Befriend the Voice in Your Head: Executive Coach Joe Hudson on Emotions, Enjoyment and Experiments

Asked what holds back ambitious tech people, Hudson names two things. The first is a critical inner voice that insists you need it to be productive, but which usually undermines success and leaves you unable to enjoy it even when you win: the money, the house and the career, yet still unhappy. The second is a dysfunctional relationship with emotions, such as pretending not to have them, compartmentalizing them or trying to manage them instead of harnessing them.

He says the repetitive, critical voice, the one that says the same thing over and over, is wrong every time. That does not mean there is no truth in it, but it is never an accurate account of what is happening. A boss who criticized you every few minutes would not make you more productive, and the voice never asks how you might enjoy working out, only that you should. Most people try to stop it, and Hudson says that does not work.

His alternative is to respond to the voice in a new way each day as an experiment. One favorite reply is "I see you're really scared. Don't worry, I'm right here with you," because the voice poses as the boss but behaves like a child having a tantrum. He adds that the experimental framing matters: the brain's habenula teaches us not to repeat failures, so a failed diet becomes "forget it," whereas an experiment cannot fail. Understanding the voice well enough, he says, makes the problem go away, like learning a river valley by walking through it rather than damming it.

Hudson points to the neuroscientist's book *Descartes' Error*, which describes patients with damage to the emotional center of the brain. Their IQ stayed the same, yet they took half an hour to choose lunch or a pen and their lives fell apart. His conclusion, paraphrased for a podcast, is that we decide emotionally and use logic to predict how we will feel. If you cannot bear to feel like a failure, you will skip certain risks, and if you cannot bear to feel disliked, you will not say your truth.

He says the same mechanism explains many problems: feeling overwhelmed is usually about emotions you are not feeling or expressing rather than the amount on your plate, and depression is often unmoved anger. Most people can sustain excitement for only 10 to 20 seconds, though excitement is contagious in a meeting. Hudson distinguishes this from people who have been emotionally abused, meaning told they were not allowed to feel certain emotions, who may genuinely be unable to sense them.

His image for health is a hose with water running through it. Kink it one way and anger comes out as insults, another way as flattery, another as guilt. Unkinked, the same energy is a loving boundary and clarity of purpose, as in Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Losing control, he adds, actually indicates there is still resistance in the emotion.

Lenny, who did a ten-day silent retreat, asks about non-judgmental awareness. Hudson calls it a great step but says the translation can get in the way. An emotion is like a child coming into your house, and it responds differently to "I am non-judgmentally aware of you" than to "I'm so excited to see you." He quotes a line he says he is best known for: joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she will not come into a house where her children are not welcome.

He also insists emotions need to be felt physically. Suppressing one means tensing muscles, and he says he can read repressed anger in a furrowed brow or a critical parent in hunched shoulders. Sitting and feeling can eventually release them, though it may take decades, while making sounds and moving the body speeds things up, as mammals shake to release fear. His practical entry point is a free audio called Emotional Inquiry, in which you explore an emotion in the body with curiosity, the way a child examines a toad.

Lenny notes that Hudson often tells coaching clients their stated problem is not the real one. Hudson reframes it: people often live in a story about an old version of themselves. One sign is that nine out of ten compliments get deflected, which suggests people cannot feel who they are, and so they keep craving validation they cannot digest.

One of his five foundational tools is to question the assumption. A person who says "I'm an asshole to my girlfriend" is assuming she does not want that, that they know what the word means, that there is an objective standard and that the problem is the behavior rather than resisting it. He tells how a friend once challenged him to simply accept, for a minute, that he was an asshole. When the shame fell away, he says he became less of one within weeks, and concludes that shame often holds bad habits in place.

Hudson says every method of avoiding a feeling becomes the route by which that feeling arrives. A conflict-avoidant executive wants to escape the sense of being out of control, so decisions stall, tension builds, and he ends up leading a tense organization and feeling exactly that. Hudson's own version: as the son of an alcoholic father, he feared emotional abandonment, and his clinginess or caretaking pushed people away faster.

He suggests reverse engineering any recurring problem by asking what you do not want to feel in it. If you are fighting with a partner because you hate feeling ashamed, you defend yourself, defending starts the fight, and the fight brings more shame. Simply being willing to feel the shame, and then perhaps saying sorry for not taking out the trash, removes the cycle. He calls it simple but very hard to apply.

He adds that what matters is where you speak from rather than what you say. His friend's "you're a dick" landed because it came from love, so it could not be defended against. Hudson says that a CMO who fears the CEO can always find one person the CEO does not yell at, who raises problems without fear.

Before going further, Hudson asks listeners not to take his advice but to test it, since he says he made it up and it may be true for you at one moment and not the next. For example, "you cannot even control your next thought" might free one person and trap another. He says the useful thing is to run the experiment and find out what is true for you now.

On joy, he says he would never tell anyone to feel it, but enjoyment is a tool for productivity. A Ferrari is fast, not efficient, and true efficiency is finishing something and feeling you have more energy than when you started. If you enjoy what you do 10% more, you are 10% more efficient, and the quality and staying power usually improve too. Enjoying taking out the trash is a choice, he says, and doing less to enjoy life more does not work.

His experiment is to ask "how do you enjoy this 10% more?", which typically leads to a deeper breath and a more relaxed body. He prefers that phrasing to "what can I change?" because trying tends to reduce enjoyment. He also finds that learning to enjoy what is in front of you comes first: billionaires in his circle have spent huge sums arranging lives they enjoy, and it does not work. He also warns against discarding negative emotions in pursuit of enjoyment.

Hudson uses an oak tree to question self-improvement: at what point in its life is it perfect? We are naturally evolving, and "I need to improve" adds shame and stagnation. He says only about 10 to 15% of people can set a "should" and carry it out, and even those who do end up with a life for who they think they should be, not who they are. Acting from authenticity means some jobs and people will fit and others will not, and you end up with the ones that are right for you.

He distinguishes "should" from "want": wants, like a plant growing toward the sun, show where growth is trying to happen. Wanting to be "better" often carries the subtext that once you do X, Y and Z you will be lovable or worthy. In his view people who love themselves have loving relationships, while those trying to earn love end up with critics. His organization therefore speaks of self-awareness, self-experimentation and self-discovery rather than self-improvement.

He ties this to his claim that understanding a problem fully reveals its solution. Giving a problem sustained attention solves it, and he cites Elon Musk's habit of asking an interviewee "how, exactly?" six levels down to find out who actually solved something. Approaching problems with a kid's curiosity, asking what you can learn, is in his view the most efficient and enjoyable route.

Hudson says every unwillingness to feel closes off solutions. Nobody wants a bad team, yet most people have one, and a conflict-avoidant leader cannot build a great team because anything alive requires tension. Building one means being fine with people being upset or disappointed, and with disappointing yourself. The more emotional experiences you can welcome, the more options you have and the clearer your decisions become.

The second tool is a set of principles to live by. Everyone already has implicit ones, such as whatever earns likes, so he suggests choosing five or six that you are confident would produce the life you want, then testing and refining them. One of his is "embrace intensity": welcome the strongest sensation in the body or the thing nobody wants to discuss at work, and some of his company's meetings begin with "what are you scared to say?" With such principles, he says, decisions become nearly automatic.

If you build your own, he says, keep it to five, test each for five days and keep them simple. Others he uses are "connection first" and "everything is in iteration." He also recommends defining each principle by what it is not. His decisions course, which runs once a year, covers this in more depth.

For companies, Hudson typically talks to the leader and three or four others, then sits in a meeting or two. His view is that the atomic structure of a company is its meetings and decisions, since a company is mostly relationships and ideas. He asks teams to make every meeting a "five-star meeting" that leaves everyone energized, which brings the real problems to the surface: the meetings that stay bad point to what needs attention.

He gives the example of a content creator friend who said his YouTube meetings were hopeless and would never get better. It turned out that the content itself was not working for him, and after he committed to making those meetings enjoyable, his YouTube numbers took off. Hudson says executives usually get all their meetings to five stars in about two months and end up with roughly half as many meetings.

He also recommends short, regular "pulse" surveys of team sentiment, which he used as a VC to see which teams were unhappy and unlikely to make their numbers. If culture eats strategy, as he recalls Richard Branson saying, it can be measured as a leading indicator. He finds it striking that leaders complain that people do not follow through but rarely try simple culture changes.

Asked for one thing everyone should try, Hudson recommends seven minutes of gratitude with another person every day. It should not be a list of things you are grateful for: you feel gratitude in your body and then speak from that felt sense, trading back and forth with a parent, friend, partner or colleague. After a couple of weeks, he suggests applying it to the area where you feel lack, which he calls the superpower.

He tells how he used to meditate seven or eight hours a day with very little money, then realized a billionaire he knew also felt he did not have enough. He and his wife began sitting daily to be grateful for what they had, though he was around $40,000 in credit card debt at the time. Three months later, he says, the debt was gone, and six months later he had $60,000 in the bank. He says the change came from defining himself as someone who has, and he still does the practice daily.

Hudson closes by pointing to the Art of Accomplishment podcast and website, which offers free workshops and the foundational Connection Course. He says the courses are experiential, with participants running experiments face to face with another person. As for how listeners can help, he says he wants his daughter to grow up in a better world, and that happens when people discover who they are.