Ant Taylor on Embracing Emotions

This moment when he called the anxiety, for me, I didn't know it at the time, it just triggered a different kind of, I guess, leadership style that was a little bit more like, I'm gonna go jump into that pit over there, guys. I'm pretty sure it's filled with snakes. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna get my ass handed to me. It's gonna be at least funny, possibly dangerous, but if I live, Come with me.

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. All right, everybody. Welcome back to The Art of Accomplishment. Today I'm speaking with Ant Taylor. Ant is the founder and CEO of Light. How are you doing today, Ant?

I'm well. I'm well. It's great to be here. It's surreal to be here, having listened to your voice for a year.

Yeah, it's surreal being here after seeing you in the Art of Accomplishment and on Zoom calls, but never quite having any face-to-face. And this is really the first time that we've, I could say, met.

Exactly. And, um, I'm always— it's, it's always remarkable when Joe rattles off your resume, um, at the various badass shit that you've done. I always want you guys to like pull up for a second and talk about like, you're a little bit of a thrill seeker, right?

Yeah. I mean, yeah, a little bit. You could call it thrill seeker, but I, it's really hard to say what I've been seeking, but that would be a podcast about me and maybe we could do that sometime, but I really want to hear about you and tell me a little bit about, about your story. Just, just introduce yourself to our audience.

Well, I'm, uh, I'm the founder of Light. I'm the— I aspire to be the CEO of Light. It's a big part of why, uh, I started doing the work with Joe. Um, Light is growing really quickly. It's a live events business, uh, helps people get to more shows and helps more shows happen with a lot less risk. And maybe you guys have heard there's a little bit of a pandemic on. To navigate the waters of of all of that treachery and keep the business growing, which we've been able to do. Um, before that, I had, um, two, uh, previous startup experiences. One was a giant success, uh, one was a personal failure but a good success for the, for the company, but all in tech, all in advertising technology in New York. Um, one of the companies sold to Yahoo, uh, the other company sold to Oracle. And, uh, and before that, I was in school. In on the East Coast. I grew up in, um, California in Berkeley, um, but very much consider myself, uh, an adopted son of New York City because that's where I feel like I really came of age. And now I'm back living in California, uh, working on all things light all the time.

Beautiful. I heard you also played basketball at Princeton, you've summited Mount Shasta, and this is something we have in common, you once scuba dived deeper than legally allowed in the Blue Hole in Belize. And as we mentioned in the pre-call, it turns out that both of us did it for the same reason, which was one dive partner getting narced and sinking far deeper than intended and needing to be rescued.

When you get down to the deep depths below the sharks, into the darkness, all the beautiful things going on on the sidewalls, they've warned you about getting narced, but it doesn't feel like you're you've lost your mind. I think I was at like— I'm forgetting it now, so if I'm exaggerating this, please forgive me, divemaster of Belize, buhol. Uh, but I want to say I was at like— it's like acceptable to be at like 140, right? And even then, only like for 5 minutes. I think I had like found my way down to 180, 190 feet.

Yeah, okay, that was way deeper than we went.

That last 50 is, um— I can't tell you for sure because I was basically blackout drunk. But I want to say that the emotional feeling of that moment was, uh, it's pretty amazing.

Yeah. Well, I'm glad you made it back and also had the experience.

Yeah.

And so I wanted to get into today, what is something that has shifted for you over the course of all of this journey through, you know, diving and basketball and all of this, all these businesses? What's something that has shifted for you personally that, like, personally in your, in your consciousness that has just shifted everything for your business?

I think that the things that are different, um, sort of daily in my life is a mixture of, um, I'm in my body a lot more. I realize that my brain is, um, a fantastic survival tool, but when it comes to thriving, um, maybe a little— can move a little slower than I want it to move. So I'm in my somatic system a lot more. I trust my intuition a lot more. I think I did the, like, the 20% to get the 80% benefit, did the 20/80 rule on, uh, radical self-acceptance and really understanding that the voice in my head was, um, coming from a place of love, uh, if misguided, um, for all sorts of reasons, trauma and otherwise. Ultimately coming from a place of love. And so getting to a place of really accepting who I am, accepting, uh, what that voice is telling me, and, you know, loving on it as it is trying to love on me, has changed sort of my, my daily practices and how I move through the world. And I think the, the last piece is just, um, embracing, really embracing my emotions more. That's a constant fucking battle against a lot of muscle memory the opposite direction. I was like a Class A avoider, avoider impresario, like I could just all sorts of tactics to get away from feeling for much of my, much of my life. But now with a lot more reps, really see the power of embracing all flavors of emotion all the time. Not just for the emotion of it, but for the truth that sits behind it.

Yeah, if I can try to kind of hone that down and sharpen it a little bit, it sounds like you're describing having started from a place of kind of living in your head and in a mental space, feeling somewhat separate from your body, feeling like emotions are just kind of something that happens that are meant to be managed or sort of, you know, put out of the way so that you can continue to have your— to meet your goals. And coming into a place of embodiment, feeling your body, feeling your emotions, including feeling, noticing the voice in your head and just coming into acceptance of all of your parts and less dissociation. So tell me a little bit about how your life and your business looked prior to having this recognition.

Yeah, the one other thing I wanna say on that before we get to that question is There was no epiphany moment, carpe diem, let's stand on the desk and scream and shout, some breakthrough moment in the work. It was much more of a series of experiments and really kind of an ebb and flow of intensity that was just pushing ever wider, pushing me ever wider into sort of undiscovered country. And that, that, and that's sort of sustained. Maybe we'll talk at the end. This summer I've gotten— I've labeled this summer the Summer of Resistance because for whatever fucking reason this summer I just started to just reject, like, just push back on all a lot of old stories, but different, but new stories, um, that were keeping me from the work. But anyway, just to say, it's not— it wasn't a single point in time breakthrough. My beloveds at Light have coined an expression for pre-work that is simply Ant 1.0. And I love this because I discovered this moniker kind of by accident when somebody kind of just slipped out, slipped out in like a meeting. I was like, oh, I'm sorry, what's, uh, what the fuck is Ant 1.0? You know, again, part of the, part of the lies our mind tells us is like Nobody can see that I'm out here avoiding the shit out of every emotion I have, and nobody can see that I'm managing myself and in my head, and nobody can see that this anxiety is eating me from the inside out. And of course everybody can see it, everybody can feel it. It's like the most obvious thing in the world. The way I came to the work actually kind of explains a lot about who I was at the time. We have a 24/7, 365 business. In some respects there couldn't be a worse business for me to be in, right? Our events happen all the time at night, and we're building technology by day, um, to make those things work. And it happens all the time. Like, when you go home on Christmas vacation, you're gonna go see, you know, shows with family. And, and, uh, so there's no real time to kind of pull up. But luckily enough, someone had come to work with us for only a brief time, but she'd come on board. Amy Vernetti is her name. And one day I'm like banging away at my keyboard and she's like, "Hey," and she's like a mile a minute kind of person. She's like, "Hey, do you wanna like 10x your life? Do you wanna like be a fucking CEO, like a fucking game change CEO, blah, blah, blah, blah." And I don't even think I looked up from my laptop. I'm just like banging away. I'm like, "Yeah, of course, that sounds amazing." Sign me up. No thoughts. There's a perfect complexity in that, that moment. Like, didn't have enough time to pull up and ask, like, what, what is this? Who is this? What do you mean 10x? 10x what?

Wow. And that sounds a lot like just standard pushy marketing. I don't know, like, like, what, what was she bringing you? Like, hey, would you like to 10x your life and increase your penis size?

And yeah, I mean, she might have said that. Sure, sure.

You know, like, I kept banging away.

I think, I think, um, yeah, there was a try, trust her, but like that wasn't the point. The point was the disassociation for me was even in the realm of like taking the right steps to, to really hit another level of performance personally and professionally, um, there was a relative detachment to, uh, anything. It was just like I've described it as, um, feeling like I was constantly sprinting across a tightrope, destined to fall. Like, you can't sprint across a tightrope. Something— the wind could be off, you lose focus. But there was this constantly, this, this notion of like, I'm going to sprint across this tightrope. As long as I don't look back and as long as I don't acknowledge there's no net below me, I have the best chance at getting within distance to leap out and grab the, the ledge on the other side. That was my MO. And obviously that's super reductive and, and obviously missed a lot of, of things. So, you know, my 1.0 self was prone to a lot of anxiety, really terrible at stress management, um, high, high performing, high achieving, no doubt, but at great cost. And the somatic feeling Well, at the time there was no somatic feeling. Let's just put that— make that very clear.

Except for the feeling of stress.

And yeah, but like nothing that I would like used as a dashboard, right? Nothing that, right, I harnessed. I brought Joe in soon thereafter, actually before I started the L12 work. I needed to do some team cohesion work with my executive team, and, uh, there was nobody better at that moment than, than Joe. And I remember there was— we were doing a view exercise, and, uh, but one of like the— or like really elementary stuff, just like getting in the flow of really understanding, um, wonder, I think. And I'm sitting in the middle with Alex, my head of engineering and Light's second employee, and he's kind of throwing me softball. Oh, he's trying to trigger me, that's what it was. But he saw, like, just throwing me softballs, and I'm in the middle of the room and all my executives are paired off around me, just like randomly. It just sort of ended up that way. And Joe did his annoying thing where he like saddles up next to you and he's like, you might— if I give it a go, bracing for it. Fuck it, what the fuck. By the time, of course, I'm brash, I'm like, yeah dude, whatever, like shoot, look. Shoot your shot. Good luck. And he kind of leans in. He's like, your anxiety is going to kill your company, and everybody in this room knows it. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Feel that shit. Feel that shit. You can feel the fucking— the whole room was just like— but man, was it the shot. The one thing I would give myself credit, credit for in all of this is I was so starved for this kind of work. Like, I was so ready to go that for me, that was a release. I think I might have started like laughing because it was just so much, right? Like, it was just like, so let's just swan dive into this shit and stop fucking around.

Yeah, we laugh when it hurts too much to cry, right?

Yeah, maybe it was some of that actually. God, he was so full voiced about it too. They didn't whisper that, right, despite those in the middle. But anyway, that was a lot of the, the, the pre, pre the work. And look, like, some of the symptoms for me, the, like, the life symptoms— and I think I said to you in the pre-call, I'd like for this call to, uh, I'm still mining a lot of questions from, for, like, my personal relationships. The professional relationships is easier because that's where I've done a lot of the work. I think this, the symptoms were pretty evident. Like, I had this feeling of like something between a glass ceiling and being bound to some floor of achievement that I hadn't really broken through. I remember when I started Light, I had such imposter syndrome coming out of my last experience and really, really all my experiences professionally because we'd had a lot of success. Some of it felt earned. A lot of it felt like not earned in a weird way, like it'd come too easy. And there were a lot of things left kind of unknown that I wanted to learn. And so when I started Light, I really wanted to drive every nail. I wanted to learn every part of the process of building a company. And so that had occupied my mental time in a great way, but I still had a feeling of like being sort of bound, like there was some upper limit of what I could achieve in the— and it— I couldn't put a finger on it. Like, I couldn't— I was like, maybe I should have gone to business school like my friends had done, or, you know, maybe I should have taken a sabbatical and tried to write that novel I've always fantasized about writing. Or like, like I hadn't done enough to break up my rhythms was sort of the di— like the mental diagnosis. The other feeling is like the, that experience of moving through a dream, in a dream scenario where you're running either from something or towards something, but you're, it's like you're running in slow motion and you can't make yourself run faster. I don't know if you've ever had a dream like that, but it was, it was that feeling more and more, you know, not a present feeling, but like a slow burn in the back of my, the anxiety, my endless well of anxiety was that, that kind of weighed on me. So that was a symptom, was just feeling kind of bound. Anxiety was a big symptom. And then a lot of just exhaustion. I pushed my organization hard. It's a hard space that we, that we do our business in. There hasn't been a lot of technology innovation in it for a lot of sort of entrenched reasons. And we had endured through a lot of those things and gotten the company to a pretty kind of good level. But you looked around, I think everybody was sort of bleary-eyed and exhausted. And if I was really honest, that exhaustion stemmed from a lot of the way I moved through, through the world and through the company.

Yeah. So kind of what you were describing there is, you know, at 1.0, you could see it fractally distributed throughout your organization, your, your avoided stress. And you knew it was there. Everyone else knew it was there. You had this belief that maybe others didn't see it. And if they saw it, something bad would happen. And it was better just to keep it hidden and pretend it wasn't there. And as a result, one of the symptoms of this is that you kept feeling like you're just in this morass as you're moving forward, and the thing— the wins that you have just feel like they come too easy, and then everything else just feels hard. Is it something like that?

Something like that. The, the wins came with light, felt sweeter. They didn't come easy, but I was addressing a lot of the, like, surface-level imposter syndrome stuff because there were essentially 3 of us, then 5 of us and yeah, about 10 of us building it. So I felt, I felt the wonderful dopamine hit of our successes, but they came at the cost of a lot of exhaustion. And there was a sense that like in that hamster wheel that you're in, in an early stage startup, like every rev of the wheel you felt took the equivalent amount of energy. There was no sort of force multiplier or escape velocity where things really started spin. And yeah, some of that had to do with just you're an early-stage startup, but a lot of it felt like it had to do with, with some of the 1.0 tendencies.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, so, so let's get into, to how this transition started to occur and how you started to, to allow yourself to see and feel what was going on inside you. And starting with this moment with Joe, tell me a little bit about that, what you might have expected to feel if somebody told you something so direct and, you know, truthy in front of your entire team and what you ended up actually feeling.

Yeah, we could call that truthy. I would say that was just some fucking cold, hard, fucking raw form truth served up in my face. No, uh, I think the— listen, you describe that incident to anybody— I've told this story to people like not doing kind of any of the, like, inner work. And they're just like, they're just like, I like, I throw them into trauma, you know. They're just like, what? You know, like, you're the CEO, like, those are your execs, you know, like that fucking narrative, right? Just remembering to that time, it would have been, I would have expected to feel defensive, uh, to feel, um, you know, enraged, offended, hurt, and frankly, to have called it, you know, just like, all right, thank you, facilitator that we've hired, go fuck yourself, and, uh, we're gonna— we'll take it from here, right? That's kind of like the textbook, whatever, version of that experience. But the release was— and this was really the start of, I think, connecting like mind to somatic response, which it took me so many reps to really get or feel. The reality was, to the words you used, when I'm in the presence of truth, my entire system just feels an intense like ease and almost to the level of, uh, like a body high or like a tantric fucking extended orgasm of, um, like— and it's funny that I remembered almost verbatim because I think every word in what he said had such a, like, resonance, not just to me but to that room of people, to that community of people that come together fight their asses off to make light a thing. And it was all from love. It was literally love.

And what had been holding you back from recognizing this truth? I mean, the moment he said it, you already knew it was true. It resonated in your system. And what had blocked you from, from allowing this truth in that you already had known prior to somebody saying it?

From an early age, my sort of traumatic early childhood experiences taught me that to feel emotion meant to— and certainly to express it— meant anything could happen and that I would be physically, you know, in danger. And so I think that cycle of like avoiding those types of— avoiding that kind of early detection system or that dashboard that we all carry. There's more of a muscle memory, I think, going all the way back. And then, like I said, there was, again, always this notion of a tightrope and of running across it and trying to get away from a past that, you know, was less than ideal and ignore the risks and pitfalls that lie beneath, and instead just try to get to something where that's all— that all goes away, which is a very— if you think about it, it's very childish kind of conception of the world and of like life. But I don't think it's an uncommon one. The only other thing I would add to what I said earlier is that I do think that there is, um, a lineage, uh, a historical lineage that feels familiar to me. You know, a lot of like my father's family came from Eastern Texas in the time of the Great Migration. And we never really talked about it, frankly, as a family. But my father was African American and we were all coming out of the South at a time when racial terrorism was if not legal, then, you know, the law looked the other way on. And so there's that feeling when I talk about sort of sprinting across the tightrope. There was also a feeling that I think I learned in childhood around just working your ass off to get to a better place than the folks before you, and that you stood on their shoulders to do that.. And that meant, um, in some cases subjugating your emotions, um, and looking normal, showing up whatever normal is, right? Looking normal, showing up normal and achieving. I think all those things were factors in how I would've expected to sort of show up and, and, and why it was so surprising that I didn't.

So let's get a little bit more deep into this, into this moment. When this truth hit you and it landed in your system in a different way than you expected. It felt like some form of relief. I'm hearing that there was like a gratitude for recognizing this truth. And also it was very activating for you. How did that moment continue in the room? Just continue that story.

I wish I could like do a reenactment of the moment because I was talking to Krystal. My chief of staff, who is also deep into this work and, um, and sort of a comrade in all of it. Um, and I remember her saying— I think it was her, like, her second week at the company— and I remember her description, it was just like, like, what the fuck just happened? Um, but it also became a permissioning because honestly, I— it wasn't even like I took it on the chin and I just kept marching through and showed the team they could battle this out. It was not that at all. It was more like it cracked me open, and what flowed out of that was a deeper state of vulnerability that I think then allowed the team to show up and go deeper in their own vulnerability. And I think getting a couple levels down into the work in community execs that are working 12, 15, 16, 17-hour days together. It meant that everybody could go— it was sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, like, I'm going deeper, so you're going deeper, you're going deeper, so I'm going deeper. And the deeper we go, the more benefit we get from the work.

Yeah, I can imagine that everybody, everybody in the room who saw this moment with you also felt the similar moment, the similar truth in them.

Yeah.

And in their role in the company and also in their lives and in their avoided emotions and their stress.

Totally. It's one of the great things I was reminded of with the AOA hot seat days. I loved those because it reminded me of the early work with the L12 where we were all still kind of strangers to each other. But I took so much from the stories of strangers. Who are in the work and doing the, you know, talking about things at the level that I'm thinking about them. In this moment, I mean, this started like a daisy chain of moments that are all, I mean, humor for me is, sometimes humor for me is a great tactic for avoiding, but for me, humor is really in truth, It's a way to experience, I think, this work at an even deeper level and to experience the love around this work at a deeper level. And so this set off like a daisy chain of moments of incredible failure by Light's fearless founder and CEO, like incredible moments that have continued now for 18 months. I remember we were doing work there's an assessment called the Harrison Assessment, which is really about charting kind of sort of qualitative attributes, but in the form of a paradox graph. So the y-axis might be my ability to achieve, and the x-axis might be my ability to manage stress. Uh, and, uh, if I'm in the top left quadrant, I'm a really high achiever who's really bad at managing stress, which is where I still happen to be. I'm just working, work, trying to edge my way to the right, top right quadrant, right, where I can do both well. Anyway, we were doing this work as executives, and, uh, it wasn't getting to where I wanted to go fast enough, and I couldn't figure out why. And so we ended up doing a group session, and this is almost— it's almost exactly a year after this moment.. And, um, I had Joe come on and facilitate. And what we realized is that we weren't getting anywhere because I didn't understand how to do the process myself. So we ended up taking the 3 hours that we had allotted for all executives to— for me to actively figure out how to fucking make this thing work for me for 3 hours.

Now, make what thing work?

Make this tool, this Harrison tool, okay, really work for what the outcome, which was more team cohesion, understanding each other's tendencies, understanding how these reflected against our V2. We use the V2 MOM process at Light to manage prioritization, you know, with the ultimate outcome that we're all sort of aligned and we're all chasing the right things with the right prioritization. Now, this would have been a mortifying discovery for me, you know, greater than 12 months ago, to realize that I was the problem in the room. But now, 12 months on, it actually became a, a super intense moment where my team got to watch me fail over and over and over again for 3 hours until I had that breakthrough. And there's no way I can simulate that for them. There's no way that they're going to get it better than to watch me struggle and find the thing, whatever the thing is, right in front of their eyes. And so This moment when he called the anxiety, for me, I didn't know it at the time, it just triggered a different kind of, I guess, leadership style that was a little bit more like, I'm going to go jump into that pit over there, guys. I'm pretty sure it's filled with snakes. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get my ass handed to me. It's going to be at least funny, possibly dangerous, but if I live, come with me.

That sounds like a, a contrast to walking through a dark jungle full of snakes with no flashlights or lanterns and saying, "Don't worry guys, there's no snakes here, just come along." That's the perfect foil, uh, for juxtaposition.

I think it's, uh, yeah, look, one I can do really well, one I can do authentically, one is authentically me. The other one, like, nobody believed there were no snakes in the fucking jungle. They never believed that. Um, and they became burnt out by it. Some of them left. Like, you know, someone said, go fuck yourself, I'm not walking into that jungle, I know there are snakes.

So tell me more about how, how things have shifted since then. You've, you've mentioned now this Harrison assessment moment, which was about a year after that, that moment with Joe in the workshop. And how else does this show up in the, in the day-to-day? Like, describe a little bit more about Ant 2.0.

I show up with questions. More often than I show up with declarations. I mean, wonder a lot more. The questions are, yeah, they're so, so important. Like, you wake up with a to-do list versus you wake up and say, what does the universe need me to see today? Or like, what am I curious about today? Those are two very different days. Same shit could happen, very different days in terms of how I show up.

How does anxiety move through your system now?

I developed some hacks since then. Typically, like, this may or may not come— be intuitive, but like, now I know that if I'm feeling anxiety, many experiments on from this first one, right, that it typically means I'm not I haven't articulated something I need, either like a boundary hasn't been set, or I'm in that state of like managing people where I feel like, oh, I've got to, I've got to go do something to bring something out of this person or protect them from something. And therefore I need to not talk about the things that I or the organization needs so that I can make sure they're okay. Hmm. Which, Jesus Christ, does that ever work out? Like, does that ever— does anyone have any case studies of that working out? Like twice.

Like, it seems to work out in teaching us new ways to, to do it differently.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah, that's right. It's successful from that, in that respect. But then, but yeah, so, so now when I feel the anxiety, I feel the anxiety, I name it. Um, there's another person on my executive team, Lawrence Pereira, LP. He's also dived deep in this work. For him He has a hack where he tries to think about anxiety as excitement. Just that, just that slight mental model shift for him is a real shift in like the resonance of what he's dealing with.

That had been a big shift for me as well in air sports and BASE jumping, which was when we had, you know, fear and anxiety at an exit point. Somebody once told me, and this was a big shift for me, like the other side of the coin of fear is excitement.

Yeah.

And it reminds me of a tool that has come up through this work, and I don't know where it came from, but there's, I think there's even some studies on this. But if you're feeling anxiety, you could just jump up and down screaming, "I'm excited, I'm excited, I'm excited," and it'll actually transform the experience from anxiety to excitement. And then you have just the energy to go draw the boundary or Or take the responsibility that you're ready to take, but you're feeling anxious about, or yeah.

Yeah, I think that's totally right. By the way, I love that your example is BASE jumping and mine's like the data portion of my staff meeting.

I mean, it's all emotional BASE jumping. That's one of the things I like to describe this work as to a lot of my friends. It's like, yeah, it's emotional BASE jumping. It's scared me more than actually jumping off of cliffs. On many occasions.

Yeah, for sure. So the anxiety piece, I like his— I like LP's hack a lot. Um, my hack is, is to name it, um, to my team, and then to find the need. Another part of my, my 2.X is, um, I started to do the simple thing, like I want to be surrounded by people who make me stronger. That was a weird one that like came out on another podcast I was doing, uh, in, uh, remembrance of the murder of George Floyd. I did it for 12 months. On the last month, I was talking to, uh, Takiyah Malikana, uh, and I said something about how we want to take a look at the board. And I said that, um, yeah, my criteria is like, who makes me stronger? And, um, that has been an incredible breakthrough for me. The work I do with, with Crystal, my chief of staff, with Caitlin, my yeh, with my executive team, LP I mentioned, Wendy and others, is really like inviting them into this work because I think as we do it in community, we do it at a deeper level, we do it, we make each other stronger. So that's been another piece of just like prioritizing my needs in that way. Another thing that's been kind of a fun one is I love the— I love no. I love no so much that I have a no doctrine.

Oh, what's a no doctrine?

It's still under development, but I've, um, it's been in place at Light, uh, for, I don't know, 6 months. I was discovering that people, people are prone to platitudes and that there's a lot of like sentences that go something like this— I totally agree with that comment you made about BASE jumping and this being emotional BASE jumping, and like, 'I really see how it is super scary.' Like, you're standing on Earth, and then you're jumping off earth and blah-blah-blah! And then there's like a dot, dot, dot, and then they say, but I actually think it's more like skydiving. So I was seeing this and I'm like, this is fucking exhausting. Like, I want what's after the but, because what's after the but is a no, and inside of that no is a deeper truth, a more robust product solution, a better response to this client, a strategy. And you're just not saying that because you're— I don't know you, but I know that like there's some emotional story that you're in that makes you think I need to hear a bunch of platitudes before we get to the no. So when we think about no as like an enabler, not something to be overcome, but something to actually point us collectively in a group of people at something closer to the truth that we started with, then like to me, an organization This is a little strong, but I think an organization might be the sum total of its no and its speed to nos, its individual nos and its ability to say, to get to those nos quickly and explore them. When we collide with each other, like when Joe saddles up next to me and the result of it is the comment he made to me, that's collision. That collision unlocks a lot of energy that can be can take the organization to another level. So I've loved no. I introduced it, the no doctrine. As we lead with our nos, we just flip it. You can do all the platitudes that you need to do to make yourself feel good on your emotional journey, fine, but just lead with the nos. And then I permissioned that nos aren't anything we try to overcome. They're not anything we try to sort of break down. They don't even necessarily mean that everything has to stop. We just— we're going to get to the nos as fast as possible, and then we're going to explore those.

Yeah, welcoming the no.

Welcoming the no.

How has that impacted your ability to say no, and what's in there for you on, on how you communicate?

Yeah, where I struggle, um, still is, um, I get into this thing of managing people, and it's really connected to my childhood, feeling like I can't say no, feeling like I can't— something I'm going to say is going to be misperceived, and I'm going to lose connection with the person that I'm talking to. That's a big one for me. Presuming I don't want to lose connection with the people I'm talking to. If I don't mind losing connection with you, all day. So for me, the practice of the No Doctrine is, um, exactly that. Like, if I can start with nos, then I've already set myself up. I've already knocked out 50% of my proclivity to try to manage your experience of what I'm saying. And that's what I still, I'm still working at.

I would like to get back to that experience of stress within you. And so you've described a lot of the 2.0 Ant being different from the 1.0 symptoms that you were experiencing. And I'm still curious about the somatic experience of when stress arises now, how is it different from when stress arose before when you were more dissociative?

So of course I still feel stress. But I guess the point is, um, I feel the stress. I don't then work out 4 times in a day and then rip out reactive emails to people, and then, you know, all the things that we do in our crazy-ass stress times. Um, so I feel it, and typically behind the feeling of the stress is an emotional feeling that we're familiar with. Maybe it's sadness, maybe it's anger or resentment, maybe it's like old shit—shit that when you actually sit with it, you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa! You're not 8 years old. So what's coming up? Like, you're good here. He made it. So let me sit with that and love on that and let that kind of move. I always say move through me, and I don't mean it like that. It's more like I had to fight. I had to, um, let someone go. And, um, I called Joe right after, and I said, I'm feeling super stressed, super anxious, and like my life's gonna end. What the fuck? And he said, sit down for a second, close your eyes. What comes up? And it was old stuff. He said, all right, sit with him, young me. And we had a conversation, and then I basically told him to fuck off, go outside and play. And at that moment It was like at a cellular level, it felt like that stress had melted into fear, terror had melted into just release, and then the joy came in. And then it was like an intense body high, and I could almost feel my body like in that like energy release moment, not like a sigh, like something had collided and now the energy was flowing back out of me, ready to be creative, ready to build connection, ready for the next thing. That to me is what sits behind the stress now every time that I— that it comes up. And of course, I don't— I'm not batting 1,000, but the on-base percentage is getting better. And at the bottom of that well, every time is a truth and an energy release that becomes creative and constructive.

Yeah, so what I, what I hear you describing there is that before the shift, the stress felt like something that was just going to get in the way. And then after having a couple of really big release valves open up, you started to build this trust, this faith that behind the stress comes energy, creativity, joy. And stress comes in all different types of flavors and somatic feelings, and some of them are still stuck from our childhood experience or other life experience. And we can start to develop a meta-awareness of, okay, when a stress comes up, feeling it transmutes it into something else. And what it sounds like you just described is that you started to feel more alive than Ant 1.0 in these moments when the stress came up. It's exactly more alive. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's beautiful. And thank you so much, Ant, for joining us and telling your story. I resonate a lot with everything you said. And it was really a challenge for me to keep this podcast about you, 'cause I kept wanting to be like, wow, there's this way that that resonates in me. And I'd love to do another one sometime.

I remember that time Joe came into my team meeting and told everybody I was a shaman. Stress ball because he's a fucker.

Maybe, maybe we should just close this episode with one fuck you, Joe Hudson. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right, 3, 2, 1. Fuck you, Joe Hudson. 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 or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.