The Art Of Mastering Your Emotions - Joe Hudson

I have been falling in love with your work over the last few months. I feel like it's been very timely for me as I try to feel feelings and tap into emotions, and you're the guy. So I've scraped some of my favorite tweets and quotes from you that I've picked up, and I wanna go through some of those with you.

Okay.

First one, "How to see the matrix. One, name an unwanted emotion in your life. Two, list the ways you try to avoid it. Three, notice that every way you try to avoid it, you actually create it."

Yeah. (laughs) Yeah, it's a... Yeah, I call that... I have an episode on that one, it's called The Golden Algorithm. And, uh, and it's basically this idea that the emotion that we f- don't wanna feel is the emotion that we abite- invite in the exact way that we try to avoid it. So the perfect example of this in my life was I, you know, had this experience of being emotionally abandoned as a kid. And so I would just keep on finding emotional abandonment everywhere I looked, you know. It was like a... You know the guy who's like, close their e- close their eyes at a bar, throw a dart behind their back, and they're always gonna hit the wounded woman, and, like, they're gonna be attracted to one another, and that's how it's gonna work? Like, it was... So I always, you know, fa- created this abandonment, and so when I thought it was coming, when I saw the abandonment, even though maybe it wasn't there, I would harden up. I would like, mm, you know, get angry or something, which of course creates a more likelihood of abandonment. So I would try to not feel it, and in the way of not feeling it... Or I would, like, really try to caretake somebody, and that would create resentment in them, and then, then they would abandon me. So every way that I tried to avoid it, I was recreating it in my life. That just goes across the board everywhere, so whether I'm working with a CEO who's, like, trying to avoid their shame, I can, like, guarantee that they will do something to create shame and then have to deal with it in the, in the terms of their company, for instance. So this is, this is one of the realities of our lives. And it's an amazing thing because intellectually you can get it, but what I think people don't get is you can just literally look at every single place where you have pain, and you can backwards engineer it. You can go backwards and go, "Oh, hey. Right, so what am I trying to avoid? How am I avoiding it? How... That's how I'm creating it." Backwards engineer it.

Why is it so reliable that the way you try to avoid it creates it? Like, uh, to me, it doesn't seem, from first principles, like that could be the case. You could a- avoid it in a way that doesn't create it.