Bite-Sized Teaching Series: After 14 Years of Coaching, This Is What I See Hold Most People Back

Hey everyone, it's Brett. If you do anything for long enough, you'll start to notice patterns. The same patterns showing up in your life again and again. In a lot of ways, that's what expertise actually is. It's someone who can recognize and work with recurring patterns. In 14 years of coaching, Joe's worked with literally thousands of different people, and in that time he started to track that many of the same patterns were keeping people stuck. He identified 7 core patterns that were coming up again and again, regardless of who the person was, where they came from, or how old they were. In this episode, Joe lays out these 7 patterns, what they are, why they work the way they do, and what it looks like to move past them. Enjoy.

After 14 years of coaching thousands of people, I have found that there are 7 things that hold people back more than anything else. And the way that I discovered these things was every time I finished a coaching session for about 6 months, I would write basically the issue that I saw, and I started to categorize them and say, okay, which one fits where?

And I found 7 7 categories.

And so I want to go through each of those categories with you today in this video. The first one is that people prioritize perfection over connection rather than connection over perfection. So what do I mean by this? Perfection means that somehow you need to get it right, and right is really arbitrary. As a matter of fact, oftentimes when someone's trying to be perfect, they don't even have an idea of what that perfect is, what it exactly looks like. And whatever they do do, no matter how good it is, their mind tells them that there was a better way to do it. Because we were told as children that getting it right was important, whether it was at school or whether with our parents. We were trying to avoid criticism. We were trying to avoid the bad grade. There really isn't that level of perfection in most of the things that you do in life. You'd never have driven perfectly. You've never had a perfect conversation. You've never looked perfect. So perfection is actually this unachievable thing. But we think that there's something that we can do there, and it will— prevent us from getting in trouble. Connection, on the other hand, is how do we do something in a way that we feel connected with somebody else and with ourselves? So you can make a perfect product, or you can get— make a product that connects with your customer. I guarantee you the second will do better than the first. You could say, I'm going to look perfect, or I am going to look in a way that I feel deeply connected with myself. So connection becomes a yardstick to know how you're doing, not perfectly, because you can't do anything perfectly, but how much it makes you feel like you're in alignment with yourself, how much you are with other people in the process. One of the things that we do in our business, for instance, is we think about how do we build people through connection? How do we onboard people into a course with connection? How do we have videos in connection? How do I connect with the people I'm doing the videos with? And each one of those things, when we do it that way, it brings better results than when we don't do it that way. And it's a simple thing you can do in your life. Just do the experiment. Take anything you do, like ride your bicycle, and ask, how can I ride this bicycle with a deeper sense of connection with myself? A great example of this was this coaching that I did with Ali Abdaal, and you can see that coaching online. We'll send you the link below where he discovers that everything that he's doing in life can actually be enhanced through connection. And connection for us is incredibly important. So it's the thing that is the basis of most transformation. It's why it's the first thing, both in the courses that we offer— we offer the Connection Course— and it's the first thing in this video. Connection, if you have it, makes everything else easier. So the second pattern that holds people back is that they try to manage their reality rather than enjoy their reality. I remember speaking to somebody who was this super high achiever, had gone to Stanford, had been a CEO, had become a venture capitalist. And we were sitting there talking and we were talking about this idea of fuel. And he's like, here I am, I'm 45 years old, I've gotten everything that I want. I have this $30 million house and I'm miserable. My wife is miserable, we're not happy. Like what happened? And I said, oh, you know, the fuel that you've been using has been dirty fuel. It's been a fuel of, oh, I'm not enough, rather than a clean fuel of enjoyment. And it, you know, it twisted his brain because most people don't see that enjoyment has anything to do with business. And I said, okay, look, think about it this way. If I wanted a really fast car, it's not an efficient car. That's not a car that doesn't use a lot of energy. It uses a lot of energy. But if I want a really efficient car, then you don't use much energy at all. And if you end your day and you're exhausted and you feel miserable, you've used a lot of energy. But if you end your day and you're like, oh, that was a great day, I have more energy for tomorrow, then you haven't used a lot of energy. And what that basically means is that you enjoyed yourself. So let me explain it in a little more depth. So if I am trying to manage you, if I'm trying to get you to do what I want to do, your reaction is going to be, ugh. If you feel like you have a friend who's trying to manipulate you, ugh. You're like, no, I don't want that. You might put up with it, but you don't want it. But if you have a friend who you can just tell is enjoying you, is just like, oh, I really like spending time with you, then you want to spend time with them. And so one of the things that happens when you're spending time in enjoyment over management is that you are attracting people to want to be with you. You are not just trying to get your way all the time. The other thing, if you look at it, look at those people who are constantly manipulating to try to get their way. Like, are they happy? I mean, they might get what they want. Some of them get what they want if they're really smart. A lot of them don't. But are they happy? Are they people you want to be? And everybody goes, no, I don't want to be that person. And what makes you not want to be that person is because you know they're miserable. And the other thing is, it's just not as effective if you're leading a life that you enjoy. And enjoyment means two things. It does not just mean I enjoy being at the beach, so I'm always going to be at the beach. Enjoyment means I'm gonna do the things I enjoy, but it's also learning how to enjoy the thing that you're doing. So like right now, you're having a moment, I'm having a moment. I am going to show you how to enjoy myself 10% more. That's it. That's all it took. You could do it too. Take it, take a moment. What do you have to do right now to enjoy yourself just 10% more? And that will give you energy, that will give you perspective, that will give you presence, that will make you more aligned with who you are. And therefore, the things that you achieve will be in alignment with who you are. So if we go back to my friend who was a venture capitalist, he achieved a whole bunch of stuff. Wow, congratulations. However, it didn't end up where he wanted it to end up. If he would have been enjoying himself in that process, making sure that what he did was enjoyable, then where he ended up would be where he wanted to be, not where he thought he wanted to be. The next one is people try to figure their life out more than feel their life, rather than feeling their life over figuring out their life. So let me give you the story. I'm 7 years old. I am crying. My parents take a picture of me to make fun of me. They take that picture, they put it in a photo album, and then I'm like 23, 24 years old, and I'm going through the photo album. I see a picture of me crying, and I said, oh, that's probably why I haven't cried for 14 years before this in my life. For the last 4 years, so to say, from 20 to 24, I was trying to figure out how to have the life that I wanted and what was going wrong and why my girlfriend and I were always fighting. And so I just dedicated to learning how to cry again. And I had no help, no way knowing how to do it. So I just went out in the woods and I pretended to cry, pretended to cry, pretended to cry. And then finally I started actually crying. And when I cried and I started letting all of that out, so many good things started happening. There was so much clarity in my life. There was so much less resistance, so much less self-talk of shame, so much less fight. And I realized at that moment, oh, holy crap, just allowing yourself to have feelings creates a tremendous amount of clarity. Now, as it turns out, there is a huge amount of neuroscience behind this. And I think the most important piece of neuroscience around this that I've discovered is from a book called Descartes' Error. And what this book basically does is, is it shows you that all of our decision-making happens in the emotional center of the brain. Meaning I take the emotional center of your brain out, your IQ remains the same, but it takes you a half an hour to decide what color pen to use, or it takes you hours to decide where to have lunch. And so your decision-making goes away. We make decisions based on how we're gonna feel. We might use the intellect to try to discover how we're gonna feel, but we make the decision on how we're gonna feel. And so it's really easy to see once you get it. And let me show you. How many decisions did you make so that you didn't have to feel that little, uh, inside of you, and you just jumped on the phone? And that was another decision you made so you didn't have to feel that, uh, that itch, that, oh, I'm not good enough. So we're making decisions all the time to try to have an emotional experience one way or another. We might use the intellect to figure out how to win so that and feel like we're winning, but it's the emotional center that makes those decisions. So if you want clear decision-making, decision-making that makes the life that you want, logic isn't gonna get you there. What's gonna get you there is welcoming all these emotions, realizing that you can feel them all. They don't destroy you. It's not the end of the world. And we have a whole video on how to feel your feelings, so you can go to that. But it's like allowing you to see, oh, all of these emotions, they're just part of life. And if I stop resisting them, it creates a lot of clarity in my system. And then all of a sudden, I make better and better decisions. So the fourth pattern that holds people back is they think that the should is more important than the want, rather than the want is more important than the should. One of the biggest epiphanies that I've ever had in my life is I lived in this little place in Mill Valley, California, and I was living in a shared house, and I had this room, and I was very monistic at the time. I had something to prove around this. And so all I had was a desk in the room. I had a big closet, so I slept in the closet on my bed, and then I had just this big empty room with beautiful light. Like, it's wonderful. And I was doing all this self-work at the moment. And so I wrote down everything I didn't like about myself. I just thought, I'm going to be, like, deeply honest, and I'm just going to write down every single thing I could think of that I didn't like about myself. I folded it up and I put it away, and I forgot about it. And it was like 6 months, 8 months later, I found it, I looked at it, and I realized, oh, every single thing on that list that had changed was not something that I told myself I should do. It just naturally changed. Everything I told myself I should do on that list hadn't changed at all. And then I started doing this experiment with people, and you can do it yourself. Look at anything that you've wanted to change for the last 10 years that hasn't changed in 10, 5 years, and ask yourself, is that something you're telling yourself you should do? And the answer almost always is yes. And the reason that this is the case is because should is a form of shame. Should says that you should, need to, there's something wrong with you, be different. It's a finger wag. It's a shame process. And shame's job is to stagnate stuff. It isn't to let stuff be free. Right? So if you look at a little kid and the little kid is on the couch and he farts in front of his aunts and his aunts all laugh, no problem. He'll just keep on farting when he feels like farting. If he gets shamed, you shouldn't do that, you shouldn't do that, he will hold it in. It will create stagnation. Shame is built to stop people from doing things, not to start people doing things. You don't shame somebody into starting something and have it work. What motivates us to do things is our wants. Our wants are super important. If you look at a little kid, 0 to 7 years old, all they're doing is following their wants. That's it. They're just like, I want this, I want that, I want to walk, I want to talk, I want to want, I want, want, want, want, want. And they have more development in that 7 years than at any other time of their lives. And as we get older, we judge our wants more, we become less in touch with our wants, and our development starts to slow. And so really being able to understand what you want and to understand that all of your wants are actually, in their essence, quite good. You'll see that there's a lot of motivation to do something. We really are motivated to get the thing that we want. But as soon as we feel that want and we get scared of feeling that want, it is a feeling to want. Then we throw a should on there. Oh, I want to exercise. This little impetus comes up. It's like, oh, I feel that urge to exercise. And then I go, I should exercise, and then pretty much I'm not gonna do it. If I just stick with the, oh, I want to exercise, next thing you know, I'll be exercising. Now there gets to be a little bit of confusion here. A lot of people think by wanting, it means craving or like really wanting or like neediness. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm just talking about the natural impulse of evolution, the way that a branch tends towards the light. It wants the light, like, there's this natural evolution in us. It's not a craving. It's not going to make us whole. It's just the next step that we want to take. And oftentimes the reason that wanting becomes hard for us is because wanting is an emotion that makes us feel like, oh, we might not get it. So there's a fear that comes up. And there's also the thing about wanting is it's going to redefine us. If we get what we want, that's going to be a different person. Right? If all my life I've wanted to have a great wife and then I get a great wife— hi, Tara, I got a great wife— I got a great wife, then all of a sudden I'm going to be a different person. And so there's a certain amount of fear that comes up both in not having it happen and in having it happen. And so really getting good with that feeling of wanting is an amazing thing. The other thing that makes people stop their wanting is that they say, oh, what I want isn't right. If I got what I wanted, I would, you know, never stop eating bonbons on the couch and watching soap operas or whatever the thing is that they think. And one is that's not actually what we want. But two is there's a want beneath the want. So, okay, what's behind that want? Oh, that want is to feel at peace. Okay. Is that a good want? Yeah, of course that's a good one. Of course we want to feel peace. So if you find a want that you think is corrupted somehow, say, what's the want behind that? What's the real want? Because the want that's corrupted is just a strategy that doesn't work for us. And so get to the core of it, and you'll see that that want is just that evolutionary impulse that's pulling you forward. Again, in my 20s, I was really into this idea of becoming awakened or becoming enlightened or whatever it was. I didn't really know what it was. I just had read some books and there was this thing. And in actuality, it was just like my perfectionism. It was, it was porn for perfectionism. Somehow or another, I was going to figure something out, and I was not going to have any problems anymore in any way. Somewhere in my mind, I probably even thought that, like, I would immediately learn Japanese, Chinese, and Russian, you know? Like, somehow or another, I wasn't going to be human anymore. I wasn't going to have to suffer anymore. And so I chased this thing, and every teacher that I ran across said in some way or another, said, it's not what you think it is, or you're already there, or the thing that's chasing is the thing that you're looking for. Meaning there was nothing, nowhere to get to. And I just never believed it. I had this idea that I could, if I ate the right way, if I meditated enough, if I exercised, if I had the right mindset, if I could be in a particular state, if I could hold that state, then I would finally get there. And what they were all pointing to was, nope, that's not the way. The way to be there is just to know what you actually are, just to be yourself. And I couldn't hear it. I couldn't hear it. And then at some point in my life, I had an awakening. I had a moment where I realized, oh, holy crap, the thing that I'm looking for is here. And that search went away, and a huge amount of the tension and war in my life went away. It didn't go away because I woke up and had the perfect morning routine or because I worked out the perfect amount and that I had the perfect body and I had the per— none of that happened. Like, we know those people. They're not happy. That's not how you get there. It happened because I just understood the truth about my nature. That was it. That was all I needed to do. And it was at that moment that I realized that, oh, everything was easier because I understood myself. Because I was being myself. And that brings us to this pattern that holds so many of us back, is that we say self-improvement is more important than authenticity, instead of authenticity is far more important than self-improvement. Seeing that, I started to obviously just live that way, saying, oh, it's my job is just to more deeply understand myself. And what I realized is not everything, but most of the things that I wanted to have happen just happened easier. I got to know myself. And as I got to know myself, I realized, oh, I really am craving connection. Oh, wow. And now that I have connection, everything's gotten easier. And so my whole life got easier, and I became more and more of the person that I used to want to be, that now I didn't care that I wanted to be, because what I really wanted to do is just understand myself. I had a teacher in college, and it was— I was reading Hermann Hesse. It was a class on Hermann Hesse. I loved his writing, and this teacher told me this story about how he was in Berlin. He was a German guy when, as a kid, when the bombs were falling, when there was like these big fires because the Allies were bombing Berlin. And he said that in the war, one of the things that he realized was it wasn't the people who were super powerful who were willing to risk themselves for others. It was the people who were far more self-possessed, knew who they were, that they were able to risk themselves for others. It's the CEO who has, like, hundreds of millions of dollars, who's constantly worried that the company that they're running is gonna fail, even though financially they're gonna be fine for the rest of their lives and the rest of their children's lives. So what's going on there? If you put your faith in power, the thing about power is it can be taken from you. Power, at its essence, is something that people believe you have. Like money has power in our society because we all agree money has power. This is how power works. You have to have an agreement that you have power for you to actually have power. And that means it can be taken away from you. It can be taken away from you with a gun. It can be taken away from you with loss of money. It can be taken away from you because people don't like you on YouTube anymore, but it can be taken away from you. And you know that essentially, you know that you need to be scared because you are relying on this thing, money, influence, fame, whatever it is, to have power, to have what you want in life. On the other hand, there's empowerment. And empowerment basically is an expression of knowing deeply who you are. It means that, oh, I recognize that I don't have anything to defend, that I'm going to be okay whether you like me or you don't like me. I'm going to be okay whether you decide I need to be fired or you decide that I need a raise, that I have choice, I have sovereignty, I can do what's required for me to be somebody that I respect. You can put me in a prison and you can have me bang rocks for a living and you cannot feed me enough food and I can still be Nelson Mandela. I can be completely empowered and it can't be taken away from me. I don't have to worry because I have that deep sense of self-possession, of knowing who I am. And so if we work towards that, we actually get a sense of safety because the world in general isn't safe. We are all going to die. We are all going to feel pain. We are all going to have heartbreak. We are all going to be judged. We're all going to be told that we're wrong. We're all going to have somebody get mad at us. And most of that is gonna happen in the next week. The only way that we can get that sense of safety is through a deep sense of knowing who we are and that that thing that we are can't really be destroyed by anybody. And the feeling of it is very much like, like being Superman or Superwoman and there's no kryptonite. Like, I don't have to worry about what's next. I know that what I am essentially will take care of that thing. And so cultivating empowerment, the resourcefulness behind empowerment, the will that's behind empowerment is far more lasting than cultivating power. And a great expression of this is, let's say you are in a relationship, and let's say it's a love relationship, it's a romantic, loving relationship, and they do something that you think is, like, super embarrassing or is going to make your friends think that you look horrible or make you ashamed of being in that relationship. And what happens for most people is they start having a power struggle. I need you to not do that, but I want to do that. You can't tell me what to do. I'm going to do. And there's this power struggle that ensues. That is an expression of people putting power over empowerment. Empowerment, however, is what is required for me to be fully in myself right now, to be the person that I respect. And that question doesn't require the other person to do anything. That question allows you to be what other people want to be rather than to be the thing that everybody's scared of. The last one is the most profound one. And before we get into it, I would say that empowerment, that feeling of deep empowerment, if you just stop in your body and you feel a deep level of empowerment, there's nothing to fear, there's nothing to defend, there's nothing to prepare for. All is well in your world, and you feel that, and then you feel unconditional love, a feeling of deep love for the world and for yourself, you'll notice that those two feelings are very similar. They're like two sides of the same coin. And it's why the last pattern that I see people really slow themselves down with is that they put defense over love. Rather than love over defense. Every time that we defend ourselves, it's because we think there's something wrong with us. There's nothing to defend if we don't think there's anything wrong with us. If I said, I think the sky is blue, and you said, no, the sky is purple, I am not going to defend myself because there's nothing wrong with me. But if I think that there's there's absolutely something wrong with me, if I'm a liar, if I think that I have lied and I'm bad for lying, if I think that other people are bad for lying, and you say to me, you're a liar, I'm going to start getting defended. Which means every time I'm getting defended, I'm denying some aspect of myself. We're all liars. I mean, that's not even to say that all of us lie, though. I think it's like the average person lies like 2 or 3 times every 5 minutes or something crazy like that. But I just mean that we're not completely honest with ourselves. No, nobody can be completely honest with themselves. And so if somebody says, hey, you're a liar, I'm— yeah, I'm not going to defend that. If I do defend it, what it tells me is that there's a part of who I am that I'm not willing to accept. There's a part of myself that I think is wrong, that I think is bad. There's a part of myself that I am cutting off. And so every time I defend, I'm agreeing with the world that there's something wrong with me. The more that you can love yourself unconditionally, all the parts of yourself unconditionally, the more you can love others. Now, the confusion that happens here is people think that if I don't defend myself, I am going to be stepped on. If I am loving and open-hearted, I am going to be taken advantage of. So my response to that is Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, any great mother that you have ever met, ever. To be really deeply loving, you have to know who you are and you have to love yourself. And that's that deep level empowerment, because you know what that is in its essence can't be destroyed. And so that loving isn't I'm being taken advantage of. Right? That is, I want to be liked. That is, I want people not to be mad at me. But loving is to say, I love you even if you're mad at me. I love you even if you want to sell me a bridge and I'm not gonna buy it. The thing that really hit it for me was I was sitting over a— I was sitting in Bodega Bay. I'm looking over this bay, which looks a little swampy at low tide, and the sun is coming in. And so there's this orange reflecting on the tide. And my friend looks at me and he says, God, Joe, you're an asshole. And I was like, no, I'm not. Like, why would you call me that? What are you doing? He's like, just relax, Joe. It's like, I still love you. Like, you don't have to be upset that you're an asshole. You're just an asshole. Like, are you trying to tell me you're like not an asshole ever? Like, you're an asshole. Like, what's the problem? I was like, oh, and this moment happened where I realized, oh yeah, of course I'm an asshole. Everybody is an asshole at some point, and I can love that part of myself. I don't have to be ashamed of that part of myself. I don't have to defend that part of myself. I can just love that part of myself. And the crazy thing that happened over the next 3 months is the more that I love that part of myself, the less I was that. Like that thing that I was resisting in myself continued, insisted that it existed because I was resisting it. And as I started to be gentle with it, as I started to love it, it transformed, it changed. And that's the real beauty of Love Over Defense is that loving people, loving yourself is an incredibly potent transformative agent. It's why in the Connection Course we teach VIEW, and it's why VIEW works. It's because you're learning how to be in a loving state of mind with people, and that produces better results than all the management, all the shoulds, all the self-improvement, all the defense, all the power could ever do. It's the only thing— it is the thing that consistently creates the most change in people. So those are the 7 things. Again, I just highly recommend you do them in order. And if you really want to explore these deeply, get them in your bones, have real felt experiences of them, really understand them in an experiential and in a problem-solving level, then the best thing to do is sign up for the MasterClass because we go through one of these a week. And I think there's like 2.5 hours of experiments that you do with other people. In each week so you really get to know each of these patterns and how to undo them.

Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or leave us a review. We'd love to hear your comments, questions, and suggestions for future episodes. You can leave those to us on Spotify or on YouTube or by emailing us at podcast@artofaccomplishment.com. Our podcast is hosted by myself, Brett Kistler, and Joe Hudson. Charlie Garcia is our producer and editor, and this particular episode features production from Cat Gansen and Nabras Ibn Omar.