Summary
Joe Hudson introduces “The Golden Algorithm” — the principle that whatever emotion we are avoiding, we invite into our lives in exactly the way we are avoiding it. Every recurring problem has at its core an emotion being resisted, and the strategy used to avoid that emotion recreates the very condition we’re trying to escape. For example, someone avoiding guilt about not exercising eats instead, which creates more guilt. Someone avoiding anger becomes passive-aggressive, which provokes anger in others.
Joe explains that what we call “material problems” are actually emotional problems — we wouldn’t experience them as problems if we felt good about the outcomes. The key insight is that the emotion being avoided contains the information needed to resolve the situation. By learning to welcome, invite, and fully feel our emotions rather than resist them, problems begin to dissolve. He also discusses how shame, judgment, and guilt act as “blocking” emotions that stagnate emotional flow, and how beneath the so-called negative emotions lies a spectrum of positive emotions including joy, bliss, and contentment.
The episode also addresses pitfalls of using this framework: not going deep enough into the avoided emotion, assuming there’s only one emotion being avoided, trying to use welcoming as a strategy to make emotions go away, and beating yourself up for avoiding emotions (which is itself avoidance). Joe notes that the algorithm works with “negative” emotions (avoiding them brings them back) but not with positive ones (avoiding joy doesn’t bring more joy — it brings you back to negative emotions).
Key Concepts
- Avoidance creates the pattern it fears
- Problems are emotional, not material
- Welcoming, not just accepting, emotions
- Joy is the matriarch
- Shame stagnates emotional fluidity
- Emotions have intelligent signals
- Self-attack is another form of avoidance
- Time dilation trades long-term wellbeing for short-term comfort
Key Quotes
“Whatever we’re avoiding emotionally we are inviting into our lives in the exact way that we are avoiding it.”
“What we call material problems out in the world, what they really are is emotional problems. What they really are is that we don’t want to feel a certain way.”
“Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome.”
“To beat yourself up over this is just another way not to feel it.”
“Each of these emotions is data and it’s all important data and you’ve been rejecting the data and you don’t have the tools you need to solve the problem because you’ve been rejecting the data.”
“Until you can feel into them, welcome them, love them, invite them in, nothing’s going to change.”
Transcript
foreign welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson wow how’s it going Joe uh man uh it has been full on it it you know creating the decisions course has been like uh you know lots of content in a short period of time it’s I’m loving it and it’s definitely not a lot of breathing space in the last couple weeks how about you man how are you yeah I’m doing really well I just got off of a really good coaching session and something that came up in that session was the golden algorithm which oh yeah you know even speaking about this for a little while and we haven’t done a full episode on it yet and I’m really excited to to do that yeah that sounds fun let’s do it that sounds great yeah yeah all right so then what let’s you look you look jazzed though I just have to say like you like you look really Jazz like it I’m wondering is it was it a deeply felt uh uh coaching session it feels like you’re very embodied yeah yeah it was it was very very deeply felt and there was just like a constant kind of a theme of leaving leaving self leaving the present experience and recognizing it and then coming back and just noticing all the different ways that that happens in the moment and then just coming right back and so we just spent so much of a session in you know in embodiment and so I mean that just I get so much out of it when when that’s how a session goes yeah uh yeah yeah awesome oh yeah I love that cool awesome and I can see how that would relate to the golden algorithm that’s wonderful okay so yeah let’s uh let’s let’s talk about Golden algorithm what do you what do you want to ask yeah so I mean we’ll just start what is it oh yeah so I mean the most basic way to say it is um whatever we’re avoiding emotionally we are inviting into our lives in the exact way that we are avoiding it so if we are trying to avoid uh sadness then we the way that we try to avoid the sadness is inviting the sadness the other way to see it is that if you are having a problem any problem at all there is an emotion that you are trying to avoid and by in the way that you’re trying to avoid it you are bringing it towards you and so this is like the emotional Center of all the problems that we have so that’s and and and I’m not a huge fan of the golden algorithm I don’t know how else to call because it is it’s so critical it’s so important it and and once you get it it makes such a huge difference in your life so I wanted to call it something really important and and however I yeah just no I’m just noticing that the name of it I don’t want it to be you know glorified or anything just that it’s just super important if you’re really once you rock it it can totally change your life so yeah yeah I’m gonna send you a golden algorithm statue for your desk actually that kind of sounds cool name a problem that that you’re very familiar with either you have had in the past or somebody you know is having now but you can name you know all the parts of the problem and everything that’s happening there so yeah and then how about it’s how about it’s you know wanting to work out and then just having a hard time getting motivated to go to the gym great okay so want to work out and not doing it and then when you see somebody in that or you’ve been in that yourself what’s one just one of the emotions that might be being avoided there yeah I’d say let’s say guilt great guilt okay and so what would be a strategy that a person uses to avoid feeling that guilt yeah well I guess one one thing that might come up is that the moment you think about going to the gym you feel all the negative self-talk about how you’re not in shape and you feel that guilt and then you instead go do something else like go to the fridge right okay so so the way that some some people handle the feeling of guilt of that they they arise is to go eat instead of go work out yeah right which then of course creates more guilt right so that’s how the algorithm works like here’s give us another one we should do like three or four of these just any other problem that somebody’s having yeah let’s say let’s say somebody feels put upon or frustrated by a partner with a partner you know great being yeah yeah and so what would be an emotion that that person would be avoiding when they get frustrated with a partner well they might avoid feeling anger great they might afford avoid the anger and so what do they do when they avoid feeling angry so when they avoid feeling angry they might suppress the anger push it down yeah and then you know come around passive aggressively to try to get what they want without being correct right and so the more passive aggressive they are the more the people around them get angry and frustrated with them which brings up more anger in them therefore the strategy in which they’re avoiding the anger is creating more anger in their life so this is so another like example of this so when I was younger a big thing for me was that I was really didn’t like emotional abandonment I felt horror you know is the trauma that I had so I was constantly trying to avoid it and every time I started to feel like I was getting emotionally abandoned I would get hard I would get defended and I would get like short with people and of course people are more likely to emotionally abandon me or abandon me altogether if I’m being a prick which is what I was being so that’s another example of it but the important part is that every single problem that we’re having this is how it works there’s no problem that you can mention that you’re having that doesn’t have an emotion that’s trying to be avoided and in that strategy of avoiding the emotion is recreating it and oftentimes there’s several emotions that that you may be trying to avoid and so when you get to see that when you get to see oh wow every one of my problems is a emotion being avoided oh and then it becomes really clear how to solve a lot of problems really quickly it’s to fully love and invite and welcome your emotional experiences okay so you said there every single problem so to play The Devil’s Advocate a little bit what if the problem I’m having is that I was hit by a car and I’m injured or I’ve tried everything and I haven’t found a job while the economy is tanking it’s like what what scope of problems are we talking about here when you say every single problem yeah yeah so it’s interesting so what I’m talking about here is the reoccurring problems in our lives specifically and I’m also talking about when we feel like there is a problem so but this the algorithm is really useful especially for the reoccurring problems in our lives but let’s take for example uh the getting in a car accident now let’s assume for some reason there’s absolutely not your fault there was no way that your emotional you know your your emotionality in that moment influenced it and it was just out of left field or let’s say a a tree fell on your car while you were driving right completely not within your control obviously the emotional uh the emotional the thing you’re trying to avoid emotionally didn’t cause the tree to drop on your car however how you handle that and how quickly you recover from that and deeply are influenced by the emotions that you are allowing yourself to feel and not feel so recently I’ve been working with somebody and they had something significant stolen from them and I mean just tremendously significant and them blaming themselves for that and trying to avoid the feeling of deep sadness and grief and anger is making that recovery time take a tremendous longer than it would otherwise the amount of shame that they are are using to block the emotions or to not fully feel and love into their shame that so to some degree it’s a problem because the emotions that you’re feeling aren’t being are being resisted and and that makes it a bigger problem instead of oh this is this fluid thing that’s moving through me we have all had something stolen from us and there’s a time when it’s a problem and there’s a time when it’s not a problem and it maybe never feels good but there’s there’s a time when it wraps us up and I’ll call that a problem and there’s a time when we’re we’ve let go of it and how we deeply feel into those emotions and allow those emotions has a huge influence on whether it’s currently a problem or not a problem in our life so that’s first thing also we often are stuck because there’s no short term way to feel good right so again using that same metaphor of a tree dropping on your car there’s no way that you can feel good about that right away there’s no choice you can make you can try to pretend oh it’s great it’s just a car no big deal or whatever but there is some sort of emotional thing that’s going to go through you that is potentially not very comfortable and to try to avoid that is what makes that a longer problem a more consistent problem the problem that repeats itself not in the case of the car but the problem that would replace it repeat itself in the case of the car is how you react to loss how how uh paralyzed you are when accidents happen how quickly you can recover those things um and then I’d say finally we’re never completely the full Dynamic right so in this case with the car and the tree falling on it that we were not at all part of that Dynamic even though we might beat ourselves up over it we’re never fully the dynamic we’re never fully a part of any of the Dynamics that create what we call problems in our lives um the tool isn’t meant to assign blame the tool isn’t meant as a way that you get to beat yourself up oh if I only would have felt this it’s meant as a oh here is a way that I can move through my problems more quickly here’s a way that I can stop repeating patterns that’s what I mean so it sounds like a lot of what you’re saying there is it’s not necessarily the problem it’s like the it’s the stuckness that we feel in relationship to the problem which sometimes makes certain problems feel far more ongoing yeah or or I’m making a distinction between something that’s happening in our life that needs to be addressed and a problem a problem being something that consumes us and guides us and pushes us and we rebel against and resist yeah yeah rather than a random occurrence yeah exactly got it okay well then let’s let’s move on and talk about what makes this work yeah the easiest way to describe it is that there is no problem if you’re like if you’re feeling great so so let’s just say for instance your company you’re you’re facing your company’s implosion and and in that implosion you knew you were going to feel great and you were going to feel free and you were going to feel successful what’s the problem with your company imploding or let’s say I was going to get a divorce and I knew that I was going to feel wonderful about the outcome that I could look around and I would go wow this is exactly what needed to happen and I can see the benefits of it and like there’s just like a full feeling of freedom and success and and joy in the result then there’s no problem so what I what I mean to say is that what what we call material problems out in the world what they really are emotional problems what they really are is that we don’t want to feel a certain way and so that’s what makes this work so if we could just paper over all of our negative feelings and feel positive feelings regardless of our company falling apart and everybody getting laid off and then we’re good right you know people have tried that it doesn’t work but I like I like the thought that was great yeah so yeah so I think if I’m if I’m taking the question of it does that mean like oh we so it’s not having the positive emotions that get you where you want to go it’s not avoiding the negative ones that get you where you want to go so it’s not you know it’s not like oh if I’m happy then I’m gonna you know make great decisions if I’m happy that that’s it’s helpful if you’re authentically happy what the issue is is far more about not avoiding negative ones the cause of the pain is in the avoidance of the negative emotions yeah and that’s why that’s why being positive all the time doesn’t work we’ve all met the person who’s oh I’m positive all the time and you’re like their life is right yeah right and it’s not authentic it’s not what they’re actually feeling correct so so this seems like a pretty simple algorithm it’s just what you’re avoiding you invite in and exactly the way you’re avoiding it you create a blind spot you’re going to get blindsided in your blind spot that’s just how it works so what makes this hard for us to just see in our daily lives if it’s if it’s so simple yeah yeah you know it’s so strange it’s it it it took me a long time to even be able to articulate it and and I still notice when I’m articulating it to folks it confuses people so it is it’s a challenging thing to see even though it’s so simple and probably some of the people listening to this their minds are going numb currently so so one of the issues is the one I just talked about which is that we think our problems are material when they’re actually we’re using the material world as a as a strategy to feel a certain way we want to feel good and we think that the fast car and the Beautiful spouse and the and the happy children are going to do that and and so we we’re using the material problems as a surrogate for the emotional and so that’s the first one so you have to undo that thesis that the material world is going to make you happy and I think that’s something that every major religion points to in in its own way that it’s you’re never going to get the happiness you want from the external world and then the other thing is that it’s um hard to admit that it’s happening because we’re avoiding stuff right it’s like because there is a there’s that movement that you just described which all of a sudden is going to be self-abuse oh it’s my fault for avoiding this all of these problems are my fault that by itself is more avoidance right that is more like to to beat yourself up over this is just another way not to feel it right so let’s say I’m avoiding sadness and I start beating myself up it’s just another way to avoid feeling sadness so that’s another reason that it’s really tough to see it’s tough because we can’t blame anybody else anymore and including ourselves so if you really take a look at it blaming yourself is another way to avoid other uncomfortable emotions so and and I’m sure we can describe that later and the other issue is time dilation which is basically there is the short-term feeling good and the long term feeling good and so the avoidance is I’m going to trade long I’m going to trade feeling good in the long term for feeling adequate in the short term feeling okay or feeling just a little bit better in the short term and so our reward system is a mammal was built in such a way for short-term rewards to be the important one because we didn’t have psychological development then right mammals it’s not from what we know they don’t have identity and so they’re not protecting their identity they’re not protecting their psychology they’re not protecting their sense of self and so when you’re dealing with oh I eat that mushroom and it causes me pain it’s a great thing to avoid when it’s oh I um somebody calls points out some way that I’m an error and it causes me pain so I get defensive it doesn’t work so well so that’s the other problem is that it it it’s it’s learning that our emotional the way we are emotionally evolved doesn’t work for a sense of identity yeah okay so the time dilation thing that that’s interesting to me there’s there’s sort of an objection that comes up where I think a lot of people actually engage in this avoidance behavior because they think they’re doing something for their future like you know I’m just going to keep giving things away to this client because then they’re gonna like me and I’m gonna get the bigger project in the future but what actually is being created is that I’m going to come back and be like have behaviors that seem entitled or aggressive when later on I start to feel like I’ve given too much and they took it and didn’t you know give me enough in return or something yeah so the key there is is what is the choice that you’re making uh for instance giving the client a whole bunch of stuff without naming that you want something in return is that an avoidance behavior or is that uh something that you’re doing out of strategy and the only way to know that is to feel in your system oh am I avoiding anything and to go and feel it so there’s obviously times that we will take short-term pain for long-term gain however this is very much in the avoidance of an emotion that’s the really critical component to notice and if you’re not avoiding it then great so there’s a there’s a different way of kind of flipping this which is that to be to have the preference for feeling the short-term pain despite it’s a it’s it’s discomfort for what we know is a long-term best outcome is the thing that allows us to move through this yes the only thing that I would change about that is that the it’s not actually painful right it’s the resistance too it’s just painful however we might label that yeah yeah and it’s not even that that’s what I mean to say is that the emotions themselves are not the painful piece it’s the resistance to them and so part of the path of noticing all these emotions that we’re avoiding is when we invite and welcome the men they change they they don’t feel as uncomfortable as they used to yeah yeah so how does how does knowing that we are avoiding these emotions help us right yeah instead of yeah it’s funny because we do this exercise where people do that thing that we just did over and over and over again they just see all of the problems that they’re having and how each one is in avoided motion and and I was with some people doing that a couple days ago and someone’s like how does this help us like Christ what are you doing that’s just making us feel like ah and I said that’s exactly why to do it is because now you’re motivated to change it like if all you have to do is just invite and welcome emotion and you don’t have to suffer for all in all these reasons like what would make you not do it so one thing is because it does help us solve the problem um and it also it makes our decisions cleaner as soon as we notice that we’re running away from an emotion and uh uncomfortable emotion and also uh once we start doing it and then solving that problem once we start inviting and welcoming the emotions because we see this is the issue it just makes a lot of our habits that we don’t like go away because we’re no longer using them to run away from emotional experiences makes the decision making cleaner makes us less defensive all those things yeah and it’s in the emotion that we’re avoiding that is like like that emotion contains the information needed to get out of the situation that’s right yeah yeah if you think about each of these emotions as data and it’s all important data and you’ve been rejecting the data and you don’t have the the tools you need to solve the problem because you’ve been rejecting the data the other way to think about it is you know that you have that kitchen drawer I’ve had the CEO said to me one time I love this um she said like my job as a CEO is to look in all the kitchen drawers that nobody wants to look in right there’s at the drawer where everything just gets shoved my job and is to open them up and look in them and sort out what’s in there and that everybody else is avoiding and it’s the same thing it’s the same thing here it’s that that that’s the that’s the work and and you open the door and you have that first moment of oh crap and then when it’s all cleaned and organized and it feels great okay so so let’s say we we recognize that all the problems in our life I even feel like some pre- attack from someone in the audience when I say all yeah um I’m just gonna say generally so we’ve we’ve let’s let’s say we take on this tool this perspective let’s do better I would say I say all let I’m gonna I’m gonna dig the big plunge and say all and if somebody in the audience can find one that isn’t where this isn’t the case where they they they can’t find an emotion they’re avoiding inside of a problem that they’re having then please let us know because I would like to find one that where that’s not the case so I will say all but I want proof I want proof that I’m because I would love to see what I might be missing yeah yeah okay okay so like let’s say we take on this perspective all of the problems that we have in our life yeah are res are resulting from us avoiding emotions and we are bringing those problems into our lives in exactly the way we’re avoiding those emotions let’s say we take on this perspective what are some of the pitfalls that can happen if we take on this perspective and over index on it or get it slightly off like what what’s some of the dangers of you know taking this as like let’s say like to the extreme making it a Dogma yeah that’s great I love that question it’s like a hammer is a great tool but how can you misuse it and so right so I’d say one of the pitfalls in using the tool is the depth in which you’re using it and this is kind of the opposite of a pitfall which is it means it doesn’t work as well unless you go into the depths so if you’re if you say what’s the thing I’m avoiding I’m avoiding pain that’s not gonna work as well as I’m avoiding helplessness and so so that’s one thing and I want to talk about depth a little bit later as well because there’s a there’s a cool thing that goes along with it from what I can tell but other things is that uh another issue with the tool is that you might still repeat these patterns that come up if because you found one of the emotions you’re avoiding but you haven’t found all the emotions you’re avoiding so one of the pitfalls of the tool is that it’s only one emotion at a time and a lot of times people make the assumption that there’s only one emotion they’re avoiding um another Pitfall that um tool is if you’re not learning how to feel into the feelings so it’s only half of a tool so seeing the feelings that you avoid is one thing but until you can feel into them welcome them love them invite them in it’s nothing’s going to change there actually has to be that not avoidance of it but they’re also has to be the learning to welcome it and there’s a space in between those two a lot of people and I would call it like indulging uncomfortable emotions it’s really about having the mental attitude of I want to understand this I want to explore it I want to listen to it I want to hear the information it has I want to respect it I want to give it the love that it never got I want to welcome it and I’m not here to try to change it I’m here to just fully be with appreciate this emotional experience so and if you’re not doing that you know it’s not gonna it’s not gonna be of great benefit to you and then the last one is the one we’ve already talked about is people can beat themselves up over it they can say oh I Now understand everything’s my fault because I’m not feeling into emotions which is both not feeling into emotions and a way to avoid emotions so yeah I think the latter is really common if you’re in depression like yes if the feeling is shame I noticed I went through a period of time with this where it was for me it was shame and I didn’t realize that it was actually kind of indulging in the shame and that being in the shames felt safe it felt like somebody was had an excuse to not be empowered and that somebody might come rescue me or at least be with me yeah and so I wasn’t actually allowing the shame to move through it wasn’t like I wasn’t willing to feel the shame dissolve yeah I was willing to feel the shame and wondering why and wonder why it wasn’t going away yeah but not too late yeah actually yeah shift and change and then become whatever it was going to become right and that would be the language that I would use I would say that you were feeling the shame but you weren’t welcoming the shame you weren’t because it’s the welcoming that lets it move all the way through so a lot of people think that a lot of people feel like these are difficult emotions and that’s why we’re avoiding them and so what would you say to somebody who thinks that not avoiding emotions is the hard thing and avoiding emotions is easy so yeah what I would say is if you think it’s easy to regenerate over and over and over and over again the emotion that you’re and you think that’s easy that’s I I don’t like if you think about it long term I don’t understand how that math works out that would be the first thing I’d say the second thing I would say is avoiding emotions means resisting them so not resisting them is different and if you have a moment of not re-existing whatever you’ve been avoiding immediately you will feel the sensation change somatically in your body and it’ll become a lot more comfortable so until you have really ex experimented with not resisting an emotional state or welcoming an emotional state you really don’t know if it’s going to be more difficult what you have in your head is an idea that oh every time these topics get brought up I feel like so I want to avoid these topics so I don’t feel like and that’s the idea and it’s because nobody has ever taught you how to be in these topics with no resistance without the shame without the defense with curiosity with Wonder with impartiality with self-empathy then then you’ll know then you’ll know that oh wow this isn’t difficult at all this is actually it’s literally when I walk people through an emotional inquiry exercise which is learning to welcome and through Wonder your emotional experience the thing I’ll say is like so you’ve just sat for 10 minutes with an experience that you have avoided for decades how hard was it did you explode you know how difficult was it and everybody’s like no it just felt great and not always occasionally you’ll have somebody who’s like oh it got a little better but and that’s usually because they’re trying to change it they’re trying to get rid of it and that’s something else that when you’re fully welcoming your emotion and you’re one of the things that happens is you’ll notice that it starts to change and shift and then you might start immediately or over the long term welcoming your emotions to make them go away which isn’t welcoming them anymore so it stops working so yeah as soon as people experience it once or twice they get it they’re like oh yeah this isn’t hard this is immediate relief so what are what are some examples in which this doesn’t work I know and I’m not talking about the kinds of things we’re talking about before where you were saying if anybody can come up with any problem in their life that this doesn’t apply to yeah but yeah but that’s why like the emotions that we’re avoiding does it work with positive emotions yeah in a usable way yeah um so that’s a great one so it it does not the algorithm doesn’t work what I what I think about it is it doesn’t work with positive integers I have a hard time saying that some emotions are negative and some are positive even though the world you classifies it that way these are negative and these are positive and the reason that I have a hard time experiencing that or saying that is because it’s not how experiencing experience them meaning for me then helplessness and anger and shame and all that has like our blessings so I don’t I have a hard time calling them negative but if we if we call them negative for now then the negative the algorithm works if you’re avoiding negative emotions the algorithm doesn’t work if you’re avoiding positive emotions and so the way I would describe this is like working out so let’s say that my problem is that my body isn’t feeling good so it’s it’s feeling in what I would call in a negative way it would be a negative feeling and so I work out and I started to work out and it doesn’t feel good so I avoid it then my body’s gonna continue to feel bad if I work out and it doesn’t feel good because there’s some resistance to it to the working out I haven’t you know it has some pain in it and I lean in and I welcome that pain and I look forward to that pain and I see that pain as information that my body starts to feel better and then if my body feels good and I say oh I’m gonna work out and I’m not going to allow the feeling of goodness to happen then what immediately happens is I start feeling bad the workout feels bad and then I stop working out and then my body starts feeling bad so it’s the same way if I’m feeling if I have negative emotions and I feel into them then I feel better and if I have positive emotions and I don’t feel into them then I feel bad so that’s the that’s the experience and and so this is something I wanted to speak to earlier when we talked about shame and scene through shame so what I’ve noticed is there is there’s there’s there’s there’s emotional states that people call emotional states but they’re kind of block or emotional states and we’ve talked about this with shame so I would call these things like shame judgment and guilt and what they do is they stagnate the emotional experience and so there are emotions that have to be felt through but they’re kind of the top level because they stagnate the emotional experience then underneath that you have the emotions of like sadness and anger and helplessness and what we call negative and then if those are all felt through then you get to the positive emotions and if you start feeling the positive emotions just like working out you feel better and better and better and better and it goes from like oh happiness and then there’s joy and contentment and Bliss there’s like a whole rainbow of positive emotions out there and it just gets more the intensity of the of the positive emotions gets bigger and and it’s wonderful and it can also be very scary in that process so one of the things that I say to describe this is joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome and so welcoming all these negative emotions uh what we call negative emotions leads to Joy but feeling joy and expansiveness and Bliss and peacefulness can be very scary in itself and when we stop allowing ourselves to feel into that then we go we revert right back to the negative got it so that’s that’s why it doesn’t work with positive emotions if you if you find out oh I’m I have this problem because I’m avoiding this positive emotion then the answer is feel that positive emotion it like lean into the positive emotion so the answer is the same lean into the positive emotion lean into the negative emotion but the avoidance doesn’t bring it back the avoidance of the negative emotion brings a negative emotion back that avoidance of the positive emotion doesn’t bring the positive emotion back yeah there’s a sort of what what kind of comes up from me in processing what you just said and there was a there was a lot there to to process and unpack yeah is that you know there’s emotions we might label them as positive or negative and that’s just sort of a way of determine like a way of stating which ones we prefer and which ones we don’t yeah and so if we prefer not to have an emotion then we’re going to avoid it and then like avoiding it’s it’s that’s going to invite the emotion that we’re avoiding but with the emotions that we actually do prefer or think we prefer there’s actually something uncomfortable about them often and it’s that other emotion that we’re actually avoiding which is why we end up feeling the other thing and not the not the emotion we think we want so like avoiding feeling Joy doesn’t make us full of joy avoiding feeling Joy makes us feel the thing that we’re actually feeling when we’re avoiding Joy which might be you know might be the shame around being exuberant yes that’s right that’s right and it’s a great way to put it and the other thing that I would say is there does seem to be like a there does seem to be a thing where people need to break through the shame and judgment and guilt so that they can feel the negative emotions and then once those are felt then the positive emotions come and the positive emotions are also scary they’re very big they’re very expansive the positive emotions make not a lot of room for you as an as a as an entity or like as a doesn’t make they don’t make a lot of room for your identity when you are in Bliss there’s like it’s more like you’re one with everything and less like you are you and so there’s a scariness to that and there’s like a wow what’s like fears come up like how will I relate to people or I might just like go off into the infinite and you know not come back or what if I’m just like sitting there laughing in a coffee shop all by myself where everyone’s gonna think I’m crazy or what wow I’m happy all the time everyone’s looking at me like what’s wrong with me you know there’s all sorts of fears that come along with with that level of of joy and ecstasy and so when you stop to repeat myself here to when you constrict on any of them it brings you into negative emotions it brings you back up the ladder right so if you constrict on Joy or the the joyous emotions you’re going to be back into the fear and and anger and helplessness and if you constrict on those you’re going to be back in the shame and the judgment and the yeah yeah so welcoming the feeling of being out of control allows us to have the feeling of uncontrollable laughter right have that experience I like that yeah exactly that’s exactly it yeah so that’s that’s it that’s the golden algorithm and that’s and it’s you know if you blend that with some of the view practices and some of the emotional inquiry practices and and they create so much Freedom so quickly so I I it’s such a it’s such an exciting thing and the the reason that I came up with is because I noticed my brain was doing that calculus every time I was working with clients I’m working with clients I’m like oh okay here it is here’s the here’s the thing that if we if we learn to accept this this problem starts to dissipate if we learn to love and accept and welcome this then the problem starts to dissipate yeah yeah and I noticed a lot of times where the where that process gets stopped is when people end in a story and then that’s that’s just the ground truth like and that’s and then that’s bad it’s like well the company will fall apart yeah exactly yeah well what would you feel if a company falls apart yeah exactly companies fall apart all the time and people live on and like what what is it that you’d actually be experiencing in that moment beyond the story yeah exactly and then what the odd part is is that when we fully grieve or feel that feeling that we’d have to feel the company falls apart it’s so much less likely for it to fall apart and if it does fall apart it falls apart so much better in such a way that benefits us so much more than if we’re resisting the whole thing yeah yeah awesome beautiful thank you so much man that was exciting I’m so glad I got to explain this this has been a doozy to really get out so I appreciate your help in that yeah I loved it I enjoyed it all right thank you everybody for listening and remember if you can find an example of a problem yeah you know relevant to Joe’s challenge if you can find an example of a problem where this doesn’t work please send it in if you can find a problem where you’re not avoiding an emotion please let us know all right yeah awesome thank you all right bye Brett thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com