The Elephant In The Room: How To Say What No One Wants To Say

Many years ago, I was working in commercial production, uh, in the film industry. And there was one job where we were working with this famous musician who was publicly going through a lot of things at the time. And so we were all kind of patiently awaiting their arrival and wondering how it was going to be. You know, we made sure we had the mojo set up nicely. We had the right music that we knew that this person liked. And we were like, okay, there's a lot of tension. And when this person showed up, they just looked like death. Like they looked like they'd been hit by a truck. And nobody said anything about it. They showed up and everybody was just really cordial, like, oh, hey, hey there, how are you doing? Welcome to set.. And they just walked right through, came into the Moho, they sat down in the chair and there's just silence in the room. And then the makeup artist comes in and she just walked right up and she just was like, oh wow, well you just look like shit, don't you? And immediately, immediately all the tension in the room just dropped and he just relieved, was just like, oh God, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like absolute shit. And that just changed everything. Just speaking to that obvious truth that nobody was speaking to really dropped in the whole, the whole day. So, so yeah, for today's episode, I want to talk about how to talk about The elephant in the room.

Besides, there's a fucking elephant in the room, apparently, which is what the makeup artist did. Right, right.

Yeah.

Just bam. Here it is. But yeah.

Yeah. It can be so easy. And yet there's a million reasons, often very good reasons, often just, you know, fear or shame. There's a million reasons to be explored and investigated why the elephant isn't talked about. How we can make a practice of saying the quiet part out loud in a way that is constructive and brings us into connection and addresses the things we're afraid of by saying the scary thing without ignoring them.

Yeah. What's interesting about your story is that oftentimes it's far easier to do what the makeup artist did than to do the elephant, speak to the elephant in the room. With an alcoholic father, for instance, meaning if the, if the pattern has been entrenched over a long period of time and there are people who you want to have long-term lasting relationships with, where you're scared to lose love, where there's all this history built in, it becomes harder and harder to speak to the elephant in the room typically than if it's Even a high-powered person that you've never met before. Yeah.

Yeah. So tell, tell me, there, there's definitely some story behind that. The alcoholic father.

Uh, no, no, really?

Yeah. What's your, what's your experience with this?

My story's a little bit different, right? My story's on the other side of, of your story, which was, that was my job in the house was to yell about the elephant in the room. And to be punished for it. So however it worked in my family, it was a, I was constantly telling everybody what the elephant in the room was, and I was making sure I was telling it in a way that nobody could hear me. I was telling it in a way that was aggravating. And to some degree, there was no way for me to talk about my dad's alcoholism in a way that wasn't gonna be aggravating for everybody. Of course, I wasn't the only elephant in the room that I spoke about, but that was my job in, in the family was to point to the thing that everybody was ignoring and to be the problem because of it. And so there is something that you said, which I think is incredibly important, which is there is a way to speak about the elephant in the room that's really it can help you be far more productive about it. It can help the whole situation become something that is healing and grow and, and has a lot of growth to it. The dilemma is you don't have full control over that. It doesn't matter how well you process it. It doesn't matter how well you speak to it. It doesn't matter how well you position it. The, you can't control how someone's gonna react to it and Unfortunately, antithetically, the more you try to control for the other person, typically the worse it goes. So the, the way to do it is far more about attuning to what's true with you in an open heart than it is going to be to try to guess how they're going to react and manage that response. Yeah.

So I'm, I have a number of curiosities from what you just said.

Yeah.

And I'll bookmark those because I just want to start with what makes an elephant, what, what causes the elephant to enter the room and be unspoken to?

Yeah. Um, a false sense of shame. False sense of shame. Typically it's like, uh, someone feels ashamed and they don't want to address it because they have a sense of shame around a subject. And so they're avoidant or they get angry, which is another form of avoidance every time it's brought up. There's many methods. So something gets brought up and somebody avoids, somebody gets angry, somebody guilt trips somebody. There's all sorts of methods that make it really uncomfortable to bring up the subject or make it so that bringing up the subject doesn't work. And so they do all that, but they do all that because they think there's something wrong with them. They feel ashamed of whatever this thing is. And, and so that deep feeling of shame is false. And the fact that I guarantee you, whatever was happening to this rock star has happened to 100,000 other people at that exact moment in time, the breakup or the, maybe they don't get newspaper articles written about it, but whatever the thing underneath the newspaper articles were, the failing of a career or a song going bad or a Everybody's hundreds of thousands of people were experiencing it exactly at that moment. And so, and nobody thinks, oh, they should all be ashamed of it. The shame is always, I should be ashamed of this thing. I should be ashamed that I lie as if everybody isn't lying on a somewhat regular basis. So that's why I call it a false sense of shame. And, and because there is that shame, that's not entirely justified. Because there is that shame that's happening. They don't want to address it because typically there's a hump to climb over when you're dealing with something that you're ashamed of. There's a moment between healing and addressing it that feels like shit. And so it's a little bit like working out. There's a moment between the moment before you go to the gym to the end of the workout where you, where there's some struggle. And so doing that, jumping over that hump is something that's prevents people from doing it often.

Yeah. Yeah. I think in the case of my example, nobody wanted to ruin the shoot day and the shoot day was dependent on the performance of this individual. And so nobody wanted to throw him on tilt and yet he was on tilt. That was what was already happening. And letting, letting that just be in the space, letting that be seen was the beginning of the path to, to him showing up as he was and being okay with it and ultimately having a reasonable performance.

Right. And how she did it was a great lesson. And the fact that she was just very open-hearted about it, it sounds like, oh, don't you look like shit. It wasn't like, oh my God, You fucking, you know, you're getting paid like a million dollars to be here and this is how the fuck you show up? You know, it wasn't that, right?

Or, oh my God, you look like shit. This, this thing's gonna go horribly now. Right, exactly. It was just like, oh yeah, cool, you're here. And yeah, this is, this is what's up. Great.

Yeah, exactly. It was very in view.

And I'm like, as a makeup artist, I'm here to like help you fix that.

Right. Yeah. You know, and it's very in view, right? It was vulnerable thing for her to say cuz she could have been blamed. There was an impartiality about saying it in the, in the fact that she was saying what was true. It wasn't that she was trying to get them into a, this rock star into a different place in that moment. There was empathy with it and there was wonder with it. Like, you know, it, it, it was, it was done inside of view with that very, which is another way of saying very openhearted.

So how did it become your job in your family to be the one to speak to the elephant in the room. And how, how did that play out for you? I'm imagining that if you spoke to it directly on a number of occasions, you know, whatever family function you were at would be ruined. You might be yelled at. Like, what was, how did you work with that? How did that role develop for you? And how did you work with that, with relationship with consequences?

This is a bit of a tangent, but it's an interesting one. From what I can tell, there's this great book that I read in college called The Family Crucible. I don't even know if that's in print anymore, but it was a theory of family dynamics. And basically it said when a marriage was in trouble, that one of the kids would be the problem that the marriage had to come around to solve to keep the marriage and the family together. And so I was, I played that role. So there's a way in which I was pitted against, and there was also a way in which I was rebelling against the authority naturally. So I was just like, yeah, I'm not, I'm not fucking dealing with it. I had major authority issues because of the inconsistency of my father, basically due to the drinking. And so that between those things got into that role. And then the other piece was that my dad really needed somebody to fight with, you know, to relieve that tension that builds from alcoholism. And particularly the way that he drank and his makeup. And so there was constantly a need for a fight. So when I was a kid, we're talking 7th grade, we'd be in a yelling match and I'd say, okay, fine, dad, you're right. And he'd see, he'd look at me and go, see, I told you, you were weak. He like, there was no way for me to step out of the role, you know, because it was very important to him that he got the fight. And so that, that's, that's how it all laid out. Yeah. In general, I was the problem that my parents stayed married, stayed married around.

That brings up something really fascinating about the elephant in the room dynamic because it's so common that the person who speaks to it feels like they are doing something wrong and they are the wrong one and they are the one causing the problems. And like, to the extent that they believe that, they contribute to a group reality field of that being true, which recreates the situation where no one in the group is allowed to say the thing because it is associated with being the bad one.

Right. Yeah, I was, I was the one bringing up my dad's alcoholism and I was the bad one in the family. We all agreed to do it, including me. And he was the one getting, you know, 3 shots of vodka in before breakfast and he was not the wrong one. Right? So it's like, it's an amazing dynamic and it's a really, really well pointed out that especially in, even if you look at the situation where nobody was saying to this rock star who was walking in, like, you look like shit. 'Cause they didn't want to be the wrong one. They didn't want to be the one that fucked up the shoot. Right. And that's typically as if it was their fault for saying something that was true instead of the rock star's fault for whatever the rock star had done. Or found themselves in or didn't postpone the shoot or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And it points to the interesting game of shame ball, the shame hot potato going on under the surface where this person showed up and he on some level felt ashamed, like, "I'm bad, I'm wrong for showing up to this multimillion-dollar shoot in this kind of a state." And You know, many of us, I was, this was maybe 15 years ago and I was relatively new to the scene and I was like, I am not going to be the person to break the ice, break this situation. But, but man, I really feel like we are all like, I really felt like we were all doing it wrong until, until it was, until that was spoken to. And it was somebody with much more experience in the industry than, than me that, that said it. And, and like you, like you pointed out earlier, it was said with love and not with shame.

Yeah. And I think that's the critical piece is that when it's spoken about and it's met with, yeah, that's true. Then you move from a dynamic where everybody thinks they're wrong to a dynamic where there's something open that can happen. And this is true in a family and this is true in a business and this is true in a, right? Hey. Everyone, the advertising campaign is not fucking working. This sucks. We tried really hard. It didn't work. We failed. Okay. Now something can be done. So something has shifted before that moment. Everybody is, oh, I've done something wrong because the advertising campaign isn't working, or they've done something. There's some sort of blame-shame cycle going on. And so there's something really beautiful about finding elephants in the room, especially if people can be non-defensive, like in the Love Over Defense, where they, where the person can just go, yep. Oh, fuck. Yeah, I do fucking look like shit. Like, imagine what would've happened in my family of origin if it was like, dad, you're an alcoholic. And my dad was like, yep, you got a strong point there, son. You know, like, but I hate this. This sucks. I don't like drinking vodka in the morning. I need help. Yeah. Like so much would've changed.

Right. But that sounds like that's not what happened. And that sounds like that's, that's not what happens in many situations. You know, you might have a company where, uh, one of the leadership team has done something like unethical or illegal or, or just otherwise outside of the consensus cultural reality. That even if they were to receive it with like, "Oh yeah, I totally did that," there would be a major fallout. And so there's the case where somebody receives it with like, "Oh yeah, totally." There's the case where somebody receives it defensively. But then there's maybe even the case where regardless of how that person receives it, having it spoken into the public realm can have major consequences. And so I'm curious how, how for you in, in, in the, in the role with your dad, how did you progress from, you know, you were describing earlier how you kind of spoke to it, but didn't speak to it and kind of in the sideways way that wasn't constructive. How did that evolve over time? And how did that evolve as a system in the family with the— It wasn't quite—

I was pretty straightforward about it. It, so it wasn't too sideways, maybe at the very beginning, but pretty soon it was, you know, very, very straightforward about the drinking. And then there was some sideways things that I did, like, hey dad, he would always pour vodka with the orange juice and, but it was always very clear every morning. So I would, you know, so every morning I would say, hey dad, can I have a sip of the orange juice? And every morning he'd be like, oh God, Joe, vodka. And we had this ritual. And so that wasn't straightforward at all. Uh, but there was definitely straightforward times. I think generally what I notice in folks is that as when you're in a, when you're not in a family dynamic, when you're in a, a dynamic between adults, it's not bring it up, not bring it up, not bring it up, not bring it up, bring it up. Bring it up again, see what happens. And then either the relationship is finished or something is moved. Typically, that's how it goes in a normal adult functioning, really not non-functional or functional relationship. That's how it goes. Or I brought it up a couple of times. No, it's gone nowhere. I'm going to live with it. So relationship ends either through I'm leaving or relationship ends through we're not talking about that. So we're not really in a relationship. We're not going to talk about the most important thing. So clearly we're not really in a relationship. We just hang out next to each other. Right. So, and so that's what my mom did. My mom probably brought it up once or twice and then just said, okay, fine. This is something I'll live with. And, and whereas I was a kid and I had a rebellion and I had a very particular thing, and you'll see this, I think, in companies too. People will either say, yeah, this is all fucked up, but I got a paycheck and so I'm gonna live with it. And a little part of their soul dies when, when you do that. And, and same in a marriage. Like you, you're, you're basically agreeing to some level of sense of security in exchange for being who you are, being your truth and, and, and actually having a functional, healthy relationship. And so it sucks. The, the, I think the real question is, How do you, how do you, what are some of the ways to do it that are really, that are, have the high likelihood of success and that are not trying to manage the other person? Because trying to manage the person who's, who's elephant you're bringing up is not going to go well. Right. So for instance, if you had the woman, the makeup lady, say to this rock star, oh goodness, you know, I really hate to say this, but geez, I'm gonna— oh, I mean, did something happen? You're not looking so— I don't know, please don't be mad at me for that. I would have far more likely gotten a shitty response than goddamn, you don't look good. You know, the straightforwardness with it, the not scared of the attack. That fear of the attack that makes you manage is what somebody will fight against.

Yeah. So, so there's what I'm hearing here is that there's the, there's the shame underlayer where everybody feels like they're doing something wrong or they'd be doing something even more wrong by speaking to what's obvious. And there's also the layer of fear, the fear of the consequences of everything blowing up.

I'm going to be attacked. I'm going to be attacked is the fear, right? Everything's going to blow up and then I'm going to be attacked. Which can be— if it was everything blows up and everybody's happy with me, there's no fear, right?

Yeah.

Oh my gosh. I'm going to be the person who says to this guy that he looks like shit and he's going to say, you're right. And he's going to walk out and the producer's going to walk up to me and say, I am so glad you said that to him because it would've been a really horrible day of shooting. No fear. The fear is that someone's gonna be like, what the fuck did you do? That guy's worth fucking $10 million an hour, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Or the fear might be that you blow the whistle and then the giant corporation comes and destroys you.

Right. Either way, it's punishment.

Yeah.

There's some form of punishment that, yeah, some form of feeling like you've, you've fucked up.

Yeah. And this is strange, but for some reason, this, the example's coming to mind of like Jesus showing up and flipping the tables in the market. Like, that wasn't— like, there's a way that that was done with love, and there's also a way that that was, like, just fire, and he got crucified, ultimately.

Yeah, I'm not sure if it was for that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For related behaviors.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing. It reminds me of a story of a friend of mine who, you know, I'm pretty sure I've talked about this before. But one day we were sitting in Bodega Bay, he looked at me, he's just like, you know, Joe, you're a dick.

And I was like, no, I'm not.

But, but, but, you know, I pulled my father. He's like, ah, geez. Can we not? Can we not? Like, that's all unnecessary. It's no problem. You're a dick. Like, I love you just the same. Why, why worry about this? Just admit you're a dick. And, and it was that same place that he came from. Right? There was nothing that he, he didn't, he wasn't trying to change me. He wasn't moving, you know, it might have from the outside, my, maybe somebody said it's really impartial. He would want me to say that I was a dick, but what was clear was that he was just gonna love me. He was open-hearted towards me no matter what, even if I sat there and kept on being defensive. And so that's the, that's the, that's the interesting piece. The interesting piece is that you can say, ridiculous stuff if you can keep an open heart and, and not, not buy into the shame game, not buy into the blame game. And maybe you have to play that to 3 rounds, right? What do you mean I look like shit? Do you know who I am? Yeah, I know, but come on, you look like shit. There's no problem, we're gonna fix it. But geez, like, you all right? I'm concerned about you as a human. This isn't a personal thing. You know, I, it, it's like that. There was this great quote that I heard this morning. I don't know, it was, it was Sarah was telling it to me. She had heard it from somewhere. I don't know, but it was this woman and she said something to the effect of, uh, I'm just none of my own goddamn business.

Whoa. That sends me on some thought loops.

Yeah. But it was that same thing. It, it was like, I'm not gonna take myself personally. It's that same kind of open-hearted, I'm not going to take this personally. This isn't personal. This is just what is happening right now. I'm not going to buy into the shame. I'm not going to, you know, and it's not my job to figure out where I'm going to be next. I'm going to just show up and let the whole thing unravel and observe it. I think is the rest of what this woman was saying that I can find out what life has to offer. I don't have to be personally responsible for it. And there's just a, a certain amount of freedom in that. So it's not just an external thing, it's an internal thing, meaning there's an elephant in the room for us as well.

Mm.

Right. Everybody has this thing that they don't particularly wanna look at. So it, you know, if you wanna figure out how to say it really well in the external world, one trick is to learn how to say it to yourself and, and, and see what works there. The other one is to make sure that you're saying it in a way that you are proud of. So one of the things that I learned, particularly dealing with an alcoholic, is that the response was gonna be different every day depending on the blood sugar and how drunk they were and how hungover they were and a whole bunch of shit that I could not control and I didn't wanna manage. So the only place that I had to go was, was was how happy was I in the way that I brought it up. And that, that's what pointed me originally to the lesson of openheartedness, because I only felt good about it when I was openhearted. And that happened to have worked better than if I was acting out of fear and trying to manage the response.

I really love that, that piece about the elephant inside of us, because I think the default stance to seeing an elephant in the room is to make it about the room. About the group, about others, and it's often like, "No one's talking about this while I'm also not talking about it," you know, is the argument. And so it's interesting to see how the internal journey of speaking to the elephant can progress from, "There's something going on out there, and that's wrong, and I'm responsible for fixing it. It's my role in the family. It's my job in the community." whatever. And really bringing that back into, oh, this is just, this is the kind of thing I won't stand for. And the ways that I have been standing for it, I have to be, I have to own those and recognize them and see them in myself, speak to the elephant in myself before I'll be ready to open-heartedly stand for, stand for what I see and bring the depth of that perspective to a group without trying to enforce another reality onto it or try to manage it or control an outcome.

Yeah, it goes even deeper than that. It's actually a great way to bring up the elephant in the room is to own the thing about what's going on with your elephant in the room. So I wasn't able to do this as a kid, but one of the things I could have done is say, oh, I'm, I'm, I noticed that I keep on playing the role of the person yelling something's wrong, and I don't want that role anymore. Could have been a great way to talk about the situation with my dad, or this is what I really want is a family that where we can love each other and not fight at the table every day. I can look at the thing that's happening inside of me, find out what that want is around the situation and bring that up. Is another way. And it was something that Kasey DeBrawn used to teach all the time, which is somebody can argue with the fact that they're a drunk or not a drunk. Somebody can argue with the fact that you look like shit or you don't look like shit, or that they look like shit or they don't look like shit. But they can't really argue with the fact that you want to be in a family where people love each other, cuz it's what you want. They can't argue with what you want. And so there's less of a place for them to be defensive. Typically, if you take that vulnerable move and you say, okay, what's my elephant? And how do I bring that up in this thing? Because if the elephant is shame, is a false sense of shame, and everybody's feeling like they're doing something wrong, then you've got that false sense of shame. In you, and that's what you can bring up. That's how you can start the conversation. Won't work with narcissists or people with personality disorders, but it'll work with most humans.

Yeah. Which of course is a slippery slope because people tend to identify anyone that they're in an argument with as some sort of personality disorder, almost reflexively these days.

Or vice versa. People will, you know, instead of confronting the person, instead of saying the thing that's hard to say, they'll make it all about them. You know, I don't want to be mean. I don't want to be rude. I don't want to, I don't want to say something that will hurt them. All those excuses that help us not be all those excuses that help us be conflict avoidant. So there's, there's dangers on both sides of it. And it's, it's a neat hack for your own personal freedom to look at what your elephant is in the room. And maybe that's the way to bring the conversation up. Maybe it's not, but It's a neat trick.

And it's at the same time, it's getting you clear on what you want.

Yes.

Which exactly clarifies your decision-making. If you're like, I, I want to be in a company where we can be real about what's going on with the impact of our products on kids or something, then that might mean you change companies.

That might mean you, you might, that might mean you go into a company that actually is going to grow instead of shrinking like the one you're in because you can't talk about the hard shit. Or on the road to shrinking. Maybe, maybe you got a couple years of momentum left, but it ain't gonna look good in, in a while.

Yeah.

Yeah. And that's the other thing is when the elephant in the— bringing up the elephant in the room becomes commonplace, it's just leads to functionality in a business or not in a business. It's like the Boeing example that I always talk about where the CEO of Boeing became the CEO of Ford and waited for the somebody to come in and tell 'em something was wrong. 'Cause they had this, entire culture of nobody bringing up the wrong things because they got punished for it. And then when that person came and said, this is what's wrong, he's like, COO, promoted them right away. Because it's that important to being able to actually show up with the fucking problem you're there to solve instead of bury it under politics and everything else.

It's a shame that guy left Boeing then. Yeah.

Yeah, clearly there's, there's been some results from that.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's an, it's an amazing thing that it's so rewarding. As soon as you see the cycle as a, in a, in a, as a CEO or in a family that the freedom on the other side of the elephant in the room, you just look for them. You can't wait for them. You look forward to someone bringing them up. I think that's something that you see in our company when we're working together is if someone brings up a problem in general, we're stoked about it. Occasionally someone brings up a problem in a way that's really fear-based and you can see like everybody bristle and try to figure out how to deal with it.

Right.

But in general, yeah.

And I, I want to have an organization where if somebody brings up something that's valid and they bring it up fear-based, it can be integrated and heard. And absolutely. And while at the same time, we're promoting a culture where things are brought up with love and ownership, which brings me to the question of how, how can we, as leaders, institutionalize this into the culture of a company or a family?

Be the example. You know, we do this in our business, you know, What's the scary thing you're not saying? In the beginning of our team meetings, one of the main questions we have is, what's the scary thing that you're not saying? Be the example. Show that that conversation can be had regularly without any defense or punishment. That is the way to do it. There's really no other way to do it. No words are going to make a difference. And if you get defensive, apologize.

Which of course brings up that there's, there's the procedural way. Where I could imagine a board meeting that starts with, say the scary thing that you're not saying. But anytime somebody brings something up, it turns into a crucifixion.

A shit show.

Right. And so there's the procedural way to do this, like adding a question into meetings as procedure, but there's also the deep work way, Give people faith that they can speak the quiet part out loud and that it will ultimately lead through whatever conflict arises to deeper connection and a better culture.

And better solutions. That's right. Yeah.

Or to a better life for them if it's not the culture for them.

Yes. There's lots of tricks like this. An example would be the no doctrine, which I believe we've spoken about, where instead of a CEO having an idea or a leader having an idea and trying to convince everybody of it, They have the idea, they roll it out, and then they say, tell me what speaks against it. And they look for every no that's coming in and they refine their idea by the nos. That is another great example of how you say, yeah, speak to the thing that is scary, speak to the thing that is contradictory. And it's really, really, really important. And if you look at The Aristotle Project, which was done by Google about what makes functional teams. This is the one of the two most critical things about having a really functioning high capacity, having a very functioning high capacity team is that one, people can say the contradictory thing. They can say the hard thing. And the other one is that everybody's voice is heard that's sitting around the table. That doesn't mean Everybody gets an opinion. It just means that people who are actually working on the project are all contributing, right? Which is very different than Bob over from shipping comes in and tells you how to build a product and thinks that their voice is equal. That's not what I'm talking about.

And, and the Aristotle project is probably one of the most misunderstood, like, research results out there because it often is taken to mean Oh, teams that are safe, which means we're going to create safety, which means we're going to stifle conflict, which means we're going to actually create a really unsafe team.

Right.

That's people don't feel like they can actually bring up conflict and work through it.

Right. Correct. Safety is created by working through conflict successfully. Safety is not created by avoiding conflict. And that's right. One of the most misunderstood things is that I can create a safe team by avoiding conflict. And that just does not work. It's about making that conflict super productive. And that is not managing the other people. It's keeping an open heart. It's acting from view. It's all those things.

I also like how the, the no doctrine that you just referenced, you know, the, the initial frame of the elephant in the room conversation is, okay, there's something that needs to be said because it's, we're missing something. But if you stack that over a large period of time, a great product or a great team or a great company is is like built from, it's sharpened by the tusks of a million elephants over the course of a business or of a family or of a relationship. And each one is another opportunity to refine the relationships, the interactions, the ways that we process information, the ways that we make decisions.

That's right. And the other piece is that each one of those sharpening moments, you're risking something. You're risking a relationship. You're risking losing a key employee. You're risking having to go back and spend an extra 2 weeks on a project. There's always a, you're risking fucking up the photo shoot. And so Taking that risk for anybody is hard, but it's a lot easier if you see that risk taken and rewarded over and over and over again.

Yeah. With every Michelangelo risked breaking, risked destroying the Statue of David.

Right. If I got that right, if that was the right person. And that's how, that's how it is in a family too. You know, our girls can come to us with anything. As a matter of fact, uh, Oona was in the car with me last night. I was driving her home and she said, I'm gonna be more like Esme now. Or her older sister. I'm gonna tell you a whole bunch of stuff that I don't want to tell you. I'm like, okay, spill the tea. Which is, it was about the age where Esme started telling me stuff that she didn't want to tell me. So it was kind of perfect. Um, Yeah, it was. And, and that's exactly how that trust is built. She now knows she can do those things with me and I will, I will love her and I will not judge her and I will not try to manage her.

Well, that sounds like a great place to wrap.

Yeah, it does.

Yeah. I enjoyed this. Uh, thank you, Joe.

I always enjoy it, Brett. I think we say, I think we wrap our, our thing the whole time, always the same, is that we're like, we have actually look at each other and say, that was fun. I enjoyed it. Or some version of that because it, it feels good every time.

And that's valid cuz that's the metrics we track, you know, we, we track enjoyment. So it's, this is sort of our like, was this a 5-star meeting? Like, yes, I, I enjoyed this episode. Yeah.

The interesting thing is I just realized there's some lack of truth to this, which is I, there are some that we don't enjoy and then we don't publish them because we think they suck.

Yeah. So thanks. I enjoyed this as sort of our stamp of approval. Like this one's got a chance of being released. Yeah.

Okay. So let's switch it up a little bit. I'll do the ending stuff, which is follow us on Twitter. @fujoehudson and @eric_kistler and @art_of_a_comp are all Twitter accounts. You can watch videos. You can watch this on YouTube. You can watch other videos, Rapid Coaching on YouTube. Rate us and say good things about us in the comments. Share us with friends if you want to have somebody know about the elephant in the room and want to create a culture of sharing the hard and difficult things and getting through the elephants in the room. This is a great episode to share.

Yeah. And if you know anyone who's got a podcast or a newsletter or a TV show that you'd like to see Joe or on, uh, reach out. You can reach us on our website or on our, on our socials. Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please share it with a friend and remember to follow us and rate us in your podcast app. The Art of Accomplishment was produced and hosted by myself, Brett Kistler, and Joe Hudson. Monyi Kelly is our production coordinator, and this episode was edited by On Replay.