The Art of Accomplishment

Brett chats with Tara Howley, coach and Art of Accomplishment co-founder, about how a flash of insight integrates into embodied wisdom.

Joe and Brett talk about what they watch for when looking for a leader or teacher or when exploring a new path or practice. They elaborate on how patterns of saviorhood, superiority, and delegation of authority can show up anywhere in society — in the workplace, in the political sphere, or at the dinner table.

What is love? We all have a felt sense of love and opinions around what it is. How do our feelings and ideas about love form? What happens when our experience of love gets confused with our complex past? And how can we unwind our conditioning and open up to the deepest, richest love available to us?

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How much of your life do you spend straining and efforting only to spin your wheels and ultimately burn out? In this episode, Joe and Brett peel apart the layers between 'trying' and effortless action. They acknowledge the value of each way of being across various life contexts and discuss the role emotional fluidity plays in freely navigating the spectrum — from trying to its polar opposite.

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We return to Joe's journey, where his years-long chase after a momentary experience of oneness slowly expires.

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Joe takes us on a walk through his childhood and early life, from the suburbs of Connecticut to fleeing the revolution in Iran. A green mohawk and an 8-second hit of oneness.

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Joe and Brett answer more questions from listeners.

Joe and Brett talk about how principles drive decision-making and shape our lives -- whether we're aware of them or not. They distinguish between principles and values and examine what gives a set of principles their clarifying power. Joe shares the principles he's used in life and business, and the process by which he's grappled with them over time.

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In the third episode of our series for the Decisions Course, Joe and Brett dive into a common emotional pattern that shows up anywhere decisions are made.

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Joe and Brett talk about how to dismantle patterns that cloud our judgment and make decisions that include the wisdom of our emotions.

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Our guest Christofer returns with his wife Sadie for a powerful couples coaching session with Joe. They uncover how a pattern of self-reliance and appearing strong for each other has created stress in their relationship. What happens when they try a different approach?

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Joe and Brett celebrate a banner year of podcast growth by answering questions directly from listeners.

In this episode, we explore:

(3:20) Anger – feeling, expressing, and receiving ‘anger at’ a person
(11:07) Presence – staying with ourselves in complex and fast-paced group situations
(15:23) Depression – what is it, and how can we play with it?
(21:26) Alone, but not lonely – how our sense of connection evolves through deep work
(25:16) Desire – staying in touch with our wants as craving subsides
(30:38) Mental health – relating to family or friends with mental health challenges 
(35:38) Patience – insights and practices to be patient with...

Joining us for today's episode is Joe’s daughter, Esme. Esme was given a school assignment to make a podcast about where she came from by interviewing a person from her family about a meaningful experience in their life.  She decided to deviate from the task and follow her interest.   She wanted to know what it was like for her Dad to raise her. 

When her assignment was complete, she offered to share it with our listeners.  Enjoy this touching interview between Esme and her Dad Joe.  

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Today’s episode is a coaching session with a guest who wants to stop postponing his enjoyment into an abstract future that never arrives. The session opens up into a deep exploration of what can happen when we bring enjoyment into any moment -- even while experiencing chronic pain.

Learn more about our free workshops and online courses at artofaccomplishment.com

Joe and Brett discuss how to find deeper clarity in decision-making, whether in the office or on the edge of a cliff. 

Decisions are emotionally-driven, and we navigate them based on how we think we’ll feel when an outcome arrives. When we’re willing to feel any emotion, our decision-making becomes clear.

Tune in to see how becoming more aware of our emotions and using guiding principles can help us quickly identify the next obvious step in any decision-making process.

Learn more about our free workshops and online courses at artofa...

In our previous episode, Joe and Brett talked about how seeing through limiting beliefs can be scary because we're not sure we'll be safe. This is an especially relevant concern in the realm of high-risk activities like skydiving and BASE Jumping. In today's episode, we explore how Brett's relationship with the idea of safety has changed over the course of a decades-long career in adventure sports.

They discuss:

1:54 - What is safety?
5:32 - Safety as an idea can bring us comfort or distress
9:20 - The concept of safety as detachment or contact with...

Revisiting the topic of limiting beliefs, Joe and Brett explore what prevents us from seeing them, what keeps them stuck, and how to see through and integrate these beliefs in a way that enables a more free and easeful existence.

In this episode, we discuss:

In this episode, coach Mina Lee joins Joe to explore the nature and emotional dynamics of overwhelm. They inspect how it shows up in our lives and the emotional blocks, beliefs, and nervous system responses that keep it in place.

Tune in for a fresh perspective on how to embrace the intensity of overwhelm and tap into an internal sense of safety that facilitates the real-time processing of big emotions and life challenges. Learn how overwhelm flows through a company and inhabits its culture, and how focusing less on reducing overwhelm and more on driving flow can...

In this follow-up on the recent episode “How Relationships Reveal Us”, Alexa joins Joe and Brett to dive deeper into the premise that we’re all attracted to the partners who trigger us the best. What does this mean, and how do we follow these triggers toward our mutual growth and freedom?

We discuss how trigger and attraction are related and how avoiding the feelings underneath our triggers can produce relationship dynamics that last for years if left unexamined. Learn to recognize and welcome your own triggers as well as those of a partner, finding the empowerment to dra...

Our sense of identity is composed of the ideas and emotional states — even the gut reactions — that we identify as who we are. Identity is how we recognize ourselves. It guides the structure of our thoughts, emotions, and visceral responses.

Most people don’t spend their lives learning how to make their identities more transparent. We often think it’s hard to change aspects of ourselves. The reality is that transforming our identity isn't inherently difficult — it's just that a large part of it is allowing the unfelt emotional experience that our beliefs about ourselves hold in place. It’...

What can we learn about ourselves from the way we engage in relationships?

Brett and Joe address curiosities from listeners about how to approach relationships in a healthy way, riffing on the observation that we find ourselves attracted to the people who most perfectly hook into our triggers, traumas, and projections. Seeing this pattern as a feature rather than a bug, relationships become a vessel for deep healing and personal growth.

Examine how an agreement that “we’re together to make each other happy” leads to resentment and kills a relationship. Consider a relationship built on eac...

Anthropologist and coach Alexa Anderson joins the podcast again for a deep dive with Joe into the emotional and practical value of grieving fully.

They examine several forms in which grief can arise, the relationship between grief and identity, various mysteries of the way grief moves, and how unfelt grief underlies interpersonal and societal conflict.

Alexa and Joe discuss the tools they’ve used to help them move their grief in the wake of painful losses and to pre-grieve losses that haven’t yet occurred. They share examples of deep transformation that followed the processing of g...

“Never rob a man of his pain or his gold because both will serve him equally well.”

Super Bowl champion Aaron Taylor reflects on a journey to emotional freedom that continues far beyond his accomplished career in the NFL. For every feeling he'd been pushing away, Aaron came to find that “on the other side is infinite possibility.”

Join Aaron, Brett, and Joe as they talk about performance anxiety, feelings in the locker room, and how faith affects decision-making. They touch on the nature of accomplishment, how to raise children who hear their own voices of appro...

Shame is nature’s way of training us to fit into our culture and society. Like an electric fence, it outlines the contours of the identity we’ve grown into and discourages us from straying outside the lines.

This boundary around our comfort zone is often a poor match for ourselves and the world we live in. When we feel shame, our emotional experience stagnates, dampening our evolution and our enjoyment. People often find themselves stuck in the same shame cycles for years.

In this episode, Joe and Brett examine the structure of shame and how...

Joe coaches a course participant through an exploration of self-trust. Beginning with an intellectual question about conflicted inner parts, our guest embraces the underlying emotional experience and touches the essence of who she is.

"What's the ultimate thing that you're running from?" 
"Some sort of spiral effect -- I've seen people I love spiral into depression or spiral into madness."
"There's an abyss in you that you're avoiding, and your fear is that if you go into that, you won't come out. So let's go."

**Full transcript coming soon! Check back HE...

Apologies are commonly associated with shame, power games, or beliefs about who’s right and who’s wrong. In this episode, we talk about the freedom to be had in making apologies without shame and in full ownership of our experience.

“When you make an apology that's upright, that's empowered, it feels fantastic. You feel strength in it. You feel responsible. You feel empowered."

What We Discuss in Episode 54:

3:52   Why apologies are sometimes used to appease our own guilt.

11:05   How to apologize in a shameless, empowered way.

17:20   The notion...

At the age of eighteen — just before the birth of his child — Emile began serving a life sentence for murder. In this episode, Emile tells us how he came to face the fear that drove him to kill a man, and which followed him into prison. He shares how he learned to love himself and see through an identity that might have otherwise imprisoned him in yet another manner. After finding inner freedom, Emile eventually wrote his way out from behind bars as well: his sentence was commuted in 2017 after serving twenty-one years, a testament to his journey and tran...

Beneath the stories we tell are emotions waiting to be felt. In this episode, we talk about how our stories and emotions interact and how feeling our emotions can help us find deeper stories.

"If you allow the emotions to move you, your stories change, period. Every time."

What We Discuss in Episode 52:

01:34   What stories are and how they impact our emotional experience.

09:14   Expanding the connection of stories to belief systems and identity.

11:42   The intellectual and emotional components of stories — how they interact and how they differ.

18...

Will Chesney found identity and purpose as a Navy SEAL, one of the military’s most elite teams, where he was required to perform calmly and effectively under the most extreme circumstances. However, years of neurological and psychological trauma left Will in a very dark place. Unable to do what he loved most or connect effectively with others, he turned to drinking and isolation. After hitting rock bottom, a friend reached out and invited Will to join him on a journey of self-discovery that allowed him to tap into his resilience and get himself back on his feet. Tune in...

In this bonus episode: Joe and Brett respond to requests to know more about the Master class. They go through the story of how it was created, what it includes, and how it addresses root causes. Brett also asks Joe who the course would be good for and who should not take it.

We talk a lot about connection in this podcast — connection with ourselves, our emotions, our relationships and with the world around us. It’s essentially what we’re pointing to in every topic we discuss. In today’s episode, we talk about why that is, and how orienting toward connection in all aspects of our lives facilitates sustained expansion, increases our capacity, and puts us in touch with something bigger than ourselves.

“And the truth is that you're being in connection with yourself and others is not dependent on anybody else because being in connection with what is doesn't...

In Episode 49, Brett interviews Joe Sanok, a business consultant and productivity researcher who, until recently, lived full-time in a camper with his wife and children. When he and his wife decided to uncouple, it changed both Joe’s and his children’s lives in a big way. Learn how Joe used his meditation practice and other self-exploration tools to allow his world to unfold beautifully through surrender to reality as it was rather than clinging to what he thought it should be. 

Joe’s latest book is "Thursday is the New Friday,” a book about the four-day work week...

In this episode, we talk about limiting beliefs and how they run our lives, affecting our capacity to be with ourselves and live the life we want. We discuss how to find them, see through them, and discover what happens when these beliefs are no longer running the show.

“It's about being able to integrate new knowledge. And if you can't integrate new knowledge because you think you have the whole story, you're limited. Period.”

What We Discuss in Episode 48:

2:51    Defining what limiting beliefs are and how they can impact your life.<...

What’s the difference between a boundary and an ultimatum? What happens when we use “boundaries” to control another person?

In today’s episode, design researcher, coach, and strategy consultant Alexa Anderson joins Joe for a discussion on boundaries. Tune in to learn how drawing better boundaries can deepen relationships in work and life by immediately increasing our capacity to love.

"It’s scary if your boundary is accepted and the person loves you in your boundary, because that means the way that you have modeled the world in the past has to now change. And that m...

After listening to our two-part series on building functional teams, it's easy to see all of the shortcomings in our teams and realize that we might have a ways to go before we can truly call our teams functional. This realization can result in shame and feelings of not being good enough. Once we realize that our brains are wired to focus more on what’s going wrong than on what’s going right, we can shift to a more balanced assessment using a powerful tool. Gratitude allows us to see how the things we might call “setbacks" or “failures...

Last week, we discussed the characteristics that set functional teams apart and how to build your own. In part two of this series, we explore the opposite: what makes a team dysfunctional and how to recognize the signs of one in your own organization. Some of the things that we discuss include why trading short-term discomfort for long-term discomfort is often counterproductive, the top characteristics of leaders who produce dysfunctional teams and the root of the dysfunctional behavior itself. Join us to learn how to identify these behaviors in your team and correct them so that you can cultivate...

Every functional team is context-dependent on some level. Functionality looks different for a team of Navy Seals than it does for a team at a food processing center. However, there are qualities that all functional teams share. How are you meeting your goals and achieving results relative to other teams in your field? How much do people enjoy being a member of your team? How much do you trust that you will be seen, heard and respected when showing up as your authentic self? Tune in and learn more about what a functional team embodies and how to build...

In today’s episode, Brett interviews Heather Falenski, documentary filmmaker, adventure athlete and humanitarian worker. Her early career included several years of working on the African continent with refugees and others displaced by war. She is the founder of One World Media, a film production company based in Boulder, Colorado.

Heather led a fast-paced life working in some of the world’s most remote and challenging environments. Although her work was fulfilling, it was also physically and mentally taxing. It culminated into a severe chronic illness that left her bedridden for over a year. Heather discusses an epip...

In today’s episode, we explore how fear underlies the power dynamics that develop in our relationships with others and within ourselves. When fear is present, we naturally desire to control outcomes by taking on a bully, victim or savior role that externalizes our fear and separates us from our truth. Tune in to join us as we discuss the difference between power and empowerment. We will explore how welcoming the emotions and resistance around undesired outcomes can allow us to exit the power dynamics and show up authentically, leading to deeper connection and more harmonious relationships.

“We a...

In Episode 41, Brett interviews Jaime Waydo, Chief Technology Officer for Cavnue. Previously, Jaime led systems engineering at Waymo, Google’s Self Driving Car program, and collaborated with NASA on the Mars Rover Curiosity.

Jaime came from a mindset passed down generationally that, especially as a woman, it was important to place everyone’s needs — children, spouse, employees — before her own. She quickly realized that this way of being led her to chronically running on empty, which neither benefited her nor her community. She pivoted to putting herself first: speaking her needs vulnerably, organizing systems to support her and desi...