Connection over Perfection — Master Class Series #3

If you close your eyes and you think of the things that you feel are most perfect in the world, those are also things that are deeply connected. We think of a flower, we think of a, a scene, we think of God, we think of an amazing product. What the human population sees as perfection, they are all deep expressions of connection.

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. What is perfectionism? If having clear goals can be so helpful in life, how could it be that the simple act of measuring ourselves up to them so often holds us back? Today we're going to explore why our quest for perfection never seems to satisfy us and often only slows or impedes productivity. While seeking connection tends to result in better output, better products, and a better life. So Joe, what makes this such an important topic?

Oh man, that's a, that's a great question. There's so many reasons why it's important to me. The one that comes to mind right away, the experiment they did, it's the dried spaghetti experiment. And it's basically you give a group of people 25 or so hard pieces of spaghetti and a marshmallow. And some masking tape, and you say, build the highest structure you can build. And it turns out that kindergartners, a group of like 5 kindergartners, will beat a group of 5 CEOs on a regular basis. And the reason that the people who are doing the experiment say that that's the case is because the, the young kids are iterating. They're just trying stuff out, trying stuff out, trying stuff out, and then when the time's up, they've tried 3 or 4 models and they've got something. And whereas the CEOs are trying to make it absolutely perfect, and then they'll put that marshmallow on at the last minute, the whole thing will collapse. And so they didn't iterate, they didn't try, they tried to make it perfect, and so it didn't work. And one of the things about this experiment, which is so cool, is that if you get those same 5 CEOs and you add an administrative assistant, they will outperform the kindergartners. That just somebody who can connect them together will immediately change it. So on that level, it's a great example of how just connection, connecting with the tools that you have, experimenting, iterating, right? That's a form of connection. Connecting with each other, like with the admin, all of that produces better results.

Okay.

So that's one of the main reasons why it's so much more important. The other more important thing is that our neurochemicals do not propel us to be perfect. They propel us to connect. So it's in our nature. Connection is in our nature. And so when you're working with humanity, prioritizing connection makes it better for you and everybody you're working with. And that's part of the reason you get better results, is that people don't want you to be perfect. The idea of you being perfect is gonna be different from person to person. What they want is to feel connected with you. And what they want and what you want is to feel connected to them. That's what we are genetically programmed to do, is to have this sense of connection. So you get a deeper level of results and you get deeper satisfaction in your life. And this is everywhere, even in the places where you don't expect it. Uh, for example, sales. Like, there's one way of selling, which is the way most people sell. They try to write the perfect pitch and then present the perfect pitch in a perfect way, and that just doesn't work as well as asking a a bunch of questions, whether that's question-based selling or whether that's challenger-based selling. It's just asking a whole bunch of questions and talking to the person, finding out what's important to them. There's a great book on this called Ready, Fire, Aim, or is it Fire, Ready, Aim? Aim, Ready, Fire. It's basically saying that you don't— the job isn't to get a perfect product and put it out there. The job is to sell the thing before you build it so that you know what people will buy, which means that you're more connected with your customer.

So then you're building what people will buy rather than what you planned or what you thought they would buy.

That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that you're prioritizing connection. You are saying, I am going to connect with my customer and see what they really want, to see what it is that I can really serve them by providing, instead of I have this cool idea, what will make you buy it?

So let's define our terms here to sort of discriminate between what is perfection and connection. And let's start by defining what is perfection.

The critical parent's voice in your head is what it is for most people. You know, we have this exercise in one of the workshops that I do, which is a triggering exercise where people are to trigger one another and people hesitate to do it. We don't do it because we want to see people triggered. We do it because we want people to figure out how to handle it when they are triggered, yeah. And there's like a group of people I can just like walk up to and I can trigger people really easily because I can read what will trigger them pretty quickly. And one of the things I can do is— Yeah, you're great at that. And one of the ways that I'll do it, I can just like see who the perfectionist in the room is and I'll say, "You're a perfectionist." And it'll trigger them because they're immediately in this headlock with themselves because like, part of being perfect is to not be a perfectionist. So it just messes with them always. But the way I pick those people out is because I can see which ones of them had super critical parents, and you can see it in everything that they do. So on some level, perfectionism is just trying to make the critical parent pleased. And since the critical parent could never really be pleased, it wasn't about you, it wasn't— and it could be the critical teacher or the critical grandparent, whatever.

So how does that perfectionism show up? What do you see in people in their lives or the way they carry themselves, or even just briefly in a workshop when you just met them?

Oh, how do you see that? It's the amount of rigidity in the musculature, the amount of precision that they operate with, how much they're second-guessing themselves, how stunted their tones are, the way that they speak are. Basically, all it really results to is rigidity and hesitation inside the person when they're trying to be perfect.

The hesitation part's really interesting because, uh, like, for me, I've always, like, identified or been, like, diagnosed as ADD or ADHD. And if I really, like, pay attention to it, the moments where I, my, I get, like, Teflon brain that skips off of my task, if I really look at what happens, often it arises from a perfectionist pessimism. I sit down to write an email and I'm like, "Oh, I'm just never gonna get this right. I'm not gonna get it right, at least not right now, so why even bother? You know, maybe some other time the conditions will be perfect and I'll know what to do, but you know, let's go see what's in the fridge for now." Right, I think that's like, they call it attention deficit disorder.

The idea in the label is that like your capacity to pay attention, but if you reverse it a little bit, it's like how much attention was paid to you. It's the attention deficit disorder. Does that mean that you can't pay attention or does that mean that there was a limited amount of connection that you got? And that's what actually creates it. So I've noticed that that's like on the other side is that connection feeling. The idea that you can do it perfectly is also just simply inane in the fact that like how— what I think is perfect is different than what you think is perfect. There's always someone thinking that you're not doing it perfectly, including you, always. So it's just the other thing you said, how do— what is perfection? It's something that doesn't exist. It's just the point of view. And the point of view, if you are being absolutely perfect, somebody's seeing you as being rigid or imperfect or hesitant or whatever it is. So that's how I describe it. There's no such thing as that. So the only way to describe it is trying to satisfy some critical voice in your head that is never and can never be satisfied.

Having goals and a vision and striving for perfection is good, right? Allows us to, you know, structure ourselves and structure our minds so that we can achieve something. How does that interact with this idea of perfectionism?

Yeah, so having goals and intentions, those are fantastic. Obviously, it allows us to focus, right? It allows us to decide which way we're going to walk. You know, we have thousands of decisions to make a day, and if we make them based on a goal, then we are far more coherent and unified, especially if that goal is coherent and unified. I don't know if that has anything to do with perfection. I don't see that as being perfect. You know, your goal— none of our goals are perfect even, right? So as long as you don't believe that there is some perfection you can get to, then the goals are really useful. As soon as you think there is a perfection that you can live up to, then the goals become less useful. To be specific about that, that doesn't mean that you're not 100% confident you're going to get to the goal. It's just the belief that there's some level of perfection at the end of the rainbow that just doesn't happen. Yeah, and the other thing is that the best way to get to what we think is perfection— I'd even say, if you close your eyes and you think of the things that you feel are most perfect in the world, those are also things that are deeply connected. We think of a flower, we think of a scene, we think of God, we think of an amazing product, we think of a person who inspires us. —an ecosystem.

And it's a metabolism.

And it's all also like far more an expression of connection than it is of perfection. So even what the human population sees as perfection, they are all deep expressions of connection.

This seems related to the idea of utopia being a dangerous idea. Right. But the idea of iterating towards better than what we have now is— —just sort of the natural state. Which is the coolest thing too, right?

Because iteration is far more connected than perfection, right? Like, if I'm just iterating and I'm learning and growing, that is a connected experience. That's what life does. It evolves. Like, it doesn't evolve to a perfect end. And so if you see yourself as trying to evolve to a perfect end, then you're no longer in the flow of life. You're not using all the natural energy, all the natural ways of being that we were designed with to be productive.

This is all reminding me of the book Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. Have you—

I haven't. What is it?

Yeah, it's a fascinating and quite short read actually. It's quite poetic and it just kind of describes this one very broad concept across a bunch of different domains in sort of short prose about how, you know, there are, there are games that are finite where the You know, you achieve something and you get the title, you get the diploma, you get the trophy. Yeah. You get the money. And then there are games that are, you know, they're not meant to be won. Yeah. The goal is not to win it and end the game, but the goal is just to keep playing.

Right. I think that's a beautiful way to describe why connection and perfection work the way they work in our systems is that life is the game that you just keep on playing, and therefore connection is what works. And when you have a game that has a finite end, or you have created an imagined finite end to it, then perfection is there. And that's the other thing about it, is that fear creates a finite end in people. So the idea of perfection is really a fear-based idea. The idea that you have to be perfect, that you have a right answer, that there's the right way to do it, that's all fear-based, and fear does not make great decisions.

Yeah, that's interesting. A lot of ideals of perfection are this belief that we can get rid of everything bad, that we can reduce all error, right? And there's a fear of like, oh my God, like, what if this happened? What if this still exists in the world? What if there's still imperfection? What if I still have to feel whatever this is that I don't wanna feel? What if I could just cut all of that out? That would be perfect.

Yeah, this is a, the CEO of Netflix has a great example of this where he talks about his first company and he basically made it idiot-proof so it couldn't be broken. And then he only had idiots working for him as he describes it. And then they couldn't really adjust their company to the new times. And so in this company now, he has— Rigidity. Exactly, he has a system that's in place to create a certain amount of chaos so that he can create an environment where smart people love to be and where it's far more flexible. And that's—

Or where flexible people like to be.

Right, exactly. And that's where connection, right? In one, he prioritized getting it right and perfecting. The other one, he prioritized being connected with his people.

So then let's get into the definition of connection then. Well, how specifically would you define that as relative to this idea of perfection?

Yeah, it's a measure of capacity for you or for anybody, anything to meet and accept things as they are in the moment. Right, so if I'm connecting with you, I'm not asking you to be any different right now. And the more I ask you to be different, the less connected we're gonna feel. The more connected, if I'm looking at a landscape and trying to adjust it and telling myself, this is the good part and this is the bad part and comparing it to other landscapes, I am in less connection than if I am in just full acceptance of what the landscape is at this moment. So connection is basically, it's like the surface area of our awareness. And we take away surface area when we start looking for things that can be better or things that are different, or any way in which we're calculating creates distances, that connection. So if you are a CEO and you want your customer to be different, you are not in connection. If you are a product manager trying to get a different answer from your customer, then you're not in connection. If you are a husband wanting your wife to not nag as much, or a wife wanting your husband to not nag as much, then you are not in connection. Connection is the acceptance of people and things as they are. That's what it is. And neurochemically, it is oxytocin and serotonin. Mostly it's oxytocin, which is the drug that is felt when we're in deep connection, when Mothers feel it when they're breastfeeding, and we feel it when we're hugging, and we feel it during sex. And that's oxytocin. And serotonin is more of like a pride, proud of each other drug, and something that you would feel like if you were watching a friend have a great moment and you had a lot of pride in what they had just accomplished. Those are our connection neurochemicals. So that's the other way to say what connection is.

Yeah. More than just pride, it seems serotonin is also involved in like meaning and satiety.

Yes, right. That's right. And the way that to think about our ability to have connection, it's really our ability to love ourselves and accept ourselves as we are. The more I can love every aspect of myself, the more I can love every person I come across as they are. And you can hear like there's somebody's mind out there listening to this right now and they're like, but if I accept myself as I am, I will be horrible. I will drink beer on the couch or I'll just stay the same as I am right now. What's interesting is that that doesn't actually happen. If you like look at any, anything, any system that is deeply connected and change is inherent, it's natural, it's evolution is part of it. It's when people get rigid, when people try to do it perfectly, that change stops happening. Yeah, it's just that you don't get to control the change. It's just that you, you have to trust a deeper intelligence in yourself, your deeper, your deeper intelligence, your non-intellectual intelligence to drive the change.

Yeah, it seems like this comes up pretty frequently in, uh, so much of so many other aspects of the work that, that you do, or that we've, that we've been doing. For example, like the victim story that people have around client relationships. It's like, oh man, all these clients, just there's so much wrong with them. If only they would see things the way we see it, we'd be able to do great work.

Yeah, or fathers or mothers or girlfriends. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right. And the way to think about it too is just like, think about the people who really make it so that you feel seen, that really make it so that you feel understood. Like, feel that, that is connection, right? And those people are seeing you for what you are. They're not trying to fix you or manage you. Right? And, and if you think about like what's so important about connection, like what makes it important is that like, think of what you would do for those people. Think of the people who make you feel most seen and most understood in this world. And what would you do for them? What would you do for yourself if you really saw and understood yourself deeply? If you really felt understood by yourself? People listening to this who haven't quit eating sugar, haven't quit smoking, or haven't like what would you do? Like, there's a way in which you're disconnected with yourself. And if you felt deeply connected with yourself and you weren't trying to change yourself, the things that you would do for yourself are far more outstanding than things you're actually doing for yourself right now. Right. You tell yourself you should do them, but you're not doing them. Yeah.

That brings me back to that ADD example I described earlier. It's like the difference between sitting down to write an email and being like, oh God, I'm just so like procrastinating today. I'm just never going to get this done. Oh, I suck. And that's, you know, telling myself how I should be. And then the connection version would be like, oh wow, I really want to get this right because this is important to me. Oh man. And like, whatever I do, it's never going to be— there's always going to be something I could have done better. Wow. Okay.

Yeah. And how about just be authentic, do it the way that I want to do it, and then look at it and see if that works? Yeah, exactly. So that connection is staying. I talk about what it means, and I say that it's like accepting things are in the moment. The moment changes, so you just keep on accepting because it keeps on moving, it keeps on changing.

Yeah, because the moment you accept something, you can also then turn that acceptance into a new model of perfection.

Yep. Yeah, I'm going to connect to you perfectly. Like, it's so amazing. It's like, hey, I want to connect with you. You can just feel that in your system. Hey, I want to connect Hey, I want to connect with you perfectly. Yeah. It just immediately takes the connection out.

Yeah. I've experienced that in relationships so many times where, like, suddenly I'll have, like, a new ideal of, like, oh, wow, this is connection. I wasn't doing connection before. Now I know what connection is. And then suddenly that can become a new perfectionism where I'm like, oh, man, like, I could call my brother and reach out and talk right now. But, like, I haven't talked in so long and it's been— and then just You know, find ways to make it not okay somehow and then procrastinate it.

Exactly. And that's the amazing thing too, is that we have all these impulses inside of us that are just popping up like, oh, I wanna work out or I wanna exercise or I wanna move my body. And then that impulse, which is the deep connection, immediately gets turned into a perfection of I should work out. Right. And then it's like completely unmotivating.

And then here's my workout plan that I'm gonna hold myself to. Exactly. Shame myself and judge myself when I miss a day. Exactly.

And you watch little kids and they just follow that impulse and there's no idea of perfection. And as they get older, the bigger the perfection, the more they're stilted, the more they're stunted. And if you look at the most, the people who have the deepest level of depression that feel most stagnant in life, their brain is telling them that they're not perfect and they need to be perfect. All the time. Yeah, yeah.

And they're just experiencing that delta between them and their model of what they want to be.

Yeah, I'll give you a little trick that I do with people. Um, you know, there's the most recently is with my guy who cuts my hair, great guy, and he, um, he's an artist and I love his art. It's good work. And he was just having a hard time getting people to, you know, buy and represent him and everything like that. I'm like, hey man, I've got a job for you. And And if you do it, if you do this job successfully, I'll give you, you know, whatever, $1,000 or whatever it was. And he's like, okay, well, what's the job? And I said, I need you to get 30 rejections. I need you to go out there and get like, get 30 people to turn you down. And if you can prove to me you've got 30 people to turn you down in a year, I'll give you $1,000. And I came back like 2 months later. I don't get my haircut that often, or I had one and we didn't talk about it. And then I was like, how's it going? He's like, I've got 3 representations and I've sold like 12 pieces. Right? And it was the difference between trying to get sold and trying to get rejected. Because his mindset moved from perfection to connection.

Yeah. Speaking of moving that mindset, how, how can we consciously shift from a mindset of measuring ourselves up to some perfect ideal and rather focus on cultivating connection? What is the practice here?

Yeah, so that, that question in itself implies perfectionism, right? It's like, how do I perfect myself in this way? And so even that question becomes a little bit less effective than another question, right? And, and so the other thing to say is that there's also no such thing as like perfect connection. So it's asymptotic, meaning that you get closer and closer, but you can never actually arrive. And so there's no place to get to that you're going to ever get to. There's just, um, proximity and feeling more and more and more and more and more and more connected. And I think it's important to say that if you choose that, if you say, hey, what I'm after in life, like my, you know, every company has a bottom line. For most of them, it's financial bottom line, but there's other kinds of bottom lines that people have. What I've noticed is when people change their life to having a bottom line of connection, they have incredibly happy and productive lives. If they can measure their level of connection on a daily basis and their job is just to feel more and more connected every day, that visceral sense of connection, it has a very, very deep effect on people. And so I just think it's really important to say that, but the trick is not to try to get there because trying to get there is a form of disconnection.

Right, there's no there to get, it's an iteration. Right.

It's really more of an allowing. Connection is more of an allowing, right? If I'm not trying to change anything, if the definition of connection is not trying to change anything, it's not quite that. It's not wanting things to be different. You might want to change stuff. That's fine. It's important to change stuff, obviously. It's more about not accepting it for what it is, even if you are trying to change it, which is in a sense allowing imperfection.

Allowing the error signal, allowing the, you know, the pain of things not being as good as you could imagine them being. Correct. Right. Which kind of breaks through denial, because what is denial other than just having this vision of how things are? No, it has to be perfect. So this information that is inconvenient, you know.

Yeah. Also, it's your imagination. It's imaginary. Perfection is again Yeah, exactly. That's beautifully said. Yeah, so how do you have deeper levels of connection in your life? And how do you allow, I would say, allow deeper level of connection in your life? Yeah. One of the things that's a really important principle behind it is to go into difficulty is one of the ways that you get into, when I say difficulty, I mean like discomfort or vulnerability. That really creates a sense of connection in folks. Uh, it, you know, if you've ever seen people who fought together in a war, it doesn't matter if they haven't seen each other in 20 years, their bond is, is ridiculous. It's like such a strong level of connection, and they've just gone through the shit together. I build my courses so that there's difficult moments so that people can start feeling bonded to one another. So there's something about going through difficult things together that creates a bond. Same with yourself. If you, you know, if I have my little kids and I have them do tasks that are hard for them and challenging for them, they feel more connected with themselves and more connected with me. You know, they talk about how to build self-esteem. And one of the ways you build self-esteem is by giving kids hard things to do. And then that's how they build self-esteem. It's not to take that away from them or to try to make it so they're successful. So it's the same thing internally and externally. And then the other main way that I talk about this is view. I talk about something that I termed as view, which is how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to other people that's very operational. And so that if you practice this state of mind, it just leads to deeper and deeper levels of connection internally and externally. Can you explain view? Yeah, the most important thing is it's a state of mind. I think that people, it's almost even beyond a state of mind. I think it is a state that's beneath all states of mind is another way to think about it. Meta-state. But it is, yeah, it's a meta-state, yeah. A stateless state, I've heard people call it. And it's good for internal and external practices. And it's basically V stands for vulnerability. I stands for impartiality, E stands for empathy, and W stands for wonder. So it's walking around the world willing and feeling vulnerable, impartial, empathetic, and full of wonder. And this is not just like how I interact with you, as you know, like we have these conversations that are in view and we do a lot of work in here, but there's also, it's also meditative. And like, if you're sitting and being with yourself quietly, How can you be more vulnerable with yourself in that moment? How can you be more impartial with yourself? How can you have more empathy? How can you have more wonder? Right? We're constantly telling ourselves, "I should lose weight," but we're never really going, "What is making it so that I've been saying that to myself for 20 years and nothing's happened?" Right? We're constantly telling ourselves how we should feel or how we should not feel or how to avoid feeling, but we're not really actually just being empathetic with ourselves and being with the feeling. We're constantly telling ourselves how to do shit, what to do. We're editing ourselves all the time, but we're very rarely just ever being impartial with ourselves. Like, oh, what's actually happening? Let's just look at this thing with kind of a watcher's eye, an observer's eye instead of a manager's eye. Impartiality is amazing 'cause people often say, well, if I don't manage it, it's not gonna turn out right. Which is clearly not true when you just think about most of the major decisions that have changed your life are not things that you decided. Did you really decide to meet your wife on a Tuesday at a bar? Or did you really decide to even take that job or apply for that job? Or did you just apply for 20 jobs? The decisions that actually make our lives are often ones that we don't have any control over anyway. But more importantly, it's like the best change agent for things is awareness. It's not management. Just aware— being aware of stuff can change things dramatically. And we put a whole bunch of management on it thinking that that's necessary, but it usually slows down.

I think that relationship one's a really great example because, like, yeah, you certainly can't plan, connect the dots in advance how you're going to meet a person or a client, or like, you can, you can sort of try to, you can try to arrange your life so that that kind of thing happens with higher frequency. But really, there's a state of mind of being open to it, uh, of allowing it, of allowing those synchronicities.

Yeah, and the more that you recognize them and allow them, the more that they happen, right? And I'm not in any way speaking out against, hey, sometimes you— it's important to say we're gonna get to this goal, right? I think goals are fantastic, I love them. The question is, can you hold that with an impartiality as well as a determination? It's incredibly easy to do when you look at nature. Like an oak tree that grows to be whatever, 5 feet wide and 40 feet tall, like that's determination. And it's also very impartial. It just kind of, it's just in the flow of things. Impartiality is the hardest one for business people, particularly to really grok and understand. And so one of the metaphors I use for impartiality is you're on a boat going down a river. It's important to row the boat, but it is more important to read the river. And if you are partial in reading the river, you're not reading the river. So that's the impartiality part. And then vulnerability, obviously, is doing the things that are just a little bit scary, to let the little parts of yourself that you judge out into the world to find out that nobody else is judging them. They're just you, plain.

Or to find that they might be judged and that's okay.

And to find that they might be judged and that's okay, right? Yeah. I mean, the thing is, we don't really care what people are judging us. There's like all the things that you're proud of about yourself all those things that you think are just frickin' awesome about yourself, I guarantee you there's people judging you for them. I guarantee you there's people, and you don't care. The things you care about are the things that you're judging yourself for. Yeah, exactly.

So we've got vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder. We've talked about impartiality quite a bit. We've talked about vulnerability. Let's talk a little bit more about wonder.

Wonder is curiosity without looking for a solution. Wonder is curiosity with awe. It has a certain level of awe to it. It has a certain amount of amazement to it, and it is in the question. We think that being in the answer is more productive than being in the question. Being in the question is incredibly important. And just as an example, you can have you could have 3 different questions arise. One question is, how do I have the perfect relationship? The second question could be, how do I have the most connected relationship? And the third question could be, how do I have a relationship that lasts 40 years and then ends exactly at 41, right? Probably. And those are going to lead to 3 different relationships. What, what the question is is far more important than what the answer is. And Living in the question is an amazing experience, to be in the question without needing that resolution, to just be in the wonder of life. It just provides, like, answer after answer after answer. But to be in the knowing, you only get one answer, and I'd much rather have many answers than one.

Yeah, it's like seeing an animal, be like, whoa, that's a giraffe, cool giraffe, or being like, whoa, look at the spots on that thing. Yeah, how tall it is. So yeah, the little eyelashes. Oh.

What, it has the same amount of neck vertebrae as I do? What, what? How on earth? Yeah, exactly. It's that feeling of just like, just question after question, answer after answer. Yeah. One thing about vulnerability that I didn't, I'm not sure if I hit, is that everybody's vulnerability is different, right? It's like, I see people often say like, oh, that guy's not vulnerable. You have no idea if that person's being vulnerable or not. Right? Because vulnerable for you and vulnerable for me is different. I could tell you all about my childhood and all the mishaps and drama, and you'd be like, "Wow, man, that was super vulnerable. Your dad did what? Your mom did huh?" And I would be like, "Yeah, that's not vulnerable." Right. That to me, I've said it 1,000 times. I've been in rooms and Al-Anon meetings and groups for years of like hashing through that stuff. There's nothing vulnerable about it for me. And that's kind of the path of vulnerability is that you're constantly showing up with that thing that's a little scary. And all of a sudden it's not scary anymore. And then you'd show up with the next thing and you show up with the next thing and it ends up leading you into authenticity into, because all those vulnerabilities are really just, ways that you're judging yourself and preventing yourself from being what you actually are.

Right. And vulnerability could even depend on role as well. Like an overbearing manager screaming is like, oh, that's, that's somebody not being vulnerable. But an employee showing their anger to a manager that they've been like hiding for so long and just resenting, there's something really vulnerable in that. I would say something vulnerable in both, actually.

Like that basically the manager who's yelling is basically saying, I feel out of control. I don't— I feel alone. I feel out of control. I'm gonna go and beat myself up for yelling in a couple minutes. I feel ashamed, and I don't know what to do to actually fix this situation. So I'm, I'm yelling because I hope that it'll make me feel like I'm in control for 20 minutes.

And to a third-party observer, as you were saying, like, our idea of what is vulnerable is different. Like, a third-party observer might observe the, the manager as being invulnerable in their anger, in the employee as being vulnerable. And we see this in movies, for example. There's so many examples where it's like, finally, that person stood up for themselves. That was such a vulnerable thing to do. Right, right.

And the thing is, the important part is, are you being consciously vulnerable, right? Like, yes, if you're getting angry all the time and yelling at people, obviously, that level of vulnerability, though it's vulnerable for you, you probably don't recognize it, other people don't recognize it. So it's not, it's not really going to have the same effect as being vulnerable in a way of like, oh, I'm gonna go stretch myself here. But what is very useful is when somebody is yelling like that, to see it as vulnerability.

Or, I'm sorry, I keep yelling at you and I don't want to be yelling at you. I apologize.

Yeah, that's the kind of vulnerability that the person yelling is gonna, it's gonna really benefit them. But to see them as vulnerable when they're yelling, just to be able to look at them and say, hey, you're not alone in this. "this whole team wants to be successful with you," will immediately change the yell. It just will. Because you're— if you can see it as vulnerability, that's great. But for that person to have the benefit and this modality of view, the important thing is that you're choosing vulnerability. You're choosing the thing that's vulnerable to you. Right. The one piece that we haven't quite talked about is empathy. And I think that's an important thing. Empathy is— is just allowing yourself to feel the other person. It doesn't mean losing yourself in the other person. It doesn't mean going into the other person. It doesn't mean confusing your emotional state with their emotional state. It just means allowing yourself to be with the person while they are feeling stuff, to be there with them in it. So that's just an important piece on the empathy.

So again, vulnerability, impartiality, Empathy, wonder, view. Yeah. How does one practice view or cultivate this state of mind or meditate?

You can do it internally, you can do it externally. Like if you're a meditator, if you just contemplate quietly, just do some experiments. See what it's like to be vulnerable with yourself and then see what it's like to be non-vulnerable with yourself. See what it's like to be partial with yourself. Have a really strong agenda for yourself and see what it's like to be impartial with yourself.

What about an agenda creeping into meditation? Right, yeah, well— I'm gonna meditate into this particular state of mind that I wanna be in, and that would be perfect.

Right, exactly. That would be very partial. And so would being partial of saying, I wanna be impartial right now. I mean, this is the thing about true meditation is not, is having no agenda, having no management. It's more like sitting on the beach and enjoying the wind across your face. So oftentimes when I'm talking about, talking to people about how to meditate, I talk about it's just non-management, but the level of management is also asymptotic. It gets finer and finer and finer and finer, right? So maybe you start with just a simple agenda, which is to be agenda-less. Maybe you start with a really simple agenda of, being aware of your body. But the idea is that eventually the agenda goes away and you become the passenger. You are being taken for a ride. You're not driving.

How do you bring that into your life when you're in a meeting or an argument or working on a podcast?

Yeah, so that's actually a little bit easier for view. Wonder means you're asking open-ended questions. So if you're really curious, you're asking questions that are gonna give you lots of data. So how, what, where, when questions, not can, do, is questions. And why questions are usually judgmental. So wonder is just asking questions. Empathy is not trying to fix people's emotional states, not trying to change their emotional state, and to let them know that you're with them.

That sounds like impartiality.

It is, and it's on the emotional level. They all are kind of the same thing. If you really, when you start really getting into them, they're all the same thing. But impartiality is, I use that more on the logical level, and the empathy is more on the emotional level. And it's to call it out because I think that most people don't recognize, or it takes them a long time to recognize, that they are constantly wanting their emotional state to be different. That they're constantly trying to get to some state or trying to get away from another state.

Yeah, we've all been taught in some way or another that happy is good. Yeah, right. Some parents are like, "Oh, I'll love you if you're successful." Other parents are like, "Oh, I'll love you if you're happy." And that's almost just as bad in some cases.

Yeah, it's not loving your kid for what they are. And the crazy thing is, is this idea is like, hey, if I love you for throwing temper tantrums, and you're gonna just keep on throwing temper tantrums. That's just not true. It's like, once you love the part of yourself, it changes. Just like if you put awareness into something, it changes. There's this, um, principle in business that says, how do you fix a problem? The thing you do is you put attention towards it. And just the simple act of putting attention towards it changes the situation and creates a solution. And it's the same thing, that awareness just changes things. And so does love. Love just changes. If you can love every emotional state that you have, they change. That the friction of most emotional states is your resistance to them, not the state themselves. If you're resistant to bliss, which oddly most people are, bliss is very overwhelming. You know, there's this great quote that says, fear is excitement without the breath. And it's just saying that excitement, if you forget to breathe because you're resisting it, is fear. Yeah. Right? So that's what empathy is all about. And we're using different parts of the brain in empathy and impartiality too, right? One is mirror neurons and one is opening our heart, the feeling of opening our heart. And the other one is impartiality is like dropping the strategies, dropping the agenda.

Yeah. Another thing about fear and excitement, back in base jumping, There was a phrase similar to this where just excitement is the other side of fear, but getting into it more subtly, fear is when you feel something is off and inauthentic, and excitement is when you feel like you're ready for it. Like whatever, like, cliff you're about to jump off of, if you feel like your equipment is in line and your mindset is in the right place and the conditions are right, then it comes through as excitement. But if there's a part of you that knows something's wrong, like you know that you kind of feel like peer pressured into this to be cool, or you know that the conditions are kind of off but you're just avoiding hiking down because because that would be annoying, then that— there's a constriction there that turns that into fear. And listening to what kind of fear you're feeling can be a really good indicator.

Yeah, that's indeed absolutely— that's a beautiful thing. And I think what it all requires— fear, excitement, breath, no breath— is to feel it. It's to actually feel it, which is what empathy is saying. It's to actually allow the emotional state to move through you and to flow without resistance. 'Cause you're never gonna get the intelligence of the emotion while trying to control it. You're not gonna get the intelligence of your people in a business if you're trying to control it.

It seems like a form of being receptive to information rather than just drawing a conclusion. That's exactly right, yep.

So that's the whole thing, that's the view. And so if you're practicing it out in the world, it's like wonder is asking questions, empathy is being with people's emotions, impartiality is, not trying to drive them to a place. We had this great experience where, you know, we did these workshops where it was these 2-day practicing view. That's all we did, just practice view for 2 days. And this is like deep stuff. Like people will call me 2 or 3 years later and go, ah, but I remember one guy, and it's more than one guy, there's multiple people where this happened, where they basically at some point in the 2 days looked at me and said, wow, I've never asked an impartial question in my whole life. All my questions, everything I'm saying is trying to get somebody to do something. And the people who are gonna have that recognition the most, the people who are gonna have that recognition the most are the people who are most disconnected, are the people who feel most lonely, who feel most disconnected, is because they have this incredibly strong agenda for themselves or for others. Perfectionism. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, and vulnerability is just saying things that are vulnerable, um, or asking vulnerable questions. Asking the question that like might get you fired, or asking the question that might make your boss angry at you, but it's your truth. And that's the thing about vulnerability. Vulnerability is you don't do the scary thing because it's scary. You do the scary thing because it's your truth. You do the— you, you ask the question because it's your truth, or you say the thing And even the work that I do, when people see me do one-on-one work, they're like, holy shit, like, how did you ask those questions? And it happens to me too. I'll feel it. I'll be like, oh my God, I'm gonna ask that question. Oh shit. And you've seen it happen, you know, where it's like, and those are usually the most powerful, most impactful questions are the ones that are really deep.

Yeah, the best ones are when my sphincter is clenching hearing you start to ask the question.

Yeah, exactly. Mine too. Yeah, it's like, woo. And that's the— that's when life just becomes really alive and opens up. And that's where the most important stuff comes. And maybe some people are gonna join you, maybe some people aren't. But that vulnerability really makes it so that you get the life that you want to live because you're showing up as yourself and your truth, no matter the consequences, no matter what someone thinks. That just drives the people who want you for you into your life and drives the people who don't want you for you out of your life. So it's a lot easier. And then we have this whole technique of asking questions and having how to have you view question and answers and all that stuff will be, you know, explicit in other materials. But there's all sorts of ways of using this to do sales and you doing this to do, management of people or doing Vue to do product development or doing Vue to talk to your father who you haven't spoken to in 20 years. And when you hear people have these conversations, it's amazing to see, like, we'd give these homework assignments in Vue, in the Vue course, and they would like go out and talk to their dad and then like parents, siblings haven't spoken, you know, getting back together, husbands and wives realizing that they had the same thing, like all sorts of beautiful things happen. Bosses and employees changing the way that they work together, coworkers changing the way they work together from like 15-minute conversations. Because you do this with executives, I do this with executives, and typically the executive's like, wait, you know, I need to be partial. That's how I've like made my living and I can't be vulnerable. And I'm like, well, let's have, let's do, it's just an experiment. Let's do this for 15 minutes. And then at the end of 15 minutes, I always say the same thing. I'm always like, hey, so, "Have you ever had a more productive 15-minute conversation?" And the answer is almost always no, because when you're that way, it's an incredible form of productivity because you get to see and learn and grow so much. And CEOs start to learn, like, oh, I could— you know, there's this great book that I love, Reinventing Organizations. There's this example of a CEO going to his people and say, "Hey, we just lost the biggest contract. We do not have enough money." "Tell me what we should do." And the whole organization said, "You know what? We're all gonna take a pay cut and we're gonna try to get another customer." And so the people who were trying to get the other customer obviously were completely motivated 'cause they saw everybody do this pay cut. They themselves had a pay cut and the CEO didn't dictate a pay cut. The people decided this is what we're gonna do. And that's an expression of vulnerability in a business. There's thousands of those expressions. There's a Harvard Business Review case of a woman who basically had no money. She had a company and she had no money to keep on going, and her employees stayed with her. And it was all about her vulnerability with the employees. It's so incredibly apparent when you get out of the mindset that people do things for money. Some people do things for money, for sure. We all do some things for money, for sure. Most of what we do in life is not for money.

Most of it— Getting beyond carrots and sticks.

Yeah, getting beyond carrots and sticks and having some faith that people really want, most people and the people that you should have hired and the people hopefully that you're married to and are people who want what's best for them. They wanna contribute, they wanna be a part of things. They're motivated. If there's no money, people wouldn't just like all sit around and go, okay, I'm done. No more money, I'm finished. Right? If like everybody had food and shelter, everyone's like, I'm finished, I'm done.

This example of the CEO reminds me of something that you've said before where the position of the CEO often feels like the most lonely position in a company. Yeah. What would you have to say just to, you know, to wrap this episode up neatly into a perfect conclusion, cherry on top? What would you have to say to that CEO that feels that distance and wants that connection but feels like, "No, no, that would just— everything would fall apart"?

I would say, "I know you had to be resourceful and you had to be self-reliant and you were alone as a kid, but you're not alone now." If you're looking for evidence, look around at all the people who are trying to make you successful, who they might not be able to live up to every one of your expectations, but it's probably impossible to find anybody who's not trying to live up to your expectations, who's not trying to make it work for you and for them. And so take a look at that and then apologize to them for not recognizing it, And that would be the vulnerable act. And then see how much more inspired they are to be there with you and to show up with you because they see your humanness instead of are scared of you.

Beautiful. Well, Joe, thank you for a perfectly imperfect episode.

That it was.

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