Sam Altman's coach destroys your limiting beliefs for 86 minutes straight

I had this experience of I am one with everything and everything is good. It was like getting hooked on heroin. I was like whatever that is, I'm obsessed.

The names that I can drop are the ones that are on the website. I find that it's better if you all name drop for me than me name.

Uh no, I really like to have a variety of people, you know, like all sorts of people. The only thing that I think all of the people that I work with have in common is they're ambitious. Only some of them are maximalists, but they're all super ambitious.

Maximalist is someone who's like, I want it all right now and I can get it all right now. I would put like Sam Altman in the maximalist category. Any limitation that a normal person would see, they're just like, "No, we can figure out how to do both."

No, I don't think it's achievable entirely, but I think that much more is achievable if you think that way. Right. So, the limiting beliefs hold us back dramatically.

Yeah, the idea of a limiting belief outwardly is just any thought process that you have holding you back. And so I'll give you one that probably everybody has experienced. They have some sort of transformation, something happens, and then they ask themselves, "Will it last?" That's a great limiting belief.

Because all that really is is just a whole bunch of anxiety presenting itself as a thought process for you to believe. And instead of saying like, "Oh, every learning that I've ever had ebbs and flows, like I've totally learned stuff and then I've forgotten it and then I relearn it." Or, "I've been able to make that shot in golf and then I can't make it." But then I learn to make it over time, that there's this natural pendulation of learning that occurs. And so the ebbs and flows are actually good because that is what learning is. Instead, it's oh, I might lose this thing. And then they have a moment where they've lost this moment of transformation and then they go, "Oh, I've lost it," which is a second limiting belief. So that would be like a very common limiting belief that people have. Or they're on a diet and they're like, "Will I be able to maintain the diet?" and then they have that one piece of chocolate cake and they're like, "Oh, well, I couldn't maintain the diet, right?"

That's a great one.

Yeah. There's two beliefs in there. The first one is that you have to suffer to achieve what you want to achieve or that you have to grind to achieve what you want to achieve. So I have a client who I can't mention their name and probably one of the most successful VCs ever has been involved in some of the biggest companies and most of their investments have been in big companies. I think they work like three or four hours a week and they had like a grind period of a couple of days, I mean a couple of years kind of in their 20s, but they just don't work really hard. And I can name another 10 people who have been able to be incredibly successful without grinding like that. They've just been able to be in the right place at the right time. And then the secondary piece of that grind is...

Here's something that I've never seen. I've never seen a venture company or a startup fail because of lack of effort. Everybody is like anybody who's got a startup in Silicon Valley anyways, they are efforting all the time and yet a tremendous amount of them fail. But the idea is if I work harder, I'll succeed. But obviously that's not true. So then the question is like what is the most important thing that you're doing? And it's usually the relationships you hold and the decisions that you make.

Yeah. So if you're going to make any transformation effectively in your system you have basically three levels that you need to address it at. The first level is the level of the mind and this is what we're usually pretty good at. Meaning most people know that they should work out, but it doesn't mean that they work out. Most people know they shouldn't be dicks to the people who they need to run their business, but not everybody is. So, intellectually understanding that's actually usually the easiest part for Americans is to actually get that to grok that. And then there's the emotional level, the mammalian level of the brain. So, the prefrontal cortex is the thinking level of the brain. It's very human. And the mammalian level I would call it the heart. I call it the emotional. And so a lot of the times if we're trying to make transformation, we have to look at what's emotionally needed to make that transformation happen. And then there's the part of our system that's more of the reptilian. It's the nervous system. And is that nervous? Can we address the nervous system? So if you want to make real transformation, you have to address all three levels of the system.

So, let's do an example that probably touches most of the entrepreneurs that listen to this. Self-reliance. So, the self-reliance pattern is basically a pattern that somewhere when you were young, you were taught that you had to fend for yourself. And 90% of the time it meant you had to fend for other people. You had to take care of other people. Maybe that's because your parents were super critical or maybe it's because you had an alcoholic father and you needed to take care of that father or you had a depressed mother. But somewhere you learned, hey, no one's going to be there to take care of me. I got to take care of myself. My needs aren't going to be met otherwise. And then the outcome of that is that those people have a hard time asking for help. Typically, they have a hard time owning what they want, being able to just say, "This is clearly what I want." They usually have an authority problem which means they neither want to be the authority because they don't trust the authority of their childhood. They don't fully step into their own authority and they kind of rebel against other authorities. So they have like this mixed relationship with authority typically and then they have a very hard time announcing that they're hurt. Like it's the last move that they'll make is to say, "Hey, I'm hurt." Right? And so that's the pattern that comes out of self-reliance. So now how would you address it? The first way is to talk about like the way I just talked about it. I saw both of you and probably most of the people in the audience click and oh I never realized that's all related really, like to be able to tie that together to show that this is a pattern that came from your childhood. It isn't particular reality and so that kind of like creates a little space for a different action, different movement, but oftentimes just seeing it's not going to really deal with it. So then there's the emotional level. The emotional level is two things, right? Typically, but there can be others, but typically there's an emotion of helplessness that I refuse to feel. I'm not going to feel helplessness. I will go and like storm the gates of hell. I will grind forever over the idea of feeling helpless.

Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. So, there's this feeling of helplessness that those people will absolutely not feel because as a kid if you felt that helplessness, if you're like, "Holy there's nobody here taking care of me." It's like death and destruction. So, you don't do that. And so, this feeling of helplessness never got to be felt as a kid. And so emotionally it means you have to learn how to feel the helplessness and how to actually look forward to and enjoy the helplessness which sounds radical and impossible.

But the way that this works is what I will call the golden algorithm, what we call the golden algorithm. So the emotion that you're trying to avoid is the emotion you're inviting in the exact way that you're trying to avoid it. So, you don't want to feel helpless in the grocery store, so you don't ask for help, which means you walk away without the thing in the grocery store. Or you don't want to feel helpless about your business not doing well, so you grind, which keeps you more burnt out, making less good decisions, destroys your relationship, so you feel more helpless. So the action that you're taking to not feel the thing is actually what perpetuates the thing. In this case, helplessness. So learning how to say, "Oh, I'm helpless. I know how to experience that feeling. I know how to actually go, 'Oh, this is just an emotional thing that's moving through me, and I don't have to be ruled by it. It's not my boss anymore.'" Because if all your decisions are based on not feeling helpless, it means there are certain risks you're not going to take. It means you're not going to rely on other people that you need to to scale the business, etc., etc., etc. Right? So that would be the emotional.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Fall in love with the emotions you're avoiding.

Like think about it this way. It's just like working out. You want to work out, you're going to have to like lean into the burn. And eventually you're like, I like working out. I like that burn. It's the same thing for emotions.

Yeah. Yeah.

So that answer is part of the pattern you're trying to interrupt. What do I do every day? One, every day. Two, what do I do? Those are the two things that make you grind. It's up to me. I got to do it. There's no grace. There's no surrender. There's no letting other people help me. And I got to do it every day.

What's the thing that I do that I can control that I can grind at that will fix my grind? So, if you're really taking a look at it, yeah, it's actually not it doesn't work like that at all. And the cool thing is it can often just be I've literally seen the moment that somebody fully understands the beauty of the emotion. Oh, I can't wait to feel helpless because when I feel helpless, what I know is that I am not delegating well. What I know is that I'm not letting other people help me. What I know is that my decision-making is constrained by a false limitation. So, I'm so stoked that I'm feeling it because I have those three signals now. And I'm going to go take action on those three things because I know that signal in my system. And as soon as they get that, there's no more effort required.

It's kind of half of it. The other half is to see that the emotional thing that's happening is let's say like it's a tube of energy, right? And so like a hose with water running through it. And if it runs clear, meaning that hose isn't kinked, then life is good. If it kinks in one way or another, then there's all sorts of problems that happen. So let's take anger as an example. So you have anger moving through your system and you kink it one way and it's like this nice dress. And you kink it another way and it's like this. I'm not angry. I just need you to do the thing. I'm not angry. And you kink it another way and it's like this. You motherfucker, you. But if you unkink it, if you actually let that emotion go through, which means you're not having resistance or shame, you don't think that you're bad for having it, then anger looks like Martin Luther King or Gandhi. It's determination and clarity. And when you see CEOs do this where they go, "Oh, right. I'm constantly pissed because I constantly feel like I'm alone in it and I constantly feel like no one's got my back." Even though I have 20,000 people showing up to work every day and none of them have ever thought, "Boy, I really hope the CEO is upset with me today." Or, "Boy, I hope that the work I did doesn't please the CEO." So, you got 20,000 people trying to please a CEO who feels all alone in it. And so they're getting angry. And when they realize, oh wait, if I don't resist this, if I just listen to it, then there's actually some wisdom here. And then they start listening to it without that shame, without that kink and all of a sudden they're like, "Oh, that means I have a boundary. It means that something inefficient is happening in the company and I need to go pay attention there."

Yeah, absolutely. There are. However, the awareness is more important than the words. So let's take for instance a common thing that is effective is you know positive affirmations or you know visualizing things going right. I'm going to go into a meeting and I'm going to visualize things going right. So you can do that and there's a certain amount of effectiveness. It's even more effective if you visualize it going right and you feel the emotions of it going right. It's even more effective if you visualize it going right in the present instead of in the future. So you can actually feel what it's happening right now. So all of those things that's really effective. But if you really have the awareness of what's behind that, then it's going to be a lot more powerful. And so what's actually happening say with the positive reinforcement is that you're changing your identity. You're saying, "Okay, I'm no longer this person. I'm going to visualize myself as this person and that's going to change my identity." And if you're really looking at identity shift and being comfortable with identity shift then you also have to visualize the negative outcomes so that you don't get scared of them. The samurai use this, I mean so many traditions use this, which is visualizing their own death and they... Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, samurai...

Yeah.

Right. So if you visualize this and you actually feel the destruction that you're trying to avoid, then you've already lived it. So, you don't have to be scared of it anymore. So, I'll give you an example of this with my wife. So, we've been married 27 years. I've been married to at least three women in that 27 years. She's like, she's changed dramatically. I've changed dramatically. And so, we come to points in our relationship where it's not working for us. And what our path is is that we both grieve the relationship. It's over. We're getting a divorce. We visualize the divorce. It's horrible. We like have the entire experience because once we've had it, we don't have to be scared of it anymore. And so when we show up, we act as ourselves. We don't try to accommodate. We don't walk on eggshells. We're like, "No, this is what I want." And then we can actually have a conversation how we can both be happy as we are now, not trying to save the marriage.

Great book. And I actually just listened to a talk by the coach of Georges St-Pierre, who's one of the greatest UFC fighters of all time. And they talk about preparing fighters for the most dangerous, scary sport there is. And he was like, "We find the competitor's walkout music. We wear our outfit, you know, we're like a dress rehearsal. We listen to the music constantly." And so we do that when we practice. And we practice the walk out. We have the bright lights. This way you are visualizing this to the point of not just visualizing but you hear it and like he was even saying something about the smell. They try to use the same glove so it smells the same. And this way when you first when you're going into this thing that's a life-changing thing you have been there before because you can sort of trick yourself into thinking this is real and you are prepared. It's the same thing like so I don't know how many entrepreneurs I've walked through that the visualization of the death of their company. Everybody gets laid off, you know, people go broke. Same thing. It's the same thing. You visualize the end of the company so that you can stop acting from fear and you can actually build the company that you want to build and be the person that you want to be.

It's more until the fear is gone. And it's not really how often, but it's how you do it. So example would be like if you do it and you actually deeply feel the emotions of it then it's probably you don't have to do it very many times until the fear dissipates then that's going to like it's how you do it is more important than repetition and reps.

I just sit down, close my eyes and visualize everything and anything that I don't want to visualize, I slow way down and feel everything I don't want to feel.

The big trick is to feel the things you don't want to feel. The reason that that's the trick is because look, if I said to you like most entrepreneurs, one of the things that they get scared about is being homeless. Who knows why, but it is something that many entrepreneurs get scared about. And if I said to you, hey, you're going to be homeless, but you are going to be happier, more content, you're going to feel great. Like think of the best time you've ever felt in your entire life, it's going to be 10x that all the time. If you knew that to be true, how scared are you to be homeless?

Right. Exactly. So, what's actually occurring is that we're scared of an emotional experience, not an actual experience. And it's neurologically this is proven. So, if I was to take the emotional center out of your brain, you would have an IQ that is the same as it is now, but you would have an incredibly hard time making decisions and your total life would fall apart. So, and you can read a book about this. It's called Damasio's Error. It was written by a neuroscientist in like 2012 or something. And so, we've known this for a long time. So basically, if I pull out that emotional part of your brain, it's going to take you like a half an hour to decide what color pen to use. It's going to take you an hour or two to decide where to have lunch. So your whole life falls apart because you can't make decisions. And this was people who had brain damage or like a stroke in a certain area and your logical center is still working and decisions are logical, right?

And it's like no, no, not right. Not even simple decisions are.

The only decisions that aren't emotionally based are the decisions that bypass the emotional center like a snake coming at you, like you jump back without it going through that part of your brain.

Yeah. So, nervous system, that's like a super tricky one. There's a lot of things that you can do, but this is like it's all very primal. And this is where like repetition and do I do this every day? This is where it really comes in handy. So there's not like an intellectual or emotional aha that can change a nervous system just like that. Occasionally like high doses of like psilocybin or something I've seen change nervous systems, but it's very undependable. And so this is actually where repetition matters in the nervous system. So one of the key principles is how do you allow yourself to experience pleasure more and more deeply because pleasure means that we're not under attack. So our nervous system thinks that we're under attack when we're not and so it amps up. Now sometimes that occurs because we have an abusive self-talk and so if I was your boss and I was like oh you fucked that up you did that wrong like why are you biting your nails why aren't you looking at Joe while you're podcasting why are you taking notes instead of being connected to your co-host like if I was doing that perpetually it would cause you stress because you're perpetually under attack but often we're doing that to ourselves. And so that's activating the nervous system. So that is the intellectual that's like how the intellect and the nervous system relate. But there's a whole bunch of things that also happen with the nervous system. I'll use my own example in this is my mom German super rigid woman loved me dearly in her capacity but like if I was 5 minutes early I was late and I would get in trouble you know it was like that kind of a thing and like things needed to be very perfect and so there was a sense of obligation and if I wasn't going to fulfill that obligation I was going to be in trouble and so my nervous system gets activated when you know I'm a minute late for a podcast though it's not going to affect anything my nervous system is going to get messed up so there's some nervous system stuff that happens just like through training and so one the kind of the overall background thought process is how do I allow as much pleasure as possible to reset my baseline but the second thing is to really start to notice and be present with for like one or two seconds those moments when my nervous system is activated or when your nervous system is activated. So when that phone call comes in and you're like, "Oh shit." You just stop and you're like, "What is it like to be me?" 2 seconds and then you go ahead and do your thing. Like go ahead, be anxious again. Like don't try to control yourself because trying to control your anxiety is just anxiety producing, right? Like it just creates more of the same thing. It's just being really really in touch with what's going on. Like bringing awareness into that moment is all that's really necessary. But it's necessary to do it over and over and over again to see what's actually occurring in your system and what's really necessary. And then pretty soon it unpacks what's going on beneath your nervous system. Your intellect starts to understand it. But your intellect will never get it at first. It really requires lots of just being present for one or two seconds when you notice that activation occur.

Yeah. So I think intellectually the important thing to recognize about conflict is imagine you're working in a factory and somebody can tell you where the machine is going to break or someone can point to you this is where the machine's broken, this is where the machine's broken and you're like great thanks and you ignore it. That's what avoiding conflict is like because conflict is the place where efficiency can be gained whether it's in a marriage or in a business or between business partners. So I'll give you a story about this. So recently we had a facilitator in our business and somebody who probably wants to be a facilitator in our business who felt like the facilitator wasn't doing a good job and wanted to give the facilitator feedback and we have a very open culture where everybody can give anybody feedback and we could say you know you need to go to their boss and then their boss will have the conversation because we're going to avoid the conflict and as a company deciding like how does this feedback is this feedback going to work? And what we realize is that if this person gives feedback to the facilitator and the facilitator gets hurt, that's something for the facilitator to work on. And if this person's doing it out of some sort of like arrogance or narcissism, like I think I can do a better job and the feedback is then that needs to be addressed. But either way, if he has arrogance and narcissism, addressing that's going to make our business better. If this facilitator isn't doing a good job, that's going to make our business better. And so, every time that we're avoiding conflict in a business, we're looking at a place that we could potentially make the system better and we're not going to do it, right?

Exactly. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.

Yeah. So, let's get into that. I do want to say one more thing intellectually too because it's that if I go in and monitor a company's health, I literally just use two metrics. How quickly do they have the hard conversation and how quickly do they resolve it? So let's say you have a CEO who's a yeller. I guarantee you that a lot of hard conversations aren't going to be had and they're not resolving quickly. And let's say you have a CEO who's conflict avoidant. A lot of hard conversations aren't going to be had and a lot of things are going to be avoided. So, it doesn't really matter what the actions are of people. Just to think about those two metrics as the health of an organization is just a great way to go in and very quickly see how healthy that organization is. Okay. So, now how do you do it? So, typically before we get into how you do it, let's talk about the resistance to it. So, the resistance is usually I'm going to be abandoned, not loved. This is a waste of my time. I'm not going to get anywhere anyway and it's going to take so much energy I could use the energy somewhere else. That's the second reason that people choose not to do it. And the third is I'm going to destroy something that I care about. Like I have the hard conversation, that person leaves, and then the company's going to collapse or then the sales department's going to collapse or whatever.

And sometimes there's actually some validity to that. Like I've given them feedback. I'm going to wait a couple weeks and see what happens instead of like be on their ass every day about the thing. I can see that there would be some validity to it. And so some of that speaks to the fact that the person doesn't know how to make the conflict productive reliably. Like I have conflict and it just ends up in a worse fight that just like doesn't go the place that I want to go. So typically if I'm talking about it, let's just take one example because this gets a little complex. If I'm taking just I want to have a hard conversation with somebody, what do I do? The first thing that I'm going to do is I am going to not solve the problem for them. So most people in a hard conversation say, "Hey, sales is off and what I need you to do is make more phone calls and we're going to monitor those through this set of data." Right? That's incredibly disempowering and that conversation usually doesn't go very well. But if you say instead, "Hey, sales are off. I need a plan. Please present it to me tomorrow about how we're going to get sales back on track." That's a far more powerful way to do it because you're not disempowering the person and you're not coming in and telling them what to do. So letting them solve the problem for you rather than you solve the problem for them. You solving the problem for them is self-reliance again and it's what most CEOs do instead of let them solve the problem for you which is far more empowering to them and it makes them feel like they can't blame you for it. So that's one of the skills that I would teach. The other one is I would really try to understand their situation before having the hard conversation. So I would ask a lot of open-ended questions. I would make sure that they feel very heard and so I understand what's going on. So, as a CEO, I sit down and I'm like, I have an idea of what's going on over here in billing, but I do not have the full picture. If I have the full picture, I should fire the person because they're not doing a job good enough where I don't have to pay attention. So, the first thing I want to do is really ask their context and understand what's actually going on with them and see like if they're even happy with the job that they're doing or what's going on. Actually, another thing I would do is I would actually be very vulnerable about where I am with it. So, I would say something like, "Wow, I feel like we've lost trust." Like I notice that like I'm not trusting that this is going to get done and so I'm not having confidence around this and that sucks for me and that's got to suck for you and so I want to know how we're going to fix it. So, I'm going to be very vulnerable with how I am rather than making it about them. So, this is again back to the self-reliance piece. Entrepreneurs who are self-reliant have a hard time expressing when they're hurt. Have a hard time expressing some sort of this isn't working for me really well. And therefore, the problem is always about the other person instead of about them helping you fix your issue, which is the way an organization is designed, right? The energy is backwards if you're trying to like fix everybody's issues rather than everybody's fixing your issues. Like if I was to invest in your company as an example and I got to pick one person who was just stoked as hell, I would pick the CEO because that's going to be the best investment. If the CEO is happy with the way the company's going, the company is going the way it should be going. If the head of marketing is happy, but the CEO is miserable about where the company's going, that's not a good investment. So, the happiness of the CEO is where everybody needs to be pointed. It doesn't mean that the CEO's job isn't to be helpful to people, but it means that the general energy of the company is supposed to be towards pleasing the CEO, making the CEO happy, which self-reliant CEOs have a really hard time like getting through their head because that puts them in the position of the authority that they don't particularly want to be because authority was bad in their childhood. So, that's an example. So, those are all ways that I would talk to somebody if I'm having that hard conversation. So, there are like very practical skills of having hard conversations. But the biggest skill over all of this stuff is the internal space. If you feel like you're bad for having the conversation, if you feel like this is completely reasonable for me to ask, if you feel like I'm actually helping this person become more empowered and I'm doing them a service and helping them become better at their job, like that state of mind has a huge impact on how the person receives it. So I'll just give you like a very short example. If I was like, "Hey, Sean, you're such a dick." Like, "Why are you such a dick?" Or if I said, "Oh, Sean, you're being a dick." You're going to take those two things very, very differently because in one case, I don't want you to be a dick and in the other case, I'm like, "Oh, you know, you're being a dick. That's okay." And so your attitude coming in, if you're scared, you're more likely to get attacked. You're more likely to have a bad experience with it. So your calm, what I would call vagal authority, your nervous system authority coming into the room and your understanding of you're here to be of service to this person is going to make all the difference.

Most people generally are.

So there's like three or four different kind of self-talk abuse cycles that you're like there's like the really overt one which is like you're up why are you up why didn't you like why don't you do this why didn't you do that there's that version there's then there's the version of you got to do this now you got to do this you got to do this why don't you do this you got to do this don't forget to do this you got to do this there's another version of negative self-talk then there's like some like kind of hidden ones which are like uh you've got it you can do this it's all good you've got this thing you can do this thing. Which you would like could you imagine going to you know Michael Jordan and going yeah you can do it you can you can shoot the basket I know you can Mike. Like you would never do it because you have confidence in that person. So this subtle undermining saying that you actually need this right it's not you're fine either way and like there's not like a natural confidence in it. So that's all there's about 20 tools to work with self-talk negative self-talk. One of the ways that you know it's negative self-talk is because it's repeating right. So when negative self-talk starts dying in your system when it starts atrophying you just have a lot less thought just a lot less thought occurs and the thought that you have is more like epiphanies it's like oh here's a cool idea oh that's a cool idea they're not repetitive over and over again thoughts. So I'll give you just a couple really practical ones. Um if you try to change the self-talk it's very inefficient. If you change the way you react to the self-talk it's far far more efficient. Your self-talk is like wow you just really screwed up that podcast Joe. And like most people they listen to that the way that they would listen to a think about the politician you hate most talking on stage. And then think about the person in the audience who's like yep uh-huh yeah yeah that's right uh-huh yeah. That's how we listen to our self-talk. Most of us listen to our self-talk as you know oh you screwed that up. It's like yep I screwed that up I should do something about that. Like that's the relationship. So instead you change the reaction to it. Like oh you screwed that stuff up oh I see how scared you are I see I'm right here with you you can be scared. Or you up wow that's really shitty management could you try to manage me in a different way please? You up prove it. You up well really I think you up. So you're changing the reaction. And so like a great experiment to run on this is think about the reaction that you want to experiment with. It doesn't have to be good or bad it's just an experiment. And every time your negative self-talk happens that day every time you remember you react in this way that you're experimenting with. And then 2 days later you do a new experiment. 2 days later you do a new experiment. So you're constantly changing the way that you're reacting to your self-talk. And just like both of you are different when you're interacting with each other than when you're interacting with your significant other or your kids if you have them or your best friend from college. The voice in our head reacts differently depending on how we treat it and you get to start seeing that. And so that's a really simple way to start not manage but start like bringing awareness and therefore changing and transforming your negative self-talk. The other another really good one that's just really easy is like write out here are the 20 things the negative voice in my head says the most and look for seven ways they're not true and if you can't find them ask your friends because what your negative voice in your head is saying is not true. I can give you if you tell me anything that your negative voice in your head says to you on a regular basis I can prove and I can tell you five ways it's not true.

You can try. Yeah.

I think actually recently this kind of a maxing kind of phrase caught on, at least in Silicon Valley. Other people are probably like, what the hell's this guy talking about? But this idea of like, you know, you're trying too hard to be too smart, you're too in touch with your emotions, you're over-therapized — there is a reaction to the reaction.