How embracing emotions will accelerate your career

Joe Hudson, an executive coach to many tech leaders and founder of the Art of Accomplishment, discusses how unexamined emotions and a harsh inner critic hold ambitious people back. The conversation covers practical experiments for relating to the inner voice, emotional fluidity, enjoyment as a driver of productivity, decision-making through principles, and building healthier team meetings and culture.

01Key learnings

• Treat the critical inner voice as usually wrong and unhelpful; rather than trying to silence it, respond to it differently through a new small experiment each day.
• Respond to a fearful inner critic with compassion, such as acknowledging it is scared and that you are there with it, instead of arguing or telling it to stop.
• Approach emotional change as experimentation and self-discovery, not self-improvement, since failed attempts at self-improvement often trigger shame and quitting.
• Avoiding an emotion tends to invite it into your life in the very form you were trying to escape, so try feeling the emotion instead of managing it.
• Ask 'how can I enjoy this 10% more?' Greater enjoyment tends to raise both the quality of work and the energy and staying power you bring to it.
• Write a short set of about five personal principles and test each for several days, since principles make decisions faster and clearer under pressure.
• Audit team meetings for whether they are enjoyable and productive; the meetings that feel bad usually reveal where the organization's real problems lie.
• Spend seven minutes a day sharing genuine felt gratitude with another person, focusing on the emotional sense rather than an intellectual list, which Joe credits with changing his finances and outlook.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.