efficient as a way of getting someplace in business and the way I talk about or think about that often is there is a river that we are on particularly in business where there’s kind of where the customer wants to go what’s needed what’s wanted where the employees want to go right and if you are reading that River and going with that River then there’s a lot less effort and if you decide you’re going against that River if you decide that you are going to like not go with the flow but go against the flow or count of the flow it’s a lot more effort or building Canal as you’ve said before or build a canal yeah so so that’s the thing so so to be impartial it works incredibly well and you know I work with um as you know some like Executives running you know companies of thousands of people and there’s like this amazing click that happens when they they realize like oh if I can be impartial in these ways not give up my goal but be impartial in how this thing happens and being partial with people I actually discover what is and then I can use that information and use that data to create a better plan and if I don’t try to force a particular thing and we just agree on a goal then all of a sudden things move so much quicker and have so much more efficiency it’s the hardest one for people to get impartiality so hard yeah yeah it reminds me of a example you’ve mentioned before about trying to plan a whole basketball game that sounds like a good example can you tell me what it is I’ve completely forgotten oh yeah um so like you have a clear goal which is to put the ball in the hoop um and if you try to plan the whole thing and you’re partial to no the the ball is going to go to this person now but somebody’s already in the way so like passing it to them is clearly not a good idea if you’re not open to other options then you you’re not going to make it to your goal that’s it that’s it that’s exactly it awesome thanks for remembering that empathy then uh so some folks feel lost in empathy and they they get lost in the other person and they they lose their own goals they lose their own wants yeah so empathy isn’t that you know so I would say empathy is being with somebody in their emotions so it’s not avoiding their emotional state it’s not trying to change their emotional state it’s not trying to make them happy it’s not trying to get them to an epiphany empathy is just like oh you’re there and I’m with you but it’s also not being in it with them it’s not believing the story and saying oh it’s true your husband does your wife does you and your boss oh my God they are taking advantage it’s not it’s also not losing your own emotional state yeah it oftentimes will will be so empathetic with people that whatever they’re feeling we’re feeling oh you’re right I am the bad guy yeah I’m terrible to you oh shame yes that’s like a perfect way that people are empathetic in a way that they’ve lost themselves so it’s not true empathy true empathy is being with somebody it’s being next to them it’s like holding their hand it’s not losing yourself in them so then uh then Wonder then and you said wonder and not curiosity are as opposed to your distinct from curiosity why not curiosity why Wonder curiosity is I mean it’s a lovely thing it’s like oh what’s happening over there uh but there’s something that switches in your physical state like if you just right now think to yourself oh what’s happening for Brett in this conversation there’s kind of an open expansiveness that happens with that question but then as soon as you try to figure it out something constricts wonder is that open living in the openness of the question with awe and curiosity can be that but curiosity can also become very focused on need the answer need the answer need the answer and so I’m pointing by using the word Wonder to that being in the question without needing to get an answer if you just stop and think about like what would it be like to be with a person who’s just in the question with me who’s just like has wonder about what’s happening with me and they don’t need me to solve anything like you can feel your whole system relax yeah that makes for a lot of ease in a sales conversation as well right exactly if you’re not in that ease and you’re like focused on trying to figure out ER than the person’s mirror neurons are like well I don’t want to be around this so in a way all of this feels very process based yeah that’s right yeah it’s interesting that you you mentioned it recently I was watching a Ted Talk on uh design process and one of the things that they were talking about in this in this lecture was how if you’re shooting for a result you won’t get it the the thing you have to do is stay focused on the process and it’s going to go sideways it’s not going to go well at times but the output is consistently better than if you’re going for a particular result and so if you look at design Theory they they all talk about this process and having like faith in the process and that it will lead you to the outcome and if you leave the process it won’t lead you to the outcome and this the the exact same thing it’s very much like living principally you’re saying here are the principles I’m living by because I know consistently if I live by them it works out in the way that that works for me and works for my my deepest truth and it’s the same thing with this it’s that guy case that I talked about in the earlier part of the program he would get into these conversations because I have no idea what the hell is going to happen and he always pointed to that and that’s what he’s saying he’s saying that I don’t know what’s going to happen because if I did or if I tried to make it happen in a particular way it’s going to go to shit so it’s far better for me to just be in this process and Trust the process so it sounds like this is a way to trust and flow with the like self-organizing social and business dynamics that are already occurring and not get in the way of them through uh kind of narrow-minded constraint or right management of the process or over management yeah that’s right so an example is that you know for a while there I directed short films and one of the things that I learned was that if I wanted a very specific result from an actor I’d get a horrible performance whereas if I could give the actor a clear objective then their performance just did really really well and it’s a really similar thought process is that if you hold that objective and you trust in the process then it works out and that’s not to say this is an interesting part because a lot of people when they start learning view they think so then I’m not allowed to have an opinion or I’m not allowed to have a boundary that’s absolutely not the case those are really important things and they can be actually incredibly vulnerable things to say and in business all the time I’ll say you know what I’m not okay with is this and I’ll just leave that up front on the table like this doesn’t work for me here the reasons it doesn’t work for me so how do we solve that problem but then I’m impartial once I have that and I’m even impartial as far as if someone says why what is it what are you missing like I’m open to listening to that but if I’m not convinced out of it I’m not going to pretend that I am to be in a view conversation because that can’t be because if I’m if I’m not being true to myself inside the conversation I can’t be vulnerable I can’t be impartial either for that matter and and it’s very hard to be curious and the person’s not doing business with you yeah exactly and then you’re right exactly and then it’s gonna go to shit eventually anyhow exactly right yeah so you mentioned earlier that there are techniques this is this is all a process around a frame of mind that it emerges from but that there are techniques so there must be something to help point us back to this frame of mind yeah yeah it’s it’s how and what questions so that’s that’s the entirety of the technique is to ask how and what questions there’s there’s a technique that’s more for running meetings that I’ve developed as well and there but the general thing is how and what questions and the reason is is because they’re open-ended questions so if you say do you like ice cream I get to say yes or no if you say how do you feel about ice cream you might hear a story of my childhood and you might hear that chocolate chip is my favorite and you might hear about my dairy allergy or you might hear how like I had a cow when I was a kid like you have no idea what you’re going to hear and so you get access to so much more data which shows that you’re actually in Wonder and if you only want to hear yes or no you’re not really in wonder so it’s how what questions and which are mainly because they’re open questions um obviously there’s who what where when and why um and all those other ones are good but they’re just not very common how and what are the most common ones and we don’t use why questions in the technique because of two reasons one is most people when they’re saying a why question they’re in judgment you know it’s why’d you do that there’s not real curiosity there it’s just like you should feel shitty and I want you to make an excuse for yourself is really what that communication is why wasn’t this done on time why wasn’t this done on time is this you know it’s like you’re looking for them to make an excuse you’re you’re already in a judgment place with them typically not always the other reason that why questions don’t work so well is because they’re the hardest questions to actually answer there’s a somebody who said why questions are the questions that scientists can’t answer like why is the sun is a really hard question and and I would say unanswerable question whereas what makes the Sun how did the Sun get there those are answerable questions so that’s the other thing and or at least there’s a lot of information you can speak on about it yeah yeah exactly and the other thing is um yeah so true it’s exactly you get information you get data uh but the other thing is that usually when I talk about all this somebody will say to me yeah but you can be judgmental with how what questions and yes you can you can be judgmental with anything what makes you such a dick yeah what makes you say but yeah and the funniest thing is when I’m doing view I might actually ask that question like hey what what’s making you such a dick right now and if I say it from view if I say it with vulnerability impartial if I say it like oh my God this is kind of scary to say this to this person but it’s true for me that they’re being a dick and I’m actually quite curious I have Wonder there right and I don’t really need them to answer in a particular way or or nor do I want them to not be a dick and I actually can empathize with them then their answers can be and it happens all the time in my world where I can say what’s making you such a dick right now and they’re like laugh or they’ll say oh yeah I’ve had a bad day or blah blah blah it’s not what makes you such a dick right right one of one of those ways of asking it is open to all answers like hey did you have a rough day like what’s what’s going on with you yes and another one of them is just like you better have a really good excuse for this you know exactly that’s exactly it yeah so that’s but why questions just imply it more and it’s more easy for the person on the other side to assume it than how or what questions also how and what questions make you reframe questions in a new way which triggers your brain you know it’s like it kind of opens your neurology for a second when you say to somebody something like what is it that’s making you such a dick it’s not a way we’d normally phrase the question and so it does something to them and to us yeah yeah I found after after doing this work there’s been so many times where I’ve been in a conversation I’m about to say something and it starts with something other than how or what and then I pause and then I find the thing I’m curious about and then a question comes out and the conversation goes in a totally different direction that’s right yeah exactly that’s what happens all the time and it’s not just different it’s also like far more meaningful and productive often you know I’ll do this in a room full of like high-powered Executives and after we have our first few conversation I’ll say so that you just had a 10-minute meeting have you ever had such a productive 10-minute meeting and that’s like that’s the moment of realization that everybody goes through where they’re like holy crap without an agenda I just solved more puzzles or I just overcame more roadblocks and then I have having an hour-long meeting with a direct report pushing them to an answer right and there’s a there’s a two-sidedness to it there’s a there’s a side that we spoke to earlier where um the open-ended questions give you more information more data but uh on the yes on the other side the person gets to be heard and speak their piece and speak to their wants and needs rather than checking a box of like oh which option was I given vanilla or chocolate exactly and and because of that you can actually come up with a better solution for a problem if you’re in that position in the conversation but also oftentimes that’s all that anybody actually needs like I see this happen all the time where say a manager wants people to go in One Direction and the people don’t want to go and all they actually need is to be heard and when they get heard fully heard they’re like okay I’ll go in that direction that makes sense we’ve all lived in that situation where we are basically being stubborn and no I don’t want to do it and then when we feel fully heard we’re like oh okay almost every complaint I’ve ever heard about a boss or an employee has had some form of I don’t feel heard in it yeah that’s right tell me a time that you were at your Peak productivity and you felt unheard yeah I know yeah exactly nobody can unless I was shutting myself out from everybody else and doing Peak productivity with myself right which means that you weren’t being productive in a team that’s right okay so so let’s swing back to the science around this tell me more about that yeah there’s a lot of stuff out there in Psychology and Neuroscience and you know CBT all sorts of different kinds of uh studies that support what’s happening if you’re in a view State of Mind uh but let’s focus on let’s say two or three of the main ones one of them is just a simple thing if you are under attack you can’t be curious or if you’re under attack you can’t learn because you’re not curious so we know this uh and on many different levels one we know that if kids feel under stress they don’t do as well on tests they don’t learn as quickly we know that um we know that if two people are in a fight here’s something you’ve never seen right one person’s like you son of a blah blah blah blah blah you stupid and the other person says oh you know what you’re right yeah yeah I get your point we don’t do that because it’s neurologically not possible and so that’s let’s say the extreme attack where we can never see somebody end up being curious or learning and then there’s just more and more subtle forms of attack and the most subtle forms of attack are you just trying to push somebody into doing what you want them to do be happy stop crying just do this task and the more that attack is there the more you’re trying to push somebody into something and be different than who they are the less able they are to learn so that’s just a simple one and if you think about it just this way it’s like if you visualize if you close your eyes and you visualize yourself like running from a lion and you’re running as fast as you can and it’s like you can hear the pause hitting the ground you know it’s catching up to you it’s going to pounce on you at any minute and it’s a huge thing you know you’re dead and it’s coming it’s coming it’s coming it’s coming it’s coming here’s what you don’t do you don’t go oh I wonder how much it weighs right and if you stop if you actually do that exercise and you stop and you go how much does it weigh all the fear goes away which is why wonder is such an important thing to point to because if you actually stop and say what am I curious curious about what do I have actual deep Wonder for then the fear that you have dissipates and if you’re trying to push somebody into something that’s because you’re in fear that’s what creates the drama of our life is our incapacity to love people as they are and we’re scared of something and so we start trying to push them around so this lion example brings up a good point that fear is actually useful because if you if you did stop running from the lion to think about how much it weighs then you would get eaten right so fear is helpful but it’s just a lot of times in our lives we end up having a stress response that doesn’t match the actual moment so what it seems like you’re pointing to with view is really cultivating a lower homeostatic set point for stress from which open-ended questions can emerge naturally and curiosity can exist that’s all all together true and then there’s also a practical thing which is we are not going to be as open we are not going to learn as much we are not going to want to hang out with as much people who are scared in their conversation with us therefore trying to control us and we’ll trust them less and we’ll trust them less that’s right because they’re trusting themselves less they think that they have to control something to be safe and people who actually deeply trust themselves don’t think that that’s true they know that they’re safe no matter what I mean unless a lion’s chasing them right yeah yeah and as as mammals we can detect that in other people a mile away we naturally do that when we walk into a room and we find out who is the one that’s most stressed out and scared and who’s the one that’s the most calm and then like subconsciously we put ourselves into sort of pecking orders based on this that’s exactly it yeah and the Predator smells it out and attacks the one that’s exactly so that’s it so that that’s that part of it and then there’s also this another part of the science is that there’s we make decisions emotionally you know if you took out our emotional centers of our brain we stop making decisions it would take us a half an hour to decide what color pen to use it would take us four hours to decide where to have lunch there’s a great book on this called Descartes error and so we make decisions emotionally so do people pay two hundred dollars for Nike shoes because they think that it’s it’s like 200 worth of shoe no they’re making an emotional decision do you buy this piece of software because you like the sales guy or the sales woman do you buy this piece of software because it makes you feel safe do you buy this piece of software because you beat it up and you feel like oh they have answers for it what the answer is that you are buying that piece of software based on an emotion and you might use logic to figure out the most likely way that you would get that emotion like I I don’t want to be yelled at by my boss so I’m making an emotional decision to not get yelled at and I’ll use logic to figure out how to not get yelled at by my boss but we’re making emotional decisions and so all the information in the world won’t sell people stuff if if it was just pure information then a Nike ad would be like look at this shoe it has six inches of leather siding and it has eight holes on each side for the shoestrings and like that would be oh but it’s not it we make the emotional Buy and so if I’m hanging out with you you’re hanging out with me because of an emotional experience that we have when we’re together if I am buying the product it’s because I’m having emotional experience around the product if I am wanting intimacy with you if I would want to call you when I’m having a problem if I want to come home and see my parents if I don’t get offended when you tell me that you need space all those things are based on emotions they’re not based on facts and so that’s really a main thing about view because we’re we’re acknowledging owning and addressing the emotional part of a conversation well when making a decision is only so much logic you can actually do given the time constraint correct and there’s so much more to consider I think what you’re saying is that the the emotions are a way that we we make a probabilistic inference based on everything that’s happened in our lives with a kind of a gist a feeling in our body that helps shape which questions we even ask with logic to figure out the final details and then make a decision yeah there’s that aspect of it and there’s also the aspect of it like how many decisions have you made so that you don’t feel like let’s say weak how many decisions have you made to feel loved like whole swaths of decisions are made over this kind of thing and a view conversation allows people to have all those emotions feel safe in them and to feel actually accepted and wanted and appreciated in that experience for who they are which we all want yeah and it’s being it’s important to just remember that everybody that you’re in a conversation with in any you know even in a stuffy business environment everybody’s making emotional decisions based on the things you just spoke about that’s right absolutely okay so so tell me more about the payoff and the the benefits of of practicing view yeah this is a this is a common story in my world I will go into a team of people typically at Silicon Valley teams that I go into it’s not only Silicon Valley teams but typically it is and so you’re talking about really smart programmers or really smart business people and they’re not getting along and I I remember this one particular example the team had like a Navy SEAL a ex-navy seal in it and MIT triple graduate you know it was like that kind of a team of just super intense people and they weren’t getting along they weren’t being productive and half day into a two-day workshop you know the people who hadn’t been able to get along were crying with each other because of all the pain and all the the all the resistance in their system that could let go when they realized oh the person across from me isn’t doesn’t hate me isn’t trying to kill me isn’t trying to destroy my thing they’re we’re just not communicating with each other clearly and it was so amazingly beautiful and then that team who had not hit their performance metrics and I think it had been three years hit their performance metrics that quarter that’s a payoff is like you get a tremendous amount of cohesion Not Just Between the team but between you and the people around you right and we all know that when we feel deeply connected with somebody that we will go to the ends of the Earth to support them and they will go to the ends there support us and that’s really what we want from friends and if it’s a true support it’s not like a dysfunctional support it’s really what we want it’s what we want in our teams so that’s one benefit the another benefit is that most people right now are like oh conflict how do I avoid that or conflict I’ll just get through it I’m just going to push go get in the conflict so I can get on the other side of it when you really understand this Frame of Mind conflict is an amazing thing because what happens every time is that conflict gives you better Solutions and you’re happy for it you start looking for conflict not looking for conflict like ah here’s a way I can pick a fight but like oh there’s attention let’s go explore it because I know if I explore it from this Frame of Mind all of a sudden I’m going to have better Solutions better answers better paths forward it’s also just a really lovely state to be in it’s like quite Pleasant you know if you are in Wonder it’s a more open and spacious feeling than if you think you know everything all the time like think about the people you know in your life who know everything all the time it’s like they don’t look like they’re enjoying themselves if you think about people who are um empathetic not in somebody but they’re just like oh I can be here with you in your state that that’s just a more open state so it’s just a really lovely place to be and there’s the efficiency that I mentioned like with the 10-minute sessions and uh yeah the other thing is that what I noticed is when people really get into this kind of conversation and they start practicing it like this sense of loneliness just dissolves there’s so many people in our society feel very lonely and very insecure not insecure like I’m not good enough but insecure like oh my God I might lose my job oh my God and when they see this technique at work and they use it and that’s frame of mind becomes kind of a steady state place what happens is they don’t have that deep experience of loneliness they know what it is to be alone but they’re not oh my God I’m all alone and nobody loves me that’s not happening and it’s not only that the loneliness starts to dissolve but also this sense of security shows up in the sense of security is there is because you realize that like no matter what your boss says no matter what happens you’re able to have this conversation with them that actually benefits you and them consistently and there’s a deep level of security in that because we’re not really scared of losing our job and not being able to make money what we’re really scared of is that we’re not going to be of value and that we’re not going to be heard and that we’re not going to be able to be seen for what our value is and so we’re worried about losing our job but if we know that every time we have a conversation it’s valuable to ourselves and the other people around us whenever we want that it’s like that’s a deep form of security right or if we’re worried about losing our job because that would mean to us that we are not valuable anywhere doesn’t matter if you lose your job if you know you’re valuable somewhere else and you could go do something that’s that you’re valuable at yeah that’s right if you think about it this way it’s like if you have a conversation with a person and at the end of that conversation they feel like they understand themselves better they understand their business better they want to continue to have conversations with you that’s how it works right yeah and and the thing is you don’t have to know shit to do that you just have to ask really good questions and be vulnerable in it and to be empathetic in it and to be impartial in it and to be full of wonder in it so it doesn’t even require that you have skills it just requires that you are are having a conversation with them that allows the best of them to come out so yeah to that and I’ve noticed that view is seems to be like this magical ingredient this Special Sauce you can just pour on a workplace and it transforms relationships and teams and how do you account for this it’s like like I was saying happened in that one company that there’s that I’ve seen it so consistently happen and it feels like magic I think partially because often Revenue increases because team cohesion increases because sales methodology improves because the products are more connected with the customer and product development conversations are better that there’s all sorts of things that happen when people feel more connected and they’re actually more in Wonder and they’re wondering what the right question is and they’re wondering what the customer wants and when they’re willing to be vulnerable about maybe the product sucks there’s all sorts of cool things but really when people are met with this level of openness when they’re met with this level of care and nurturing when they’re met with this level of support they really know it and that is what relaxes something in them and it allows them to perform at their best like we said at the beginning it was it’s like if you know you’re being judged by a team if you know that um if you know that the people in your team are not open to you you’re not going to be at your Peak Performance but if you know that that’s there if you know that you can be accepted and the boundaries will be held and you feel safe in that environment you’re going to be incredibly effective even if the outside world is like man you’ve got two months to solve this and you better solve it if you know you’ve got your team there with you that’s going to get you your best performance and it’s going to get you your best performance in a marriage as well right if I know that my wife deeply supports me deeply cares about me is open to my truth is in deep wonder about what my experience is is vulnerably sharing with me that’s what allows me to be the best husband and vice versa and that’s really the magic of it the magic of it isn’t some technique or some State of Mind the magic of it is that it allows all of us it creates the environment where all of us can be the best that we can be where all of us can live in our truth that’s what’s the magic is it’s just like really good soil and then the seed of who we are gets to sprout and who we are is freaking amazing so view vulnerability impartiality empathy and wonder uh this has been a great episode Joe thank you very much thank you thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US in 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 foreign