How Can I Make Better Decisions? — Decisions Series #1

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. Hey Joe, how you doing?

I'm good, man.

How are you? Yeah, doing well. You know, I've been thinking that, you know, on the podcast a number of times I think I've mentioned how we first met, which was that you had been doing a talk in San Francisco called How to Make Good Business Decisions. And— Yeah, that was something that really caught my eye. I had ended up moving to the Bay Area from kind of my life overseas doing air sports and BASE jumping and wingsuiting. And I was on my own personal mission of how to make better decisions because there'd been a lot of cost and consequence with not making great decisions in our community. And I really wanted that to be That was a study that I was really deeply in at the time, driving me down rabbit holes in neuroscience and consciousness in general.

Yeah.

And so I just realized we've never actually done an episode on how to make decisions.

Yeah. All right. Well, that tickles me to no end. That's actually something I was thinking about when you said, oh, about decision-making. What made me crack up at the beginning was this this idea of like, oh, we really haven't done this, and it's such an integral part of the work. So yeah, I look forward to— let's do it. Let's talk about decision-making.

It's also one of the practical things that people desire. You know, we talk a lot about how to feel your feelings, and people are like, okay, great, what's the point?

Yeah, okay. Yeah, good. Then we should tie those two things in together. Let's do that. Yeah, so as we've, we've talked about the thing many times on the podcast about how the emotional center is the decision-making part of our brain, that if we remove it, it'll take us half an hour to decide what color pen, you know, or whatever it is. Like, you might— you'll maintain your intelligence, but you won't be able to make any decisions. So that's the, that's the quintessential link. The quintessential link is that we make emotional decisions. We do not make intellectual decisions. What we're doing is we're using the intellect to help us try to understand how we will feel at the end of the decision. So we use a SWOT analysis to— it's not really like, what's the best result? It's what, how will we feel at the end of it? And I'm, I think I've said this on the podcast too before, which is like, if you took your SWOT analysis and some authority that you completely trusted looked at you and said, well, you know, if you just choose this, you'll be happier, or if you just choose this, you'll have a more satisfied life, the SWOT analysis just goes out the window.

And so, yeah, and for, for listeners who might not know what a SWOT analysis is, it's a term used in like business that is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.

Yeah, or like if you've written a pro and con list to decide what, you know, whether you're going to marry the person or whether you're going to you know, take the job, whatever.

Yeah, Darwin had a very, very famous one of those on whether he should marry the person or not marry the person.

Wait, tell me this story. Say it again.

Yeah, I guess Charles Darwin famously did that. He did like a very intellectual bullet point pros and cons list about whether or not to marry his wife.

Right, right, right. And if somebody would have said to Charles like, hey, Charles, man, guarantee you're gonna have a happier, better life if you marry her than if you don't. It's just like all that whole analysis just goes out the window. And so that's the other clue that what we're really doing is we're just using the intellect to try to figure out how we'll feel best. And in that, there's an assumption like, I'll feel better if my wife is supportive. I'll feel better if the job makes me money. I will feel better if I am successful. I will feel better. And so not only are we trying to figure out what's going to make us feel the best or the way that we think we want to feel, but in that is a whole bunch of assumptions that are often full of errors. And so the intellect can also lead us into the wrong place, whereas the emotional experience is a great way if you're really aware of your emotions, and you understand how they move, then decision-making becomes something like a completely different thing than to think that you're making intellectual decisions when you're not ever making them. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Something tying back to another thing that you've said, I don't know if it's on this podcast, but you told me once that I really liked this, which was that the body lies as much as the mind.

Yes.

Or you could say even the emotions do.

Yeah.

And so this isn't necessarily to say that our emotions are correct and our mind is wrong. It's more just to say that we make decisions based on the emotions that we anticipate we're going to feel based on the outcomes. So that knowledge helps us, just helps us be more aware of the full stack of what we're making decisions from, not necessarily to point to any particular part of our system as being more trustworthy than another part.

Correct. Yes.

Is that accurate?

Yeah, I would say there's a couple of things in that. The first one is, Clarity and decision-making comes from being willing and able and welcoming all emotional experiences. So what we know about neuroscience is that we're more likely to make a decision or act as a way to avoid something bad than to feel something good. So a lot of the times what that means is that our decision-making, the intellect is weighing the avoidance of something bad over the potential of feeling something good. And so if you're happy to feel any emotion, good or bad, if you welcome any of these emotions, your decision-making becomes very clear. If you can be in love with feeling fear, if you can be in love with feeling anger, if you can be in love with feeling excitement or exalted or exuberant, which everybody's like, "Of course I can," but notice that that might not be the case. So if you can feel all those things happily and you look forward to them, then your decision-making gets a lot more clear. So that's part of it. The second part of it is that yes, your emotional system is not always clear in itself in the fact that you might be, say, feeling something because of a trauma that isn't actually happening in this moment, or your mind might be telling you a certain emotion means something that it doesn't mean, right? And then a great example of this is anxiety and excitement. That oftentimes, I mean, there's this great phrase that excitement is just fear with breath, or anxiety is excitement without the breath. Basically, that if you can breathe into a feeling of anxiety or fear, that it can become excitement very, very quickly. And so that, like, what's the right emotional experience there? Is it that you're not breathing? Is it that you're actually feeling excitement or fear? So there can be a lot of confusion around that as well. And so yes, it's not like, listen to your body and you'll make all these great decisions. It's literally understanding how your emotions work, how your body works, how your intellect works in the decision-making process is, uh, is the beginning of learning to make great decisions.

Yeah, and it sounds like that also includes being aware of what our fears really are. You know, an example in jumping would be you might have the healthy fear that points to the physical risk you're about to take.

Yeah.

And you might also be feeling the fear of letting somebody down or the fear of not, you know, some kind of threat to your identity. And you might be registering that identity threat as a physical threat and feel physical, the physical response of fear.

Yes.

And not realize that you're weighting your decision towards something that is actually protecting an identity rather than protecting your life. And that's, that's one of the core learnings from, from this work for me and backpropagating through my, through my life in air sports.

Yeah, right. That's so— a lot of us are protecting our identity, and yeah, that's beautiful. And, and a lot of us make bad business decisions and apparently bad jumping decisions in air sports based on something that's actually not dangerous to us but dangerous to our identity. Yeah, I would say the thing is, is that the— if you think you're making a decision, you're in fear, period. So I have made 500 choices today. I am unaware of those choices. They just happened, right? So I, I'm choosing to talk to you right now. I'm choosing to have my phone in or my computer in this configuration. I'm choosing where to look. I'm choosing what I'm drinking. I'm choosing what words to say. And they're all choice. So for semantics, I'm going to call those choices. Decisions is where you go, okay, I have a decision to make. And now I'm sitting here thinking about, do I go left or do I go right? Do I take the job? Do I not take the job? Do I buy that car? Do I not buy the car? So if you're in a thing where a decision, where a choice has become a decision, where all of a sudden there's a lot of thought put into it and you're really putting some energy into that in itself is, is fear. So already you're in some fear, operating in some fear.

I kind of want to challenge that a little bit as a devil's advocate. Uh, what makes it not that we could be operating out of desire? On one side of the coin, I can see that we fear a negative outcome. On the other side of the coin, I can see that we desire the best of possible outcomes, and we might even desire to not have the thing that we fear occur? And it can— like, which, which— how do we know whether fear or desire is actually primary there? And can it be both?

It can be both, but, but all that I'm saying is that fear is involved, that there's, there's some place where there's fear involved. So there could be a ton of motivations, desire being one of them, or the motivation to be right, or the motivation to not be judged, or the— there's a There's a thousand motivations in there, but there's a fear. There's a fear of getting it wrong. There's a fear of a consequence if you're making a decision instead of just having a choice that is in front of you. And so that's a really important thing is just to notice that there's fear involved in it. And when there is fear involved in it, our ability to think becomes less clear. Our ability to learn becomes dwindled our ability to see more solutions because we've become more binary in our thinking. So all of that occurs because we're in fear. So once we're in that decision-making, that's what happens. And it's kind of the short fix on that that a lot of people will use and that I will share here is that you just do the next most obvious thing. So I'll give you a story about this. So when I was investing in, I called it investing for philanthropy, where we would put millions, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars into some project. There's this thing about like, there's this moment, are you going to do it? Are you going to put this money in? And I used to think that when I saw that, I used to think, "Oh, that's a decision that I have to make and I have to make it well." And through my time working in philanthropy, what I realized was that's a false, that's not true. It's never true. What's true is you just do the next most obvious thing. Oh, if I'm thinking, do I put the money in or do I not put the money in? It means there's some fear. What's the fear that I have to address? Okay, I don't know if this person's going to be great. Okay, I'll do some reference checks. Okay, now do I still— is it just am I sending them money now or am I still trying to make a decision? Oh, I'm still trying to make a decision. Okay, well, maybe it's not— what's happening? Oh, maybe they're not serving. Okay, the next most obvious step is to call some of the people they're serving and make sure that their product is as good or their service is as good as I thought it was. Oh, you know, so it was just constantly looking. Anytime I thought I had to make a decision, what's the next most obvious step? What's the fear that's not being addressed here, and what's the next most obvious step that'll lead me to—

So what if, what if the next most obvious step is, fuck it, I'll just jump, that'll make the decision for me? Or the next obvious step is, I'm just going to go to the fridge and grab another beer? Or, yeah, what, what makes the next most obvious step? I guess this would be a matter of how well we've calibrated our emotions and where they direct us, how, like, how much we've felt But I'm also curious how you would distinguish between obvious choices.

Yeah, that's awesome. Very specifically, it means that you're staying focused on the problem and you're not jumping in, you're not speed bumping an emotional experience. So what that means is that it's not like, oh, the next most obvious step is to ignore or to avoid, and the next most obvious step isn't to avoid again by jumping over an experience. I'm just so tired of being in this not knowing that I'm gonna fucking just do something. That's one level of avoidance. And the other level of avoidance is I'm gonna go grab a beer. And so what you're doing is you're staying focused on it and you're not speed bumping any of the emotional experiences.

And how do you, how do you prevent getting into like analysis paralysis there if the next most obvious choice is to check the check the charts and then go back and check some other numbers and then go back and check your— yeah.

So the next most obvious thing to do. And so, and if you're looping, okay, if you, if, if you're looping, then you're not doing the next most obvious thing to do, right? So looping is like checking the charts, I would say, isn't doing. What's the thing that you have to do? What's the next most obvious thing to do? And that's the, the critical piece. Yeah, yeah, those are great. Those are great nuances that you're pulling out.

Yeah, cool.

So that, that's like, that's a, that I would say that's a short-term, that's a great, really practical, I'm in a decision, here's what I do. I, every time, and it's literally, oh, I think I have to make a decision, that means I'm in fear, that means there's something that I need to investigate. What is it that I have to do next? And it's that, it's that It's that analysis of, okay, I see it. Now that means that there's something here. What do I have to do to investigate, to unravel that?

And what would the difference would be between, like, the next most obvious thing might be to take actions and follow the next most obvious actions, and it might be that the next most obvious thing to do is to pause and do a little bit of yoga or take care of yourself.

Sure.

And Sure. You know, what would make you not get kind of pulled in? I guess if you were to do that and you, you get regulated to a point, it'll naturally arise in you to start taking action on the problem again.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying that you have to like 24/7 the problem, but yeah, it's just like, what's the next step in the problem if you need to take care of yourself in the meantime? Obviously. Yeah. And I think that the, the thing that I mean, it's kind of this amazing thing. Just if you— this is like a simple little experiment you can do, which is super fun. So you're driving and you're like, where are we going to eat? And that's a decision. And it's like all of a sudden you're in the conversation with your girlfriend, fiancée, kids, whatever. Where are we going to eat? And there's this whole thing, or you're in it with yourself. And then if you just say, you know what, I'm not going to— I'm just going to find out where I'm going to end up. And then all of a sudden you're at this place, you like, then you have a conversation and then boom, oh right, all of a sudden we're here. Oftentimes that's the way life works where you can literally just say, oh, I think I have to make this decision and I can just actually kind of look and find out. And that's what used to happen with the philanthropy is just like, I would just say, oh, what's the next most obvious thing? And then all of a sudden I'm like, yeah, we should invest or no, I'm outta here. And it wasn't— a decision never felt like it got made, right? It was never like, oh wow, I have made the decision. I'm doing this or I'm not doing this. I just looked up and was like, oh, I guess I didn't invest there, or I guess I did. And that's how the world works is like all of a sudden these big decision points just kind of evaporate and they just become the next most obvious thing. And so, and it's because you're addressing the fear directly instead of, instead of thinking that you can figure out the future by sitting and looking at charts or thinking it through.

Okay, so, so we've talked a little bit about how emotions are a big part of how we're making decisions and that they are generally fear-driven. And when we, when we feel like we are in a decision, there's some kind of fear. Um, another way that relates to, you know, something that I've experienced is that any time that I find myself stressed in a decision, it also just means that I haven't fully accepted the outcomes of all of the options or of the options that I might take.

Yeah.

Which is a different way of saying what you're saying, I think.

No, there's— what you're saying there is like another nuance that's really important, which is, so what— how most people think making a good decision. So most people think, oh, okay, here's a good decision. It's a decision where I avoided the consequences. I made the decision that I avoided the consequences and I got the reaction that I wanted to get, that I got the thing that I wanted to get. So a good decision in a business or an investment is that the investment went well, right? But my experience as a venture capitalist was that my best investment was the one that I made like not so good money in. And the worst investment was where I made the most money. And, and, and I think I can't tell you how many VCs have felt that same way where they have like, this was a great investment, but it didn't make money. And this was, this was like, God, it was a shit show, but it made a ton of money.

And you're speaking to some other like intangible return than money that came from it. Yeah.

Or like Yeah, I mean, the company was really well run and it was like they had a good team and for whatever reason, something or this, or it did something really cool in the world, but that market timing was off, right? And whereas the other—

Gotcha. So you—

Made a lot of money, but yeah, but it was all fuckada in 17 other ways and it caused the biggest headaches and took the most of my time, et cetera, et cetera.

Got it. Yeah. So you're referring to a decision that based on the available information was a good decision, it just didn't work out. And other ones that you just happened to invest in, and if you had been, if you'd had your druthers, you wouldn't have done so, and then it worked out. 'Cause there's some, especially in the markets and with companies and investing, there's a lot of stochasticity. And then a lot of decision-making then becomes about portfolio theory. And an example of that from like jumping would be, you could say that you made a good decision because you survived the jump you just did. And you could also survive a jump and say, "I made a bunch of terrible decisions because I don't believe that I could have done that 100 times and survived." And if I had planned on making 100 jumps, then that was a failure.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Yeah. If I made the kind of decision that I made with the company that didn't do so well 10 times, my portfolio would be fricking amazing. If I did 10 decisions with the one that did well 10 times, I would be bankrupt. That's exactly the way to say it. Yeah, beautifully said. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very cool. Yeah, so, but one way people think about it when they're like, I have to make a good decision, most people are thinking, is it gonna get me the result that I want? Is the decision I'm gonna make get the result that I want? And that's not how I make, that's not how I see good decision-making and it's not I don't think it also doesn't lead to the best decisions overall. It doesn't lead to the best outcomes overall either. So what I would suggest is that when you're looking at how to make a good decision, the other ways to look at what a good decision is, is that feels really good inside of you. You're like, "Oh, this, like I could be happy with the consequences either way because I made a decision in a way that felt great." It felt like it was a part of my authenticity. It felt like who I am. Like, so when people are going, do I take the job or do I not take the job? They're thinking, which one's going to make me happy? Instead of, oh, what's the decision that makes me feel really good right now?

Uh-huh.

Right? What makes me feel like, oh, how do I make this decision? Right? And because we're in fear, we're thinking about it in a binary way. And so we're not seeing all the alternatives. And as soon as you say to yourself, okay, instead of trying to get the best outcome or get the right outcome, I'm going to change my focus to, to how does it feel best in me, then immediately the fear starts evaporating, new options get seen. So it's not, I'm going to take the job or not take the job. It becomes, I'm going to ask for this and this and this, or I'm going to make sure that my relationship with this person is right before I take the job, or I'm going to make sure that the resources that I need to be great at this job are going to be delivered for me before I take the job. And so the, the change goes, how do I, how do I be in this decision that feels great right now? Is another way that I think a more fruitful way to think about how to make great decisions. It's not the outcome, it's how you are in the decision-making process.

Yeah, I'm seeing a really beautiful symmetry right now back to the Relationships: How Relationships Reveal Us episode where we— you described that if we're in a relationship where our role is to make the other one happy, then we're basically— that's hell. And I'm seeing that right here. It's like if we're making decisions out of the trying to make ourselves, our future selves happy. Like, you can't predict that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. Yeah. And then the, the other way I, the way I think I'm making a great decision is if I'm making it principled. And, and so I think principled decisions are super critical. And, and so there's two reasons for them. One is that if you're making a decision principled, you're more likely to get the reality that you are wanting. But the other reason is because you make decisions a lot quicker. All of a sudden, decisions just evaporate and they just become choices. So for instance, and I can give you lots of stories about this, but I'll just give you one principle that I work off of, which is I just don't work with assholes. Like, I just don't do that. And there's been huge times where there's been like large amounts of money that I could have made if I would have just suffered this this asshole for a, you know, X period of time or something like that. And it was really hard to say no to this big pile of money. And at the same time, I have that principle and I know that living by these principles, and I'll revisit them every once in a while, say, is this true? Is this still right? The principles that I live by. But if I live by those principles, then it turns out that like my life is the life that I want it to be and all my choices can help me. And so I don't even think of a principle as something— if a principle doesn't help me make decisions, it's not a true principle.

What's another example?

Another example is that I put connection first. So if I have a decision to make over like, do I accept something or not accept something in my life or a job offer or a, client or I connect. I will not make the decision unless I feel a sense of connection. And then I can like, oh, that's— so connection is first. And if I'm having a problem, first thing I do is I go and connect with the person. That's a principle that I live by. And so what does that do in the long term? What that does is if I make enough decisions that way, it ends up that I don't have assholes around me, which is fantastic. And I feel deeply connected with the people around me, which is fantastic. And so the principles that you hold, if you hold them through all decisions, because the decisions is one event, and so you can think about your decision like a portfolio too.

Yeah.

And it's like, oh, I have a portfolio of decisions and my job is to make most of them good decisions. And if I'm living principled, I will do that. And it might be hard in those moments, But finding those principles and living by them, making your decisions by them is the shortcut.

Yeah, this ties back to what you said about feeling great about making the decision or making the decision that feels great in your system now. And I imagine if you make decisions from what you think your future feeling is going to be, then you're basically telling yourself that I am prioritizing my imaginary fantasy future over my present. So you're going to end up living a life where your present is always organized to be sacrificed for some future.

That's so beautifully seen. That's exactly right.

Yeah, yeah, beautifully seen, because I've been there. That's—

yeah, we all have, right? We all have. And I remember this, you know, I remember this time when like people talked about principled decision-making, and I just was like, what the 'What are you talking about? What do you mean?' And it just made no sense to me. It was just— I remember it was like— And then what happened was I was working with somebody who worked exclusively on principled decision-making. And it was over this deal. It was early in my venture capital career. Excuse me. And he's making a decision, and he basically just went through like these 5 principles, you know, this, this, this, this, this, this, this. And, and it was a board thing, and he just like said, these are the principles. And he let— and I saw him do it. I saw him make a great decision really, really quickly, and I saw him not lose his center in the, in the process, you know. Like, it was, you know, one of those things where you get the board call and everybody's freaking out because something bad's happening. And this was like a merger and acquisition. Like our big exit was about to go away and it was horrible and everybody's freaking out. What do we do to like— and this guy is just like, yeah, so here are my principles on this. And I remember one of the principles was you build a company to make the best company. You don't build a company to sell it. That's one of the principles that he lived by. So he's just like, if they don't want to buy the company, we don't chase. If we chase, the best case scenario, we get a lower price. If we're like, fine, best case scenario is they go, oh shit, and they come back. Great. But in the meantime, we're just going to continue to build the best company we can build. And it was just principally decided, bam. He had like 5 principles and he went through all of them. These are my principles. This is what I see works. And he just did it and he never lost himself. And it was, absolutely the right decision for the company. We made a lot more money on that company. And funnily, when they came back to buy it, it was that same company that came back to buy us and paid a lot more money a year later. And so it was just that, it was that. And when I saw that, I was like, oh, that's what people are talking about when they say principled decisions. It means I am going to do something that feels like shit right now for as far as my ego goes, as far as my identity goes, as far as like short-term gain goes, because I, I know these principles work, and so I'm going to live by these principles. And they worked.

Yeah, yeah. There's an interesting—

they didn't work, I don't think it would have mattered to him at all, except for maybe he would have looked long-term, oh, are my principles wrong, right?

Yeah, there's interesting contrast there to like the I guess if there's a principle of I'm going to make the decision that feels good, that might conflict sometimes with the principles that actually draw us through our ego, you know, through, through the uncomfortable feelings of, you know, drawing boundaries and saying no and leaving money on the table. And, you know, firing somebody that we like as a person, and all these, all these decisions that can bring us through difficult feelings.

Yeah.

And so how, like, I guess there's a, there's a lot of times that our emotions might conflict with our principles and our emotions might conflict with our intellectual analysis, but it sounds like the difference between the intellectual analysis and the principles is that the principles are something that's been sort of consolidated over time and you've learned that it works. And, you know, it might be like, I, you know what, I don't lie, I don't want to tell lies because I don't want to have to remember 30 different truths for who I'm talking to.

Right. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah. The distinction here that's I think really important to make is like, there's men— like, I, I think about like Mandela working in like breaking stones in the quarry and being in, in jail for a long period of time. That wasn't going to be comfortable, but it felt good. There's some aspect of him that felt true to himself, that felt like he was being himself in that process. And so the good that I'm feeling, that I'm speaking to, like, you feel good in the decision means that you're in yourself, you're empowered, you're saying, yes, this is who I am. Not in an identification way, but in a way of like presence. I can be present in this decision-making. I'm not saying I'm going to be comfortable. Okay, I'm sure he was not comfortable, but I'm sure that he could be himself in that. And so that's the distinction that I'm making.

Yeah.

And then being able to welcome all your emotional states is to say, oh, I can feel— I can happily feel the fear of losing this deal. I can happily feel the anguish of being stuck in this quarry. I can happily feel any of these experiences. Allows you to be in yourself and maintain who you are in rough times. And who you are is the principles. Yeah, as far as like how you want to be in the world.

I want to tie this back to another thing. Maybe this is even just a principle or just a sort of a pillar of the work, which is that we tend to invite what we fear. And so if we're acting on principles that bring us into our fear, how do, how do we, how do we follow those principles into fearful places without inviting the thing we fear. Like, for example, if my— if I have a principle that leads me to, uh, want to approach a bunch of investors or approach some people I'm attracted to at a bar, and I also know that that's going to bring me into a situation that I'm afraid of, and then maybe I will stumble over my words and then like produce some kind of negative response to my expectation, get rejection, and that I, I might be able to predict that that rejection is going to send me into an emotional spiral for several weeks How do we follow principles into the fear without creating the conditions that the fear invites?

Yeah, so it's the same principle, but it works just a tweak different than how you're describing it. So the things that we fear, we invite through the avoidance of the things that we fear.

Ah, yeah.

So I'll give you a story of my— I was just having this conversation with my daughter last night for dinner, and she was She has a new guy that she's dating and she's really liking him. And she speaks to his last girlfriend or fling or something like that. And she gets this fear that he's playing her or isn't into her as much as she's into him or some version of that. And so she decides, and very coolly decides to say like, hey, this is the thing that like, I have this fear and like, what are you up to? And what's going on here? And the guy's like, no, I totally want you to be my girlfriend. And like, I'm totally committed and blah, blah, blah. And so it worked out well for her. But in the conversation, as she's talking about it, I noticed she was just kind of defending him a little bit too much. And like, and I said, like, hey, babe, what are you doing? Like, why are you— why do you need to defend him? Why do you need to like, justify that he's not going to hurt you or something like that. What's really going on there? And she sat with it for a minute, then she started crying, and she was just like, this is my own fear. This is me being scared that I'm gonna get hurt, and I'm trying to avoid getting hurt.

Wow.

And she says— she's tearing up, it was so beautiful. And, and then, and so I said, yeah, so I want to teach you something. In this particular case, it worked out well, but The reality is, is that acting on that fear made it more likely that he was going to abandon you, right? Because you're more likely to come off needy, and she has broken up with a lot of guys who are needy, so she knows that world, right? And so you're more likely to come off needy, which means somebody who's self-possessed isn't going to be attracted to you. And you also ended up pushing— potentially could have pushed him into something that he wasn't ready for. And the other thing is that, like, if you can take or leave him, if you can be in that fear yourself and, you know, learn to welcome it, then you're self-possessed, and that's a harder person to leave, right? So in all those ways, so for her, it's the avoidance of that emotional experience that is creating, is recreating the fear. Yeah. And so what Living Principally does is it says I'm going to go right towards that emotional experience. I'm not going to avoid it. And so just to give a couple more examples of this, I as a kid was like, not kid, in my 20s, I was really scared of being abandoned. And so I think we've talked about this on the podcast a couple of times. So to avoid the experience of being abandoned, I would get angry at people, which would make it more likely for me to be abandoned, or I would become avoidant, which made it more likely for me to be abandoned. And so it is really us trying not to feel the emotion, the thing that we fear— abandonment, being left, um, being rejected, being a loser, um, failing at our business. It's that experience that we are trying to avoid that we're inviting back in. And Living Principled forces us to feel the stuff that we don't want to feel. Fear, feel the idea that, oh, this company that is not going to get bought and we're going to lose our investment. We have to go and feel that shit and welcome it.

Yeah. Yeah.

I love the avoidance of that that makes us run towards them and say, oh, come on, please, please sign the deal. We'll give you a discount.

Right. And it's also what makes us justify, pre-justify our decisions and post-justify them with confirmation bias. One of the things I really love about the story with your daughter is that there was this hurt that she was afraid to feel And so the way that she made the decision, she justified in her mind, she was justifying her partner.

Yeah.

To avoid feeling that feeling. And that's, that created the blind spot that would have had her fall right into that feeling later on. And this is just another really key thing about human decision-making is that the confirmation bias. Once we make a decision because we don't want to feel whatever consequence of having made the wrong decision or having having the emotional experience that we were trying to avoid— losing the money, losing the partner, losing the business— then we— that's the source of the fear that ends up constructing stories that blind us to reality.

Yeah.

And then feeling the underlying emotion is just the way through it. We don't need to construct a story anymore if we're okay with all of the feelings.

Right. And that's the other way in which we create our own. We recreate the reality that we assume to be true, like, or invite the fear. So one way is we try to avoid the feeling in a way that immediately brings it towards us. Another way is that we see the world, we prove that this is the way the world is, and that recreates that experience for us as well. Yeah, right. Like the person who's like, who thinks A world leader who thinks, oh, the world is cutthroat and everybody's out to get me and they're going to get me at some point. Those are the leaders who go and start the wars, who verify that everybody's out to get them. You know, they, they, they start penalizing, punishing, containing, constraining, oppressing people so that they're not destroyed. And in that They create a world where that's the— that is the actual reality, and they always get destroyed by it.

Yeah, I mean, it'd be nice if there were some examples of that on the world stage right now, but I mean, yeah, only if there was examples of—

only, yeah, maybe like two huge examples are happening. One is, is currently happening, one that will happen in the next five years. Is that— it's just how that works, you know. And so these— this is the way we do it. And so if you live principled If you say, okay, this is the reality that I want to see and this is how I want to live so that I feel really great about myself, then you create that reality. And to do that, it forces you to feel all these emotional experiences that you don't want to feel and become friends with them, welcome them. You can't make that decision to say, we're not going to sell the company even though it was going to be a lot of money unless you're willing to feel, yeah, the oh shit-ness of it, the fear of it.

Yeah, which brings up another potential principle, which could be that I want to make the decision that leads to my deepest growth, which, you know, you don't necessarily know what that is, but you do know what you're avoiding. If you're— if like the more self-aware you become, you notice more, yeah, what it is that you're avoiding. And sometimes I can tell that I've definitely made decisions in the past that didn't seem rational. I didn't end up getting what I wanted. I didn't end up feeling the way that I wanted to feel. And it's almost as if there was something subconscious, something deep in me that brought me into that place to feel the thing that I was avoiding. And I couldn't tell if it was me that knew that or if it was just some deep biological instinct to growth.

As a coach who's been through a lot of this stuff, I see that all the time. I watch people and they think they're doing one thing, but I'm like, nope. Yeah, I totally see how they are. Like, I have a client right now who like isn't working for a short period of time, you know, finish one big project. And typically really high-powered people, when they stop working, they'll go into like this depression. And, and it's really just exhaustion. And except for that, they beat themselves up over not doing anything. So they— so it becomes a depression. And, and I'm watching her do all this recovery. I'm watching her do, um, making all this growth with her family. I'm watching her like be with herself and be more honest with herself And she just is like, "Yeah, no, what am I doing? I really should go get a job." And I'm like, watching her whole— doing all the groundwork to make the life that she's always wanted that she's been avoiding. And so I see that all the time. I see people constantly make a series of decisions. I'll know when clients are gonna make a move usually a good month or two before, because I see that they're doing these things that they can't understand, but they're— their deep wisdom is leading them right to it. And, and, and I think it's something so beautiful when you can actually have faith in that, when you can say, I don't understand this decision, but I have faith that something— my wisdom is, is, is, is, is guiding me here.

Yeah, that leads to a lot less stress of the second-guessing of ourselves. Yeah, you know.

Yeah. And also, I think the other part of good decision-making is there is an act of surrender in it. There is like an act of surrender to decision.

Like, you—

since we can't control the outcome, there is a place where that has to be surrendered. The outcome has to be surrendered. And, and there is— and learning that surrender is unbelievably— like, it creates so much freedom and so much joy. To say, oh, this, this part of it's beyond me. This is what I can actually control. What I can actually control is how I'm going to show up here in my— how I'm going to be in the world.

Yeah, well, that sounds like a wrap. I don't know about you, but that feels really good to me.

Yeah, sounds good. I think we have more to talk about decision-making at point, but I think that this is a good one to end with.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Joe. I loved it.

Yeah, what a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for bringing up this topic.

Yeah, you got it. Yeah, see you everybody.

Bye.

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