How Emotions Are Your Decision-Making Compass

Dave, I was so thinking of you just before this session. We were going through the balance sheet and the income statement for Bootstrap Giants, and I load up the balance sheet and in my head I'm going, fuck, I like, like, this is not good. And I'm looking at Jesse, who I think is going to amplify that. And he's, he's going, oh, beautiful, beautiful. This is like a real good business. I go, how are we both seeing the exact same thing and having these two different reactions to it?

And then the other thing that happened was, by the way, though, the business, to be clear, did 50% profit margins in Q4. 5-0.

The other thing that happens is payment, not the balance sheet. But anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's— I wasn't crazy about the income statement. As soon as we're looking, actually, the income statement looked good, and I go, wait till you see the cash flow statement, and then it's, then it's gonna hurt. And it's like, where's the pain, Andrew? And then the other thing that happened was 2 weeks ago, I was literally in the office in St. Louis going, talking about the contract that we have, and I go, Jesse, I'm worried about you not letting us take cash out of the business. I need that in the contract. That was literally the most, like, the most important thing for me to debate in the contract discussion. We end the conversation today and he goes, Tanak, I think it's time for us to get distributions next month. And I'm going, fucking A, the guy's trying to take money out of the business. We need the money. We need the money in the business or else it's going to die. And then I go, well, this is what I talked about. What am I going to do here? And it's like, it's such a weird thing that goes on in my head. And it comes back to what Rick Elias said on Wednesday, the founder of Red Ventures. He goes, what you say in your head is more important than what other people are saying around you. Pay more attention to it. And Jesse, the whole time is going, you paying attention to this, Andrew? You catching this? I'm going, yes, I know.

It's yeah.

I don't know what you make of that, Dave, but that was my, my head trip.

Just to be clear on what Rick said, I'm a little confused. He said what you pay— what you say in your head is more important than what other people say.

That's the conversation you have. The person you talk to the most every day is yourself, and pay attention to that conversation because most of the time you're not paying attention to that conversation, which this is going to tee up perfectly for my topic for today's episode.

But not that you should listen to the voice in your head, but that the relationship you have with that voice is really important. And notice that you're listening to that and not what other people are saying. I read something recently, Andrew, that said if you really pay attention to the voice in your head, you'll notice it's schiz— schizophrenic. Like, that's fair, you know. Oh my God, we need to be able to take cash out of the business.

Oh my God, we can't take cash out of the business, right?

Like, that's just what it is to be human, is to have a voice in our head that's just constantly saying things Often that are literally the opposite. And that's the, to me, it just shows how perilous it is if you either identify as that voice or listen to what it says, because it could drive you crazy.

Well, I think Andrew was talking about our operating agreement with me and he kept being like, we need a provision to do all the distributions. And I'm like, are you doing this for me? Because you're worried about me or for yourself? Because all the businesses I have, we distribute the profits out at the end of the quarter. In fact, I have a system to do it and here's how we approach it. And he'd be like, are you sure we're going to do this? And then I'm like, I don't think this is for me. I think this is for you. You want to— for your future self, you don't trust that person. You think that person is going to want to spend the money in the business and therefore you want to contract it so that we have to push the money out of the business.

Maybe I'm literally feeling like I'm on the verge of tears because I feel like I failed so badly as we were going through the income statement and the numbers are a representation of who I like, who I am. And so it feels like this is not who I want to be. I'm letting my wife down.

And you're saying, Andrew, you perceive that the numbers are a representation of who you are and your value and your worthiness. Yeah, yeah.

And it's funny, we have one of our members who seriously wants to have a conversation with me next week. We booked it even though it's Christmas week because he is going through something very similar. He had a little bit of a like the reduction in numbers. And when I see it through him, I go, I get it. I can talk you through it. When I see it in myself, I feel like, oh, I'm so bad.

What is it that you get that you can see in him?

I can see that his numbers are doing well. He's not doing as bad. He probably has some kind of story in his head that he's not as good as someone who he had worked with before, who we know in common. And maybe that's it. He's probably thinking that he's gonna let Jesse down. And why would Jesse want to continue to work with him? Um, that kind of thing. Hmm.

What's the, what's the core feeling underneath all of this, Andrew?

I don't know, cuz I'm so like jittery inside.

I think it's probably fear, right?

If you did know, what would you say?

Yeah, sorry. Sorry. That's a better coaching question than mine. Fear.

I definitely feel fear. When he said, is it fear? I'm, I'm like going, oh yeah, that is it. Thank you. You've, you've seen my imaginary friend.

Well, so this is a great segue. So here, here's, here's today's topic, I think.

Yep.

I think we, we already hit on a bunch of elements of it. When people ask me about coaching and working with Dave, I, I kind of tell this story. I'm like, you know, I started working with this coach cuz Rick Elias told me to, and a lot of people are like, all right, let's prob— yeah, let's just do that. And you remember for my birthday, Dave had been trying to work with me for like 5 years and I was like, ah, yeah, too expensive. I don't need a coach. It's fine. And then I always tell people the story about Dave for the first year. I was like, hey, make me a great CEO. Like teach me how to be like the best of the best. And I just joked that Dave was like, first you must notice. And I was like, what? And I was like, Mr. Miyagi, like telling me to wax on, wax off. And I was like, what? I don't, what the hell do you mean? Like, He's like, notice Jesse, what do you notice? And I'm like, stop using that word. Like, I don't, what are you talking about? And it was about a year, I'd say, honestly, before it, back to Rick's comment to you and this, like, before I could even know, even I was even to isolate that voice in my head as different from myself, even a little bit. And then to notice when I was feeling fear or when something was coming up. And I want to talk a lot about that journey, but also like the specific, some of the tips and tricks that we did. Because I, it's now where I start. Now I see the value in it. At the time I didn't get it, but if you don't have that self-awareness and cultivate it early on, the rest of this work is sort of impossible.

I think that's such a good point. And I guess you're talking, Jesse, I'm thinking about how like my real focus is on self-awareness and self-discovery, not self-improvement. And I think it's flipped. I think most people are totally focused on self-improvement. How do I make myself better? And they're so focused on that that they're not actually looking in the mirror to see what's really true for me now. How is it? What are the distinctions I'm not seeing? And, um, I actually think at a certain level your true self can't be improved. And that might be worth— fun thing to play with. Um, and discovering your true self is a way more important and powerful path than trying to improve your little s self, your, you know, persona or, um, personality.

When you, Dave, we, you, you could talk, say what you did with me, but you probably do it now with new, new clients. Like, talk about some of the early things you do when someone is like, doesn't have self-awareness and you're trying to help them cultivate it.

The thing, a thing that I do in almost all my, uh, initial sessions with clients is I ask them, how do you know when you're thinking? And almost every client is sort of like, looks at me kind of quizzically. Like, it's like, no one's really like, what do you mean? And they either say like, oh, I'm always thinking. Or, you know, well, I'm, you know, you know, I look up to the right or something like that. And Eventually some of them get to, or I say, well, you know, consider that the way you know you're thinking, like really mechanically, is you hear a voice in your head talking. And often that is an unexamined, like you're saying, just, it's like people aren't even aware that there's like a voice in their head talking. They just think, oh, that's me. And so I then say, and consider that in order to have the experience of hearing a voice in your head talking, there must be a talker and a listener, right? Like, otherwise, how would you have that experience, right? There's a voice, there's a voice talking, and there's— and most people spend their entire lives identified as the talker. And I think one of the most powerful shifts you can make as a human being is to identify as the listener instead, because you get freedom and you get choice. Like, if someone, you know, if you're walking around the street at night and someone some drunk, you know, kid is like, you suck. Like, it's obvious you could just ignore that kid's voice. But when the voice sounds a lot like you and appears to emanate from inside of you, it's not as obvious. So that's the, to me, that's a huge unlock. And that, you know, that could be years of growth for someone just starting to distinguish, oh, that's not me. That's the voice in my head talking. And then really looking at the relationship you have with that voice. I've sort of had this image in my mind of like, I'm like, you know, in a coffee shop, just, you know, peacefully sipping my tea. And this, you know, crazy homeless guy sits down next to me and just starts muttering to himself like, ah, you suck. You're not good enough. You're not as good a coach as that other coach, blah, blah, blah. And like, am I going to like listen to him and think he's talking to me and then believe what he says and engage with it? Or do I just keep sipping my tea and kind of, you know, just let him say what he says.

Um, so that's been a really powerful, and I feel like with me it was even more basic than that. And I always tell people, I always tell people, like, I thought I was self-aware and the way I defined self-awareness was like, if you asked me my, my strengths and weaknesses, I could tell you and I'd be honest. It wouldn't be bullshit. Right. But I feel like the thing, one of the things we learned early on was that's, that's actually not a great definition of self-awareness. Self-awareness is moment to moment, what's coming up for you, what's happening in that second, in that moment. And for me, at least, I mean, there was a bunch of things I think we did, but one of them was just noticing my body. And I had never ever noticed my body. I had never ever noticed sensations in my body. I had never, so I didn't, I didn't know what emotions were as a result of that. Like there was all these other even more animalistic things I would describe them as that I didn't, I, I had no awareness of that, that, you know, you helped me get, get a better sense of.

Why does the body matter? I understand listening to the voice that's in my head because it's basically telling me what to do or, or at least I'm reacting to it, but who cares? I don't even notice it in my body.

I think that's a really common, uh, stance, especially in our culture. It's like, well, isn't my body just the the vehicle to move my head around so I can think and reason. Uh, there's a lot of answers. One of the answers is we pretend that we're rational creatures and that we make decisions rationally, but it's not true. Like we actually make decisions emotionally. And in fact, there's, there's been studies and, uh, you know, people with brain injury where they couldn't feel. And, you know, give my IQ test, they'll do it, you know, every bit as good as they've ever done. But you ask 'em like, what color pen would you like to use for the test? And they literally spend hours deliberating which color pen to use because we actually make decisions emotionally and then we rationalize them. And so what happens is most people make decisions in order to avoid certain feelings that they don't want to feel. And if we, if we're even more precise, in order to avoid feeling certain sensations in their body that they don't want to feel. So most people's lives are literally limited by which physical sensations they're willing to experience in their body. And so if you like, one of my goals for my clients is to expand their capacity to be with more intense sensations, anger, fear, rage, sadness, grief, because the more you can be with it, the less you're limited. And if you're really honest with yourself, you really look, a lot of your decisions are just to avoid certain sensations, certain feelings.

Do you have an example of that, Jesse, of what you felt in your body that influenced what you're doing?

Oh man. Well, yes, a lot. But Andrew, my answer to your question, by the way, I think that the, like, for people listening to the, the super easy rational touchstone here is think about a time you were really nervous.

Yeah, there I feel it.

You were about to give a speech. Was that in your head? No, you can— when you're really nervous, you feel it. It's a physical sensation. So, you know, if you think of the extremes, or you're really angry, those are all physical sensations that show up in our body. So when you— I always tell people like, hey, wait, hold on, start with the extreme. And did you, did you or did you not feel it in your body? And was it or was it not a signal that something was going on? If Yes, which everyone says yes to. Now, like, what makes you think that, you know, when, when you look at the income statement or balance sheet, that like that's not showing up a little in your body? It's not— you're not freaking out nervous, but, but it show— presumably I'll ask, I'll put the question back to you, Andrew. Did you feel it in your body just now when you were looking at the—

I felt—

where did you feel it? What did you feel in your eyes?

That they were going to cry. And then I felt in my, in my, in my internal, in my body, like in my below my chest, above my stomach, I felt this sense of, oh, this pain. It was like a squeezing.

And, and so, I mean, I think for the first 2 years of sitting down with Dave, the first thing he'd have me do is thoughts, feelings, sensations, right?

Just keep asking you that.

Back to— that was the way every meeting would start. Right now, thoughts, feelings, thoughts. I, I'm thinking about that meeting we just had about the income statement, balance sheet. Feelings, I feel a little anxious and maybe a little sad and, and, you know, sensations are my eyes feel like they've got some energy behind them. And like, I'm kind of doing it what you just said for you. And it helped to cultivate how those things all kind of connected or just, just where I was in any given second or moment. So that, by the way, the, the, when this became really effective for me was maybe, I don't know, 6 months later I'm sitting in a meeting and someone presents me numbers, right? And I felt the feelings you just felt, Andrew, but instead of letting myself fall victim to those feelings and go, oh, what the fuck? Why is our, why are we down 30% here? I go, oh man, this is, I'm the joke. There was a joke with like John Oberlin or others where I'd call people and I, or I would get on the phone. I'd just go, I feel fear. Like they'd be presenting numbers to me and I would just say out loud, I feel fear. Like I noticed my chest is getting tight and I feel fear right now. Um, and then people, it was so much more effective than me starting to yell at people for numbers being down. Yell at people? Not yell, but like put them down.

You could tell he was upset.

Yeah, like you've— I mean, you've seen some of it, Andrew. Like, I'm not yelling, like, or trying to purposely— it's like a— yeah, I would be— I would— the person would not feel good after the conversation, let's put it that way, right? They'd feel dressed down, or they'd feel like stupid, or they'd feel whatever, because I was feeling scared in those moments, not unaware at the time prior to the work with Dave Kashen. And I would put, I would be like, how come we didn't think to do this? Why? What about this? Where, you know, somebody else is doing it this way. Why are we like all, I don't even have to yell even to make the person feel bad because now you're basically just preying on their worst insecurities of themselves. Right. Yeah. Because you're feeling scared and that's what would happen. And so it allowed me to to notice it, not push it away, by the way, but just be aware of it. And sometimes even make other people aware of it. And, and that, that process was actually a very healthy process for everyone.

Yeah, you probably went into blame mode, Jesse, is my guess, and started blaming them because you were scared and state of threat. I, I think there's a really important point you're making here, which is most of us know that like when we really fuck things up, it's when we're most emotional and we react, right? It's like, okay, you know, most of the times we can kind of get away with just operating relatively unconsciously, but like those moments where the shit hits the fan, where things don't go right, or things don't go the way we expect, whereas, you know, something, you know, intense is happening, is usually where we cause the most damage, right? There's, you know, it's like trust takes a lifetime to build and a minute to destroy. You know, in relationships, personally, in business. So I think that's an important point you're making, is that like the times where we react like that, it's usually because there's some intense feeling in our body that we either don't notice, don't pay attention to, don't want to feel. And then the way we, we react to avoid feeling it is we express it, but instead of doing it consciously, like, oh, I'm gonna go scream in my car or take a wiffle ball bat to my bed a little while because I'm angry and I need to move some anger. We just throw the stapler across the room or rip into somebody. And it's because our system needs to express that energy. So it can either leak out in unhealthy ways or we can learn to feel it, be with it, and then choose our response. It's like ultimately the difference between reacting and responding.

And I think there's a lot of bullshit, I think, especially for men, where like, oh, we don't feel emotions, emotions are not valuable, we're going to push them away. And in retrospect, every— everybody feels the emotions, right? They just don't know what to do with them. And they're actually— their emotions are playing them, they're not playing their emotions, especially for men, I think, where, where we're taught to push them away or to avoid them or not feel them. And it's sort of impossible to do that. But that's, you know, when I look back, if you would have asked me at the time, to my career, 2010 to 2015, I'd be like, yeah, it was fine. I didn't feel all that much. I was, and then that's what I would've said at the time. Now I look back and I go, oh my God, I like spent, you know, weeks upon weeks just in fear states, or I was really upset or angry, or I was sad about something and I didn't even know I was sad. But I made these 5 decisions with an unknowingness of being sad because I wasn't aware that I was actually sad about, like when I did the deal with Red Ventures, I think I've told Dave Kashen this, but Andrew, I don't know if you know it, but like I was really disappointed with the valuations that we got from the marketplace and I didn't know what to do about it. And I was like, well, I got to get something done because we need to show something for this. And we did a deal that like, it ended up being great for so many other reasons, getting to know Rick and the Red Ventures, but the actual financial deal was not what I wanted at that time. I wanted to sell the company. I wanted to be done with it. And I was sad and I was like, oh, it's not going to be as big as I thought it was going to be. Dave wasn't in my life in that time. I didn't know that. I can remember now the disappointment. I know where I was. I was sitting in our lawyer's offices going through kind of saying like, what should we do with the process? Because like we were not happy with the numbers. And I remember now I can look back and go, my God, I was so sad. And I just didn't feel the sadness. I didn't go, oh, let me cry about the fact that I thought I was going to get $100 million, but now I'm getting $60 million or whatever silly numbers they were. And instead I said, okay, well, no, no, no, I'm going to hero this. I'm going to go fight. Let me call Rick back. And see if he'll just do a different kind of deal with me that will. And literally, if you look at the contract, the contract with Red Ventures is an investment followed by the— they could buy the business for $100 million. Like, it's so transparent what I was trying to accomplish. My sadness was trying to accomplish— it was trying to accomplish this like nominal number I'd come up with in my head that I wanted to sell my business for.

Isn't that good though? Because you, you reached out, you had energy to go and call him out and you said what you wanted and you gave yourself an opportunity to get that. Isn't it then good that you reacted to your emotions?

Well, I think I'll speak for Dave, what he would say to me. And I used to say kind of a version of that, Andrew. Then I'd say, well, no, I would tell you, no, it wasn't bad because what I wanted was actually sell my company. But I think the Dave answer I'll try is once I would have felt my feelings and let them fully through and pass, then I could have come back to like a centered state and made a decision. And that decision might have been to call Rick. And, and do the same thing I ended up doing. It might have also been, no, let's take the best offer on the table, let's move the whole company along, and let's be on to the next thing, right? So, but, but now I look back on it and it's just like, again, good things can happen when you're angry, but that, like, that's not— is that really the way you want to make the decisions or not? I, I don't want to make my decisions that way. I want to make them with a clear head. Okay.

Yeah, I think this point of clarity is the big, um, sort of unlock from my experience. If you're not willing to feel something, you're, you won't be as clear about what you really want. So, like, especially with sadness, a lot of people are in relationships that are not really right for them, in, in jobs that are not right for them, in business and running businesses that are not right for them. Doing projects that no longer make sense, right? A lot of people are way too busy, all because they don't want to feel the sadness and grief of letting go of something. And so it really— the unwillingness to feel that feeling actually impacts your life because you end up making decisions to avoid feeling sadness instead of, okay, I'm willing to feel that. I let myself feel it. Okay, now what do I really want? And so to me, you know, you— the frame is not like, well, okay, if this gets you to societal success, that means it's a good thing, and if it doesn't, that's bad. My frame is different than that. My frame is what's authentic to you. And if you're not willing to feel the sadness, you're not going to show up authentically, you're not going to get clear about what you really want, and you're not going to sort of live your authentic life.

All right, if I'm taking something—

sadness or anger or shame or fear, right? I'm just using sadness as an example.

If I'm taking something away from Jesse, reacting to his emotions instead of feeling them and deciding what he wants to do, the takeaway for me is, yeah, it worked out okay. He asked for a deal where he had an opportunity to hit the number he wanted, but it could have also been like, I'm going to destroy this whole deal because I'm so angry that I didn't get, or sad that I didn't get what I wanted. Or Maybe if he would have taken a breath, he could have come up with something that was the right follow-up instead of the reaction to his unfelt emotions. And that's what you're saying. And this is not a disaster story, but I do feel those disaster stories where I feel it. My— I, I can't remember one specifically, but I could see it in myself going, this is terrible, it's not what I want, I'm gonna get angry at something and I'm going to fight towards something instead of—

well, I also, I was unconsciously— I didn't is I didn't even know that's what I was feeling. Let's go back a little bit to self-awareness here. And I want to double back and ask Dave something for everyone in a second, but I didn't know I was feeling sad, Andrew. I thought I was being rational and I wasn't being rational. I was feeling really sad. And I, and I, if you look at the deal, the deal was drawn up to solve my sadness, which is now I can walk around with a piece of paper that says I have a path. I'm selling my company for $100 million. Like it's the stupidest. It was, it was not the right, right deal for for us, for the team. Like, I, you know, again, it wasn't a disaster scenario, right? We solved for a few variables, but it also led me down an even darker path of like, why am I even doing this now? Like, I didn't, I didn't want to be running the business anymore. I wanted to have sold the business and moved on at that time.

And like, I trust life. Like, I don't— that now I don't say, oh, it should have been different. Like, that was your path and you wanted to be done with the business. If you had been willing to feel your sadness, let go of this ideal image you had of a $100 million outcome, sold it for $60 million, you would've been done and onto the next. And I think that actually, again, I trust life, whatever, but in that moment was more true of what you wanted and you couldn't create what you wanted because you didn't want to feel.

And Andrew, for your capitalist self, here's a disaster scenario. Do you know how much the enterprise value of Ambush changed between 2015 and 2020? No, you, you see how much value I've created in the last 3 or 4 years at GatewayX?

Yeah.

Growth decision, it changed zero. We, the company did not increase in value one penny. If anything, it maybe decreased a little bit, but let's say it was flat during those 5 years. Why? I met Dave. I, I mean, you tell me, maybe because I didn't actually want to be doing it. I didn't want to be running that business because I, at this, Dave came in my life and I was like, oh, this leadership stuff sounds much more interesting than running this marketing services business. But like, to get to your worldly answer, capitalist answer, dude, for 5 years I created one of the first, I created $50, $60 million value. The last 3 or 4 years I probably created $50 or $60 million in value between Growth Assistant and all these other businesses. That period, there was no financial value created. And again, there was lots of other value created and I don't regret it now. Like we've worked through it and there's so many good things that came. I trust life, like Dave said. And if you want to just look at it purely financially, those were like the least value creating years of my life because I was, again, I dealt with this scenario where I, I let sadness take over and I didn't even know sadness was taking over.

I wanna make a bid for authenticity here, cuz I think it's underappreciated. Like to me, Jesse, the, the, one of the takeaways of that is like when you're following your authentic path, like all sorts of, you know, unexpected riches and goodness seem to unfold. And when you're off path, you know, I think it's, it's a feature, not a bug of life. Like. Life gives you that feedback. It's not working because it's, it's like trying to get you back onto the path. That's one way I look at it. So to me, that's one possible takeaway is when you, again, when you let yourself feel all the feelings, you get clear about what you really want. I, I've just seen this movie so many times that when you're following your own truth more than some intellectual idea of like, this is strategically the right decision and blah, blah, blah. Like I've been amazed at how things unfold in, you know, sometimes seemingly miraculous ways or just people are in flow and they're just creating, you know, like I, I think Jesse, the last couple of years, you tell, you know, you can share more, but like, yeah, my sense of you is you're, you're much more in flow and like, look what's like, you're just creating all sorts of value and it's like joyful and fun and you feel like you're living your best life.

Yeah. Yeah. This is the, this last 3 years have felt way easier than any other 3 years professionally for me. And I've probably created the most value in the shortest period of time.

And by the way, I, I, I think this is worth, and Andrew, I think I'm curious to hear your reaction to this. To me, the goal is, is like more and more extraordinary results with less and less effort.

I do hear that from Jesse a lot, and I love that. And sometimes it feels like you can't ask for that. You can't, as we're analyzing the business, think about less effort. We should be thinking about more effort, but he keeps saying What do we get the most results for, for less effort or creation?

All, all, but if we get really finance dorky for a second, all asymmetric payoffs are like that. Think about social media. You can put the same amount of effort into two posts. One gets seen by a million people and one gets seen by 5 people. And that's because the algorithm, like a well-written post has that sort of payoff to it, or in a good investment in something is no effort. It's just write a check and you have this huge payoff from it. Yeah.

And even like Elon may spend the same, I don't know, 78 or 80 hours a week working that like a coal miner might spend, right? You know, arguably the coal miner is putting forth a lot more effort and yet, you know, look at the asymmetric value created.

Dave, one thing I wanted to talk about, I think Andrew, you could be the, the, the audience here, but like it was helpful for me again, as like, I would say my EQ was extremely low. At the time, but just the various sensations and how they present and what they typically signal in terms of what you're feeling, I think would be a really helpful takeaway. Are you familiar with this, Andrew? Mm-hmm.

So th— this was something I learned from the Conscious Leadership Group to, to give credit where it's due, um, which I think they learned from, uh, uh, Katie and Gay Hendricks, this idea that there's 5 core emotions. And each of the emotions, you know, brings wisdom. So the way I think about it, I'll start, you know, so the 5 emotions are joy, excitement, anger, sadness, fear. So joy is the energy of celebration. And so the wisdom question for joy is what wants to be celebrated? So if you want more joy in your life, It's actually not as hard as people think. You have to change everything. You just have to look for what wants to be celebrated and celebrate it, right? And, um, I was just with a buddy and he has this mug that says, holy shit, we're alive, right? Like we could celebrate being alive and experience joy in any moment. Uh, excitement is what wants to be created, right? That's the energy of excitement, right? It's something new, something unknown. You know what wants to be created. Sadness is the energy of letting go, right? If you think about grief, mourning, right? So the question is, what wants to be let go of? Um, I find often what wants to be let go of is some idea we had about how life would be, some ideal image that we made up about how things would be. As a quick related tangent, I took this relationship course They talked about the dream behind the complaint. That in almost every— a relationship coaching course— in almost every relationship, there's like, we came in with some dream that we didn't even necessarily communicate to our partner, they never agreed to, but then the rest of the relationship we spend complaining that they don't adhere to our dream because we're not willing to feel the sadness of letting go of that dream of how it would be so that we can relate to our partner as they actually are. So sad. I find a lot of mileage in—

I just wrote that down. That was really good.

Um, so sadness, the energy of letting go. Uh, by the way, I usually— well, I'll finish and then I'll say what I was about to say. So joy, excitement, sadness. Anger is the energy of boundaries. So the wisdom question for anger is what wants to be stopped or destroyed, right? And I have been playing with this one more and more. For me, anger was the no-no. You know, my parents didn't get angry. Like, I thought angry was what Neanderthal, you know, like people who couldn't control themselves, they got angry. Like, I am cool, calm, and collected. And I've been welcoming, allowing more and more anger, and I can literally sense my boundaries more. And even, you know, I think there's flavors of boundaries from like simple wants to like needs to like real boundaries, right? So even just when I don't get what I want, I can feel my anger and it shows me, oh, there's something I want that's not happening, right? So, and then the more extreme, it's like, this is not okay with me, you know, stop it. So anger is boundary energy. And then fear is about what wants to become known, right? Fear is the energy of the unknown, basically. I think fear is actually a doorway to a more expanded frame of reality. I think fear is, um, I'm becoming more and more excited about fear, frankly. But, uh, one way to think about fear is the energy of attention. Fear says, hey, there's something here to pay attention to. There's something that wants to become known. That's something that wants to come into our awareness. And you know, if you're walking on the edge of a cliff, it's kind of obvious. Fear says, pay attention to where you're stepping here. Right. But you know, in, in other less like literal survival threats, so, you know, fear basically says, hey, there's something you're not paying attention to that wants to be paid attention to. And, uh, I kind of want to say more about fear for a second. Um, I don't know.

Well, one thing while you're thinking, Dave, I'll just jump in, Andrew. I think the cheat sheet for me that was super helpful back to this idea of sensations was each of these emotions maps to something, a feeling in your body. And so, you know, do your, you said your eyes were feeling like you wanted to cry, like that's the feeling of sadness. Like maybe you thought you were going to be a billionaire by, by your age. And every time you look at a balance, an income statement that only has a few hundred thousand dollars, you're like, there's this little guy in you that starts feeling sad and, and that's like a signal you're feeling sadness and chest tightening is nervousness and shoulders and fists are clenching or anger. And sometimes your body feels like it's effervescent and that's like a joy or celebratory feeling. And so that, that for me at least became just such an amazing way to understand myself of what was happening in those moments. Because if I pause for just 30 seconds, just sitting in the car for a minute, took a deep breath and like, oh man, I'm feeling a little angry, like, right. And, and you know what I do with, with GatewayX, Andrew, and you know this probably a little bit, but maybe you don't realize I'm doing it. It happened this morning with Adrienne. She's feeling scared about something, some fear about whatever the planning process. And I think typically when people are feeling fear, they're like fighting internally with themselves. Like, don't feel that. Oh no, it's fine. Like, and I just said to her, I paused. I said, hey, maybe your fear is trying to tell you something. What do you want to pay attention to?. And for her, it was like I gave her like oxygen to somebody who was choking. She goes, oh yeah, this is the thing that really matters. Like, oh my God. So now all of a sudden we took something that felt really unproductive and made it extremely productive for that person because it got them out of the back and forth. Right. And so anyway, the sensational aspect of this for me at least was of great service. It really taught me. It is like the cheat sheet I use for myself because I don't consider myself a high EQ person or didn't consider myself that. And it's like, oh, okay, there's something going on here. Okay. That means there must be a feeling. There must be something that I'm feeling that I'm now aware of that I wasn't aware of.

Let, let me draw that map a little more precisely if, 'cause I, I think it's useful.

Please.

Um, so, uh, joy tends to show up like in the chest, in the core, sometimes face, um, even spine. Uh, anger, it tends to be shoulder, neck. A lot of us are familiar with that, like, you know, that tightness. Um, fear tends to show up in the belly, right? That gut constriction. Sometimes people say like a pit in my stomach. Um, sadness, chest, right? Heart and eyes, you know, like you said, Andrew. Um, did I miss any? Excitement. Uh, you know, conscious leaders are calls it, uh, like sexual energy. It feels like sexual energy, which actually can be really confusing. There's a whole meme around like why we should allow sexual energy in the workplace. And you know, there's like creative agencies sometimes have issues with affairs and people sleeping together because there's a lot of like creative energy and they mistake it for like, oh, this means I'm supposed to have sex with that person as opposed to like, oh, there's an attraction. There's something that wants to get created here. Um, so hopefully that's useful.

Okay, so Matt's saying to me, look at how my body's feeling as a way of decoding what is basically going to start influencing my decision, because feelings and emotions are more likely to influence my decisions than I think. I always think it's all cerebral. And then once I do, what do I do with that? So now I know that I'm crying because I had this vision of myself wanting to be a billionaire by now, or maybe that I'm comparing it to past success and it's just, it's starting, but the past success has already happened and I'm comparing the starting experience of our balance sheet with the ending experience there.

What do I do?

My, my, I'll tell you my instinct actually. Let me be open with you because this is where I've, I've been really challenged by Jesse's approach and your approach and I'm welcoming it because I know that mine hasn't. My approach is to go, you fucking failure. Look, look at what you did in 20s. Get up in there. And what did you do at 20s? Did you go to sleep? No way. You stayed up at night and Yeah, it might have meant that you woke up a little later. Screw everyone else who cares that you're waking up later. Get in there, stay up till midnight. Yeah, you have a baby. The baby goes to sleep at 7:30, you go to sleep at 3:30, and then you'll deal with it the next day. There's Red Bull today. There was a Red Bull there. That's why I would go, and I would think that would be helpful.

But I— that's not necessarily a wrong or bad choice, right? So just if you're hearing us as, as like Oh, you should just, you know, work 6 hours a day and not push yourself. Like, that's not what I'm saying at all. Like, there's times where you might choose to work all night. Um, but it's, it's about, is it a conscious choice or is it reactive? Like, I think most people, if you ask them, would you rather make decisions out of love or fear? I think intuitively they'd say, I'd rather make choices out of love than fear.

None of the entrepreneur friends that I have would say that. They would all say fear because that would keep me going where love would slow me down.

Or maybe I just say like presence, you know, when you're fully in your flow state, present, clear, as opposed to when you're reactive and constrictive. Maybe that's a better way to frame it. Same, it's the same, but we'll frame it that way. And so, one thing I often say is I think of emotions as love through a prism. And again, this language might not work for everybody, so translate it as you will. Andrew or Jesse might have a better way to describe it or more relatable. And, and so the— it's like love calling us home, or just a more simple way of saying it is, it is showing you how you're out of presence so you, you can come back to presence, right? So it's like if I'm holding on to something from the past, sadness arises to say, hey, let go of that thing so you can just be with reality as it is. And, and, and when you're actually connected to reality as it is, you make better choices, obviously, versus like, I'm just holding on, like we, like Jesse's example, I'm like holding on to this thing from the past and I'm just going to make choices basically to not let go of that, as opposed to, okay, here, this is actually what's going on right now. I'm grounded in reality and I can choose, you know, both from that, like grounded in reality and also grounded in myself and my own truth of what I want. As opposed to, to avoid certain feelings or in a reactive state. So it's, it's twofold. Let me be clear. One is you can't be present if you're not willing to feel a feeling that's arising in the present. In fact, one of the reasons we go out of the state of presence is to avoid feeling that feeling. It's like, oh, there's anger, I don't want to feel that, I'll just go into my head and think about things, right? Because in my head I can go into fantasy land and not be in reality.

Um, create my own reality distortion field and then use it as motivation or something.

Yeah.

Well, what, what it looks like for most people is I, I gotta figure it out. Like, this is kind of what you're describing, Angie. It's like fear, I think, is the most common. So some fears arising, I don't want to feel that fear. So I'll go into my head and try to figure out how to control reality so that I don't have to feel that fear. Yeah.

I, I, the, the, I'll try a version of it. And I also using some of the stuff from Conscious Leadership, I think if you just imagine, and this is all stuff I've learned from Dave, but like naturally, Andrew, you are naturally, or all business people are naturally able to like create great things. Their flow state is their actual default state. Right? It's just flowing. Oh my God, I can do this. It's a state of being. They're like, ooh, I can do this. Like, here's a new idea. Let's go do this. I can sell people. I can do these. And everyone knows what that feels like. Then you get a bad number that comes back or something. A person quits. Something very specific happens. Now your flow state gets blocked. And I think what Dave is saying, the prism concept is like, it is, oh my God, anger is here now. Anger is blocking your flow. Then what you do is you go— go ahead.

Just to be precise, because I don't want people to think that anger is blocking their flow, because then they'll resist the anger. Resistance to anger is blocking your flow. Anger is the flow, actually.

Yeah, anger, anger comes up and it's like, what wants to be stopped? Oh, I should change, I should be a— change my HR policy, or, or, you know, something comes up and, and then you feel resistance to it. That blocks you. Now, now there's like in your pipe, something is stuck, right? And then typically I think what Dave's saying is like, oh, then you try to figure it out and you try to work around it. You don't want to actually go through it. And to answer your original question, Andrew, what do you do with it? Anger is there. And what conscious leadership would tell you is feel the anger. And I, after doing this stuff, I used to sit, I used to sit in my car and I would, I would like slam the steering wheel by the car's a great place cuz you're by yourself and it's quiet and, and I'm like, ah, like I'm screaming at the top of my lungs.. And it took me 5 minutes. And the feeling, you know, one of the things they say in the book, The 15 Commitments, is every actual feeling is authentic. Feeling is only 90 seconds long. Anything you think you're still feeling is, is your brain recycling that feeling again. And they call it the cognitive emotive loop, which is just, I'm gonna think about the scenario again. I'm gonna get pissed off again. When you actually have fully felt that feeling, then it's, then it's, the resistance is gone. It comes through the flow and you're back in the flow state and you're back. And you're back working through it and then some other thing comes in. And so that's like the, and then they have different ways to feel the different feelings, right? Like when you feel sad, cry, like let it go. Right. One exercise Dave had me do a lot, Andrew, for, and this might be a good one for you is if there's a part of you who thought you should have been a billionaire right now, and it turns out you're not, who feels really sad that this is all you've accomplished, right? That's your story, not mine. I think you're an awesome accomplished dude. Write a letter to that billionaire guy inside of you and let him go. Just let that, let, let that, that thing you created for yourself go. And that's an exercise I've done often. It sounds kind of corny. Once you do it, it's so effective. Hey, you were there when I was 20. You wanted this. You started the billion-dollar website idea. You did all these things. I'm saying goodbye to you. Thanks for all the things you've done for me, but now I want to say goodbye. I'm going to grieve you. I'm going to mourn you. I'm going to let you go. And because the, you know, I have a great life with beautiful family, children. I want to, I want to say, I don't want to feel that feeling anymore. I'm going to let it go, or I'm going to feel it, feel my sadness and let it go.

And I think that's really important. What you just said, Jesse, it's not just the intellectual exercise. It's that you actually feel the sadness, the grief. Like I'm letting go of that vision I had of being a billionaire by this age. Now, by the way, If you're like, I want to be a billionaire. If you still have that desire, awesome. Like you're not like wishing you were already there when you're not, is not helping you get there. That's the irony that it's actually in your way. If you can just, ah, I'm not, I thought I'd get there by this age. I'm not there. Okay. But I want in the next decade, I want to become a bill— if that's just your authentic want, which is fine. Like nothing wrong with that.

Great.

Imagine it, move toward it. Again, I want you to be your authentic, creative, resourceful self in creating that. And what gets in the way of that is I'm not willing to accept reality as it is. And that includes feeling the grief of it not going the way I thought it would go.

All right.

Little thing about accepting reality the way it was and the way it is. Two podcasts ago, we— I stopped the whole conversation to go, Jesse, did you hire a stylist to dress you? Because he was looking good. And he goes, no, I just bought this from this app and I got a whole bunch of stuff. I bought a whole bunch of stuff from that app. Apparently I'm not as big as I think I am. I had to return everything because I got it way too big. But I got one last one that just came in today. It was a straggler.

It does not look as good.

Am I gonna look handsome in this? Oh, look.

I like it.

With patches and everything.

You'll look handsome no matter what you wear, Andrew.

I don't know. No, I, I like to, I want to look even more handsome. I'm getting pants that are not jeans. I'm getting help from my wife. We got a bot. I stopped some guy who was very well dressed at my kid's school. I go, you are very handsome. I like the way you're dressed. He stopped talking to me for a few weeks because it freaked him out. And then through my kid, they related and they, they like, haha, Andrew's kind of funny and personal stuff. And then his wife messaged my wife and goes, okay, I see you want it. You want Andrew to dress like David. And, uh, here are the places. So she gave us a list of places. I got boxes.

I'm gonna use what you just said to bring us back.

Um, bring it.

I think people are even more scared of intimacy and joy and pleasure than they are of sadness, anger, and fear. So it didn't surprise me when you kind of vulnerably said to this guy, I really like your style. You know, you look really good. That he, you know, sort of shut down and disconnected from you. And I think it's actually important to recognize that. I think we, you know, we talked about upper limit, but, or, and, you know, a version of that is like, if you give people, you know, in a workshop, like an hour to feel sadness or anger or fear, generally, like, it's really valuable. They'll go with it. If you're like, okay, for the next hour, we're going to feel pleasure. And joy, it freaks people out, which is interesting. Like, it's just interesting to note that we aren't comfortable with it. So again, it's not just expanding your capacity to be with anger, fear, sadness. It's also expanding your capacity to be with joy and pleasure and excitement.

You're saying allowing my feelings to come in will let me not just accept that I'm feeling sad that I'm not the way I wanted to be at this point in my life, but also will let me be happy for where I am.

And okay, there's two more points I want to make here. One is there's this idea that like all of your emotions flow through the same pipe. So if you're going to block one, you're going to block all in some way. Another way I heard it is like joy is the matriarch of all the feelings. And if you're not letting her children in, she ain't coming. So most of us want to feel joy. If you're not willing to feel anger or sadness or fear,, you're, you're gonna block the flow of like your natural joy. I actually think joy is sort of what's left over when you just allow everything else to move through. Um, and then the second point, and I think this is actually really, really important and most people don't understand this. And Andrew, I think we even talked about recently, like, well, well, shame, that's painful. You know? Oh, you know, sadness, that's painful. I actually think it's important to recognize that emotion— no emotions are painful or bad. It's, it's actually the resistance to the emotion that feels painful. So like an emotion plus resistance is a fundamentally different experience than the emotion without resistance.

And again, and the practical, by the way, just to, I think like if you've ever had a failed business or a failed relationship or a failed, you missed a flight, there's the feeling of what's about to happen and you resist it and you resist it, you resist it. And finally, when you're like, all right, this business is not going to work. It didn't work. I'm saying it didn't work. I missed my flight. Like the bad thing never feels bad when it actually happens. Then you're kind of like, oh, because it's the resistance to that event you were trying to avoid that's creating all that.

That's what I'm playing with this week. That was what we did in our last session, he said, feel it. And he helped me realize that a lot of times when Olivia, my wife, wants to plan the next thing that we're going to do, I go, I don't want to do it. He goes, what are you feeling there? And then what are you resisting? And it's the resistance to it that's making you dislike the conversation and suffer through it, and— or suffer through procrastinating on it.

What—

I—

wait, I want to say two quick things before I can. One is, uh, Andrew, have you seen Inside Out, the movie?

I did. I think so.

Do you remember it?

I don't.

Re— my homework assignment to you, rewatch it over the holidays with your kids. Watch both of them if you can. Because I, like, after you've done a lot of this work, right after this conversation, like, that movie so well captures— when you were saying Joy is the matriarch, you're literally in the movie, Joy is the matriarch. She runs the show and then Sadness has to come in and she tries to block Sadness. And then, and there's a whole story built around And for our kids and even for ourselves, I find it to be such an amazing way to understand how these, these energies inside of us move. Um, so anyway, I would watch that. And then the other thing I just wanted to share briefly, yesterday Dave and I had a session. It was like, it started with my calendar being busy and me resisting wanting to look at the calendar to plan it. And it turned into this whole other thing of me feeling like I was almost guilty for how great this is all working out. And so I used it as a, like, when I looked at the calendar, I was like, oh, I kind of feel bad that I'm like doing all these things and am I allowed to do all these things? And instead I'm just going to not look at the calendar to avoid, avoid having to confront that I have such a cool setup and situation going for me at GatewayX. And it was just a very interesting example of how coaching is like some random surface level thing is actually tying into some really, really deep fear.

And then what did I, ask you to do?

To welcome the fear and welcome the unfairness. Welcome the, like, the guilt.

Welcome shame, right? It's it. And again, what I want to say to listeners is you don't need to believe anything we're saying. I would strongly encourage you to run experiments for yourself and see like, wow, okay, if some feelings coming up, what happens if I stop resisting it and welcoming it? From my experience, it literally changes the experience of it. Like, it doesn't feel bad anymore. It's, you know, get really curious about it. Like, oh, where in my body is that showing up? Oh, okay, there's a tightening sensation in my belly. Okay, if I welcome that, is it, is it a problem? Is it— oh, it's just— or, you know, heartbreak. Like, I love— I, I've grown to love heartbreak. Like, I think I was like, let your heartbreak open. It expands your capacity to love. So I almost look forward to heartbreak. I look forward to anger because I'm like, "Oh, okay, there's something I haven't been paying attention to about my boundaries." Oh, and then I'll go have this conversation and assert some boundaries or some want. So there's kind of like this almost gradation from like, could you just allow the feeling? Could you acknowledge first that you feel them? Could you allow it? Could you accept it? Could you welcome it? Could you love it? Could you look forward to feeling shame or grief or sadness? And it may sound crazy to some people, and I just, again, I challenge and invite you to try it and see what happens, both in terms of how the experiential, like the visceral feeling of it shifts in your body, and then also how clarity emerges. Oh, one other thing I think is really important to name. There's actually, when I, when I challenge clients, like, you know, okay, Jesse, are you willing to feel that guilt? Or I think Andrew, I said, are you willing to feel your shame? I think Andrew, you said what most clients say, man, if I may share.

Yeah.

Which is like, I, I feel like I'll just drown in it.

Like if I let that in, I'll just be, I didn't say it about shame. Shame. I didn't want. To— but I did say that about a lot of feelings. I go, if I let it in, I'm gonna drown in it, and I don't want to live like that.

Yeah, and that's, that's the lie that our minds tell us. And it's, it's a total paradox because it's actually the resistance that's keeping it at, you know, like what you resist persists. And like Jesse said earlier, authentic feelings, there's like a wave of 90 seconds, right? Emotions, energy in motion. It's just like moves through. So for my actual experience of allowing, you know, sometimes there's a few waves of it, but that allowing it, welcoming it, then allows it to pass through and move through you. And so it's just a lie and a, you know, a fear. Like so many of our fears are just stories about the future that aren't true. Um, as I think Matt Machari said, you know, fear makes bad predictions. It's like, it's not actually— it's important to notice is we get really scared to allow and feel those feelings, that we're going to be engulfed by them. Or like, if I allow anger, I'm going to just be enraged and I'm going to cause all this carnage. It's not my experience, actually. When you allow it, it just moves through you and you kind of come back to presence.

All right. Let me close it out again by observing that Jesse, Jesse's dress, he's wearing a turban today. Usually Fridays are turban-free, more relaxed. Jesse, what are you up to this weekend?

I did this for you guys. I wanted to close out. Well, cause we're putting this on YouTube also. And I really, I'd like to represent myself and my people appropriately.

My version.

I have a bunch of family coming in town, my parents, you know, so it's also good, good greeting.

By the way, Andrew, I dressed up for you because I know how much you pay attention and I just, I noticed sadness that you haven't commented or noted.

I appreciate it. I did comment on this.

I wore my like holiday button-down shirt.

That didn't make an impression on me when Jesse commented on your haircut. And the whole time I was looking at my hair going, I need a haircut. But here's what, here's the positive thing that I love. I always look at your background and I think he's got a stunning background, but there's always a reflection. And the fact that you got rid of the reflection is something I commented on in the beginning and I love it. All right, boys. We're going to talk again in 2 weeks.

We're going to feel our feelings.

Keep sending messages over. How great is it when people tell us they love this podcast? Keep telling us.

And happy holidays, everyone. What a— by the way, there's this quote, like, if you want to know how enlightened you are, go spend a weekend with your parents. Yeah. Next few weeks for a lot of people, you might—

good self-awareness builder—

to feel all of your feelings. And so go practice.

Bye-bye. See you guys. Dai.