Embracing Intensity - Emotion Series #2

The person's willingness to embrace intensity will mark the amount of change that they will feel in their life in the short term. It's like, it's a great leading indicator.

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. Good morning, Joe.

Hey, how's it going?

Doing well.

It's actually afternoon here.

Afternoon? Oh yeah, morning here, afternoon there. Hawaii, California.

Yeah.

Yeah, I hear you're taking your daughter on a road trip.

Yeah, yeah, she just got 15 and a half. She got the learner's permit and I was like, hey, how do you want to learn to drive? She was like, let's drive across country. So we're going to drive from California to New York.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, I'm really excited for it because I You get these moments with your kids, especially as they get older, where you get to really deeply sink in with them on a topic. And those road trips are the best way to do it. 3 days ago, I'm sitting in this cafe— COVID's opened up— sitting in a cafe with my 12-year-old. And we're talking about embracing intensity in this cafe, where she's trying to figure this out. Like, what do I mean? When I say to her, oh, hey, you're running away from a feeling there. Lean into the feeling. And we're having this conversation. It's just one of those epic conversations you have with your kids every once in a while. And there was this lady who was sitting near us, and it was like watching her jaw just drop, like what the hell is happening? How is this conversation happening between a dad and a 12-year-old? It was really amazing. And it was that conversation, actually, which is the reason that I said to you, hey, let's talk about— Embracing intensity.

Hmm. Is that when you told her that she's going to be doing this drive all in one go in like 36 hours?

No, different daughter. The younger daughter is embracing conversation.

Oh yeah. The 12-year-old's not doing the driving.

Yeah. No. And that wouldn't be embracing intensity. That'd be creating intensity.

Uh-huh. Yeah. An important distinction.

Big distinction. Yeah.

Yeah. So this, this is something that comes up a lot in our courses as, as a principle for ESF and kind of a principle for any of the courses. And it's one of the things that really. Kind of attracted me with my air sports and like kind of extreme adventuring background, which is like, okay, yeah, embrace intensity. Yeah, let's do this. So like, can you, for the audience, define what you mean by embracing intensity as opposed to what I just suggested on the road trip, you know, creating intensity?

So embracing intensity assumes that there is never a moment when there isn't some intensity to embrace, that there's really nothing to create in the situation. And I use the word intensity so that people don't think like it's difficulty, because I find that when people— once people really move through embracing, say, their anger or their sadness or their fear, that they find it's more challenging even to embrace things like peace and joy and to allow that in. So the intensity is really about the thing inside of you right now that has some discomfort, or it's like it's It's like being asked to expand in a way that is slightly uncomfortable, and it's embracing that. And I think the best way to think about it is if you just close your eyes for a minute and take a deep breath, and you say, am I bracing or am I embracing? And that's like the felt sense of it. The felt sense of it is like, How much am I allowing my experience to occur and how much am I resisting my experience?

Yeah, that kind of points to an important thing where the concept of creating intensity, like if people are learning as they go through these courses and they do this work and they find there's a lot of intensity in them. And so then they're like, when there's intensity, that must mean there's growth. So I'm gonna start by creating intensity. And you could tell like if you're creating intensity, and not just letting it come up, there is a bracing to it. It's like, okay, here it comes. I'm ready for this intensity.

Right. Also, I mean, I like creating intensity every once in a while. Don't get me wrong. I think it's a really useful tool, but it's not a principle to live life by. Meaning, well, I mean, you know what we've done in some of these courses and it can be quite intense. And so I don't steer away from creating it, but it's not, that's not a surefire way for transformation. But what is a surefire way for transformation is embracing intensity. As a matter of fact, I was sitting with a whole bunch of CEOs, and we were discussing what do we want to be able to measure. And I said, well, one of the things I would love to be able to measure is transformation in different ways. And they were like, well, what's the leading indicator of transformation in your mind? I was like, oh, the person's willingness to embrace intensity will mark the amount of change that they will feel in their life in the short term. It's like, it's a great leading indicator.

This seems like this is one reason, perhaps, like one of the benefits of embracing intensity. What are reasons why we might want to drift towards living in this principle?

Yeah, it's funny because my daughter asked me the same question when we were sitting across. She was like, well, what are the reasons? And I came up with 3. And then as we were talking, there was a 4th that showed up. So I'm going to give you the 3 because those are the only ones I remember. And then we'll see if the 4th one shows up in this conversation as well. But it's incredibly good for decision decision-making. It's incredibly good for joy, like increasing the amount of joy that you feel. And it's incredibly good for effectiveness. Oh, I have a fourth one that's come. It's really good at effectiveness and it's really good at curbing unhealthy patterns. So those are the reasons to do it.

Okay, so you've got like making decisions. Let's start with that first one then. Can you elaborate on that further?

Yeah, this one I think I've even talked about in a different podcast, but it's basically Our decision-making is actually an emotional situation. It's not an intellectual one. We're not making intellectual decisions. So in 2012, the guy wrote a book called "Descartes' Error," where he shows that if you take the emotional center of the brain out of a person, they'll cease to make decisions. Even if their IQ stays the same, it'll take them half an hour to decide what color pen to use, or 4 hours to have lunch. So what that means is we're making decisions as a way to feel what we wanna feel. Means that we wanna feel good and we wanna feel loved and we don't wanna feel like a failure and we don't wanna feel shame. So we make decisions based on that and we're using our logic to figure out which way we're gonna feel. So the key to great decision-making isn't logically thinking it through or being non-emotional. It's actually being completely willing to feel any emotional state.

Hmm.

So if you're doing something, if you're scared to take risks because you'll fail, or you're scared to speak your truth because you're scared you won't be loved, or if you're more commonly scared to take a risk because that much, the joy of success would be overwhelming to you and you'd feel like it would be taken away from you. So you avoid that feeling of accomplishment, which seems antithetical to people, but it happens all the time. Then if you're willing to feel all that stuff and you learn to embrace all that intensity, then you make decisions far more clearly.

So there seems to be a link here between emotions and intensity. Like, uh, for, for many of us to feel an emotion is intense and to feel more emotion feels more intense. And this is our common pattern and tends to be that we suppress it at some point.

Yes.

Before it reaches some threshold that we're afraid we'll be dysregulated or, like, lose our shit.

There is no real intensity in an action. There's only an intensity in a feeling, physical or emotional. So, you know, if you were jumping off a cliff and you didn't have any emotional experience, it wouldn't be intense, with or without a parachute, outside of maybe the wind on your face and, like, that experience. And we know, psychologically speaking, that we make decisions based on the feeling that we get from the decision-making. And particularly, if I have this right— see if I can remember it correctly— that it's the avoidance of negative feelings that is more powerful in the way that we make decision than the positive reward. Even though positive reward will change behavior quicker, if you look at the way people act, it's like trying to avoid negative feelings is actually more powerful.

Yeah, it's a really good one. I mean, looking back in my life, the times where I I felt in the flow with the universe were the times that I was just following what I actually wanted. And the times that I was avoiding what I didn't want or emotions was when I found myself feeling the most lost and disconnected. And so like back to decision-making, something that's really important for decision-making is being context aware. So you could decide like, okay, who am I gonna hire for this particular role? And then you could also ask yourself, what's important about hiring somebody? And something we talked about in the Feel Over Figure episode in the AOA series, was how our emotions create the context in which our logic works. And so becoming aware of what that context is— oh, I'm afraid of my business failing, I'm afraid of being perceived as a failure, I'm afraid of being abandoned, I'm afraid of my partner leaving me— recognizing the context within which we're making decisions helps us process that underlying context to allow us to make a different set of decisions because we're aware of the underlying pattern.

Yeah, just intellectually, that's true. And then on a more physical or emotional level, what is also happening is the more we embrace it, the more sensitive we become to it. And the more sensitive we become to it, the more aware we are of it. So when I first started, and we've had an episode about this too, I think, where it's like, you didn't think you felt fear for a while. And then you're like, holy crap, I'm feeling it all the time. And it's like, it's the same thing with my world. It was like, I'm not feeling that emotion, and then, oh wow, I am feeling it. And so you just become more and more sensitive to these emotional states from embracing intensity.

Yeah, yeah.

So we'll make that a subcategory number 5 for, for reasons, is that increased sensitivity is amazing because it's not just a sensitivity towards your own, but it's your sensitivity towards others. So you'll be in a conversation with a counterparty, say in a business situation, and you're so aware of their emotional state because you're so aware of yours. And it's, it's like an incredible thing to be able to hang out with people and be aware of that in a way that allows you to create healthy, amazing relationships.

Yeah, it makes you more perceptive to, you know, the energy in the room.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So, so moving on to what's something along the lines of curbing addiction or stopping unhealthy patterns?

Yeah. So the thing about all addictive cycles is that there's a moment where you're feeling something that you don't wanna feel that you move to the addiction, right? So it's like, I don't wanna feel the want for a cigarette would bring me to the cigarette, or I don't wanna feel the negative voice in my head brings me to, or the shame that the negative voice in the head brings to me, I don't wanna feel that, therefore, I'm gonna move to television, or I don't wanna feel out of control, so I move to anger. But if you're good with feeling all those things, then there's no reason to move to the addiction. And there's no reason to particularly have the shame around the addiction. So if you just feel into it, it really helps curb negative behaviors.

So this is speaking to addictions, but also it can be any kind of behavioral patterns that we have. So like drama triangle patterns, like I'm not willing to feel my helplessness. So I try to avoid that by solving everyone's problem and infantilizing them.

Right, yeah, so that's the second way. The second way in which it curbs negative behavior patterns isn't just the addiction. It's this thing where if I am used to being— if I got taught from my family, hey, I'm going to be emotionally abandoned, then I'm going out into the world trying to avoid that emotional abandonment, that feeling of emotional abandonment. And the way that I'm trying to avoid it, I'll recreate it. For instance, I used to, when I was recreating the pattern of emotional abandonment, I would get angry whenever I saw that I was starting to get abandoned as a way to avoid feeling that feeling. Obviously, the anger made more people abandon me, 'cause who wants to be around someone who's yelling at them? And therefore I'd invite it in. If you just go, "Oh, I'm gonna feel that, I'm gonna feel that abandonment," I'm going to sit in that. I'm going to learn how to make friends with that, learn how to fall in love with that, then you don't really recreate the pattern over and over again. Because what's happening in our system is like, it's like we're a cell that's trying to get back to homeostasis. And if we weren't allowed to feel something, we're going to recreate that negative pattern in our life over and over and over again until we feel it. And then once we've felt it, then we don't have to recreate the pattern. And so you see this happen all the time in people recreating the patterns, all to avoid a feeling. As soon as— in my work, all the time I see this— as soon as someone fully falls in love with the feeling they're trying to avoid, the pattern stops. The negative pattern. It's the quickest way to stop a negative pattern in your life.

Yeah. Yeah. So it brings back to a metaphor that I've had for emotions, which is that they seem to be the way for our nervous system and for ourselves to self-organize itself back into homeostasis. And the avoidance of them is these patterns we've learned, like an electric fence with a dog, where you teach the dog that if it goes near this edge of the property, it's gonna get shocked. And eventually the fence can be turned off and the dog just won't go there, even though through that fence lies freedom. And each of our emotional movements is the system trying to find homeostasis. And to the extent that we avoid them, we're blocking it. Yeah.

And I like the, the idea of the electric fence too, because If you actually touch the electric fence, it's uncomfortable, but it doesn't actually harm you, right? And what's different than with the emotions than electric fence is that the emotions actually become more and more comfortable, that they change. And so one of the greatest things about embracing intensity is that when the emotions are welcomed, they feel very different in the system. That the discomfort of most emotions, negative or positive, is the resistance to them. It's not the actual emotion themselves. Sadness in itself is quite joyful. I remember in AOA once where somebody was talking about how they learned to enjoy their own sadness and how it opened up this floodgate of sadness and moved all this trauma out of their system. Similarly, you can have a deep joy for it, and it changes. It's like sadness doesn't look the same way. It'll go from maybe like, poor me, to, just like a deep grieving and gratitude. Anger will move from maybe like a passive aggression or like a rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, to a like, no, this isn't gonna, I'm not gonna allow this to happen right now. So as we learn to embrace the intensity, those emotions become so much more fluid and they change and they're so much more comfortable. And they don't take control of us the way that resisted emotions do.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting that resistance, it's, it's really about the dissonance. Like if, if part of our system is trying to move towards homeostasis in one direction and the other part of our system is pushing against it in an equal and opposite direction, not wanting it, then not only does it persist, but it's also just increasing stress fractally throughout our body and our emotional system and our thoughts.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I haven't thought of it that way, but exactly. That's cool.

Hmm.

Yeah. So I guess that's, benefit 6, somewhere on.

Yeah.

Is that it changes the way your emotional experience is far more fluid.

And I guess that would have impact on your body too. Like a lot of the diseases that come, that are associated with ACEs, like Adverse Childhood Experience scores, a lot of that just comes from there being a lot of chronic dissonance in the emotional and physical body.

Definitely in the musculature. Like you can tell there's lots of people who did it the guy who invented microexpression, that whole theory. His teacher understood this as well. But you can look at the way somebody holds their musculature, and their musculature holding is based on what emotions they don't want to feel, and you can tell so much about a person just from that. And you've seen this with, like, ESF. You've seen it so that, like, you see someone's face completely change as it releases.

Yeah, so that brings us to I guess the fifth one. So we've gone through improved decision-making, we've gone through getting out of unhealthy patterns, including addiction. We've gotten to feeling more intensity, more sensitivity, including to things like joy, positive emotions, and positive experiences.

Yes.

And then effectiveness. It seems like all this sort of comes together in effectiveness.

Yeah, I would say effectiveness and joy. There's another way that it increases the joy in our experience, But let's do effectiveness first.

Mm-hmm.

And effectiveness— so I would just say we're more effective when we can do the things that are uncomfortable for us. So one example of this that I think is quite obvious is when you're working with somebody and you say, OK, we've got this new project that we've never done before, they'll do the things that they know how to do first instead of doing the things that they don't know how to do first. That's really, really common, and it's the least effective way to go about doing it. In MIT, they have a principle that says, you look at the part of the problem that you understand the least about, and you start your work there. And it's the same in a CEO of a company. It's the thing they don't want to look at, that if they look at it, they'll be most effective if they look at that first. And so it's the same thing in a marriage. If you have a marriage and there's that pink elephant in the room, to approach that, and to talk about that, and to feel into that immediately, as quickly as you can, will make you more effective. Have a better marriage, be happier, be better to each other, be more loving. And so if you're willing to feel and embrace the intensity, then you're far more willing to go into the thing that everybody else is avoiding, and you'll be more effective for it.

Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And coming back to joy, 'cause I was sort of combining joy with increased sensitivity as a category, but then you say there's something more to it. What was that?

Yeah, so I think my most repeated phrase is this phrase that says, "Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome." And somebody else once told me it was kind of like, it was like you have one or two docks in your port, and one emotion can be there at a time. So if you're not fluid, then joy never has a place to come and park. So that's what I'm speaking to. I'm basically speaking to the fact, if you embrace the intensity and you don't repress it, then you don't get this low level of the unfelt emotions sitting in your life all the time, and then you're moving in your natural state, which is joyful and loving. And so I see this all the time, and it's why when people have these big emotional movements, they feel all this relief, they feel all this joy in the short term. But it's also long term— people who are joyful are people who can cry easily. People who are joyful are people who can, like, are very fluid with their frustration and anger. Who can let their fear move through them really quickly. It's not people who have repressed the fear. Like, we all can close our eyes and think about, oh, that person repressing the fear, they're kind of anxious all the time. They're not joyful. And that person who's repressing their anger, they're kind of depressed or they're angry all the time, depending on how they repress it. If they repress it by grrr, or they repress it by, I'm such a bad person. Either way, you know, or the people who repress sadness all the time. It's like that need for perfection and that rigidity that happens in their system and their whole body. So yeah, joy just happens naturally when everything else is moving fluidly.

Yeah, it seems like everything happens more fluidly if everything's moving fluidly, everything in your life, whether it's joy or whether it's motivation or— connection or swiftly moving on from something that's not working.

Yeah, definitely. There's— as compared to like not feeling it and trying to manage it all the time. You know, there's this great saying that I learned in venture capital, which is the amount of— the amount of effort it takes to create a deal is the amount of effort that you need to maintain it. Basically, if you have to do a whole bunch of work to try to get the deal done, then you're going to have to do a whole bunch of work to make that deal successful. Ah, that's so true. It's so true. Yeah. It's true, and not just in venture, in creating a project in a company. And similarly, it's like, if you have all this effort to keep your emotions in line and in check, and you have to hold muscularly and emotionally and mentally, it's like, that's a lot of effort being put towards something that isn't effective, that isn't joyful.

I'm curious to get like 3 integration questions from you that can help people recognize if they are bracing or embracing their intensity, or creating it or embracing it.

Yeah, well, the best one is, right now, are you bracing or embracing? Are you embracing or bracing? I think that's a great question. And I asked myself that question for— there was a time when I asked myself that question like 10 times a day. This beautiful question that I just loved asking myself. Another great integration question would be, go and feel, go and have a moment of feeling an experience that you don't wanna feel. Have the feeling of abandonment and sit with it for a good 10, 15 minutes and then ask yourself, Like, what? What was so bad about that? What made it that you didn't get destroyed by it? Have the experience that you've been avoiding your whole life, and then ask yourself, what made it that I could survive that? What made it that I possibly even feel better after I've felt it? So that's another great way to integrate this work. Third way to integrate the work I would say, what are the emotions? And I think feeling them more than labeling them would be good. But what are the emotions that I don't wanna feel that sends me into my bad habits? Those would be the three.

Yeah, beautiful. Thank you, Joe. Awesome.

Thank you, Brett. Good to talk to you again.

Yeah, you too.

All right, I'm gonna finish packing for the road trip. Truck is halfway packed.

All right, get to it.

All right.

Have fun.

Thanks.

See ya.

Bye.

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