How embracing your emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (Art of Accomplishment)
Joe Hudson (guest), Lenny Rachitsky (host)
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, featuring Joe Hudson and Lenny Rachitsky, How embracing your emotions will accelerate your career | Joe Hudson (Art of Accomplishment) explores harnessing Emotions and Joy to Transform Career, Decisions, and Teams Executive coach Joe Hudson argues that two core issues hold ambitious people back: a toxic relationship with their inner critical voice and a distorted relationship with emotions. He explains how embracing, rather than suppressing, emotions dramatically improves decision-making, productivity, and overall life satisfaction. Hudson offers practical experiments—like reframing self-talk, cultivating enjoyment in everyday activities, and adopting daily gratitude practices—to shift from shame-driven self-improvement to authentic, experiment-driven growth. He also extends these ideas to teams, emphasizing principles-based decision-making and designing “five-star meetings” as the atomic units of a healthy, high-performing culture.
Harnessing Emotions and Joy to Transform Career, Decisions, and Teams
Executive coach Joe Hudson argues that two core issues hold ambitious people back: a toxic relationship with their inner critical voice and a distorted relationship with emotions. He explains how embracing, rather than suppressing, emotions dramatically improves decision-making, productivity, and overall life satisfaction. Hudson offers practical experiments—like reframing self-talk, cultivating enjoyment in everyday activities, and adopting daily gratitude practices—to shift from shame-driven self-improvement to authentic, experiment-driven growth. He also extends these ideas to teams, emphasizing principles-based decision-making and designing “five-star meetings” as the atomic units of a healthy, high-performing culture.
Key Takeaways
Stop believing the critical voice in your head; change your relationship with it.
Hudson argues the repetitive, critical inner voice is always “wrong” in how it motivates you. ...
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Embrace your full emotional range to unlock better decisions and more options.
We decide emotionally and use logic to justify those decisions; if you’re unwilling to feel certain emotions (e. ...
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Focus on enjoyment as a primary productivity tool, not a reward.
Hudson suggests asking, “How do I enjoy this 10% more right now? ...
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Shift from “should” and self-improvement to “want” and experimentation.
Operating from “should” creates shame, stagnation, and slow growth; operating from genuine wants and structured experiments creates movement and natural evolution. ...
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Use principles and emotions together to improve your decisions.
Hudson advises defining a small set (around five) of simple life principles—e. ...
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Diagnose and transform company culture by upgrading meetings and decision-making.
He sees meetings and decisions as the atomic structure of an organization. ...
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A seven-minute daily gratitude practice can rapidly rewire scarcity and identity.
Hudson recommends seven minutes a day of felt, shared gratitude with another person—speaking from the bodily feeling rather than intellectual listing. ...
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Notable Quotes
“Whatever emotion that you're trying to avoid, you are inviting into your life in exactly the way that you're trying to avoid it.”
— Joe Hudson
“The voice in your head that is critical and repeats is always wrong.”
— Joe Hudson
“Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome.”
— Joe Hudson
“If you say, ‘I’m gonna figure out how to enjoy what I do 10% more,’ and you succeed, you are 10% more efficient.”
— Joe Hudson
“If you understood the problem, there would be no question about the solution.”
— Joe Hudson
Questions Answered in This Episode
How would my behavior and choices change if I fully welcomed the one emotion I’m currently most afraid to feel?
Executive coach Joe Hudson argues that two core issues hold ambitious people back: a toxic relationship with their inner critical voice and a distorted relationship with emotions. ...
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What are three recurring lines from my inner critical voice, and how might I experiment with responding to each of them differently this week?
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If I crafted five simple life principles today, what would they be, and how confident am I that living by them would create the life I actually want?
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Looking at my calendar, which recurring meeting feels least like a ‘five-star meeting,’ and what does that reveal about deeper cultural or structural issues on my team?
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In which area of my life do I feel the most lack (money, time, love, etc.), and what might a two-week, seven-minute daily gratitude practice focused on that area change for me?
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Transcript Preview
(instrumental music) A lot of the people in my circles, they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try to arrange a life that they enjoy and it doesn't fucking work.
What is holding people back?
It's the fact that they have emotions that they are not sitting, feeling, or expressing. Whatever emotion that you're trying to avoid, you are inviting into your life in exactly the way that you're trying to avoid it.
What the hell? Why would (laughs) ... Why does this happen?
(laughs)
You have this really amazing insight. The voice in your head is often telling you bullshit.
What most people try to do is they try to stop it, and that doesn't work very well. I think the best way to work with the voice in the head is to pick an experiment every day and respond to the voice in the head in a new way every day. One of my favorite responses is, "Oh, I see that you're really scared. Don't worry, I'm right here with you. I got you."
You're really big on helping people feel joy.
It is, like, such an important tool for productivity. If you say, "I'm gonna figure out how to enjoy what I do 10% more," and you succeed, you are 10% more efficient. Not only that, usually the quality is gonna get a lot better too.
Is there just, like, one thing you recommend that basically everyone try to experiment with?
Yeah. It'll change your life dramatically really quickly.
(instrumental music) Today, my guest is Joe Hudson. Joe is one of the most sought-after executive coaches amongst tech leaders and has worked with folks from OpenAI, SpaceX, Apple, and other world-class companies. Joe's unique approach to coaching draws from his spiritual, psychological, and neurological practices, and in his intimate courses that he runs a few times a year and in his podcast, he helps people create the life that they want with enjoyment and ease. In our conversation, Joe shares the two things that he finds most often keep people stuck in their life and in their job and how to work on getting these things unstuck, why the critical voice in your head is always wrong, contradictory, and telling you bullshit, and how to build a different relationship with that voice, why falling in love with your emotions is so important and so powerful, why you'd be better off focusing on what you want versus what you think you should do or think that you need to do, plus a bunch of amazing advice on how to make better decisions, help your team run more effectively, and why a seven-minute daily gratitude practice will change your life. This episode is basically for every single person and will make your life and your work better. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Joe Hudson. Joe, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
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