My Art of Accomplishment Retreat

Clean fuel vs Dirty Fuel

I wrote this in March of this year right after attending “Groundbreakers”, an Art of Accomplishment retreat.

I recently went on an Art of Accomplishment retreat, and like my Hoffman experience, it was transformative. Similar to Hoffman, the retreat was somatic and reflective, and was about behavior change. Also like Hoffman, the organizers also want the retreat to be private so I’ll stay high level – this is published with Joe and Tara’s blessing).

Coming back, I’m feeling great — I have more positive self-talk, I’m feeling more connected with others, and I’m feeling more secure and full of life. I’m on a high.

I felt all of this during Hoffman too, but it’s hard to maintain the same energy months afterwards, which makes sense in retrospect. Of course it’s going to go away after a retreat if you don’t keep up the practices, the same way gains from working out fade away if you don’t continue exercising. I think a gym/dojo is a good metaphor, change requires practice. Fortunately, AOA has courses year round to practice the various different exercises which I’m excited to get into here.

What is AOA exactly? It’s basically a series of exercises that make me feel more like myself/the person I want to be, and bring me closer to others and myself. By design, it’s not a protocol. It’s not a top down formula to follow, more of a bottoms up practice to respond to—it’s following my intuition and getting out of my own way.

One early exercise we did was a listening exercise. Most people never experience what it’s like to be with someone that allows them to speak without:

1. Judging

2. Trying to fix

3. Trying to help

4. Trying to defend

So we tried listening with judgment, listening with trying to fix, and then listening with love — a stark contrast.

One big thing we focused on throughout the retreat was the voice in our head, or our self-talk. AOA focuses a lot on the voice in the head, and now to rewire/change our negative self-talk, but they do it via feeling emotions — “moving them” — rather than blocking or repressing them. We have thousands of thoughts per day, and most of them are very negative. They’re about things that are wrong with us and ways we should be different.

Here are some personal example thoughts that came from my negative self-talk exercise that I’ve had historically (In general I am pretty happy go-lucky and have mostly positive self-talk).

• My life is almost over

• I’m too externally driven

• I have a hard time letting go of past

• I should have more patience with myself

• I should have achieved more by now

• I’ve messed up opportunities

• I use humor to avoid feelings

• I’m addicted to phone

• I don’t deserve my good fortune

We then did a series of exercises that meant to better understand the voice in the head so we can transform it.

The first one we did was an exercise where we looked at the traumas we had in our lives and how they led to our negative self talk/voice in our head. But what was fascinating about the exercise is we also looked at what could have been the *positive* lessons we took away from them.

The reason this is so fascinating is because the voice in the head is a self fulfilling prophecy. It’s like this Tony Robbins clip — if you are scared of something, you’ll look for it, which means you’re more likely to find it.

AOA calls this the golden algorithm: Whatever emotion you try to avoid, you end up inviting into our lives — in the exact way you try to avoid it. It seems obvious in retrospect: The man who is scared he is going to get abandoned, looks for signs he is getting abandoned, and then acts in ways that brings about his own abandonment.

You can sort of create this formula for other fears too:

- Avoiding feeling rejected → Never put yourself out there → End up feeling perpetually rejected

- Avoiding feeling like a failure → Play it safe → feel like a failure

Or even worse, how people push love away. Quoting Joe:

1. They decide which parts of themselves are lovable and unloveable.

2. They try to only present the ‘lovable’ parts.

3. They feel empty because they never feel fully loved.

What AOA gets us to believe is that the voice in the head is often incorrect. But also that we should think about it as separate from us, since what it says is more true about itself than you. For example, who’s more controlling, my true self or the voice in my head? The voice in my head.

Every time the voice in your head criticizes you, ask “Would you say the same thing to someone else in a similar situation?” You rarely would, so why would you say it to yourself? Asking that question about a belief is one among a series of techniques to discredit the voice in the head so we don’t take it seriously.

There was a broader exercise format which was a set of questions to interrogate the voice in the head so you can see how obviously false it is and can’t believe it anymore. What’s funny is that when you discard the belief you start laughing, like you immediately get lighter. They’d like to keep the exercise private to ensure it’s practiced well so you’ll have to go to the retreat to learn it.

Byron Katie has a version of this with her four questions:

1. Is it true?

2. Is it really true?

3. How do you react when you believe that thought?

4. Who would you be without this thought?

The answers are usually:

1. Yes

2. No, I guess it’s not 100% true, or I can’t prove it

3. Bad

4. I’d be much happier

I had a few breakthroughs on the retreat. One is around a story I’ve told myself that if people are mad at me, that means I must have done something wrong. That may be true, but not necessarily. There are also other interpretations I could take. One is that I don’t control how someone interprets my actions. Or that I was doing my best that I could at the time with the skills that I had. Another is that, even if I did hurt someone, this was a great growth opportunity for me to change and that doing so would honor that relationship.

What AOA tries to do is help us take our biggest fear and *own it* it. Invite the fear in, feel it fully, and let it move through you. If an emotion wasn’t allowed to be felt all the way through, we tend to try to recreate the circumstances that caused it, so that the emotion can move. Once the emotion can move all the way through you, the circumstances stop getting recreated.

If you’re feeling stuck, it’s usually an indicator that there’s an emotion you’re trying to avoid feeling. There’s a lot we do to avoid feeling the emotions. Quoting Joe again: “Every time you judge somebody or yourself, there’s an emotional experience you don’t want to have. Anytime you tell yourself “You can’t” or “It’s too hard,” there’s an emotional experience you’re avoiding. If you felt great during the experience, you wouldn’t avoid it . Every time you think you have to make a big decision, there’s an emotion you don’t want to feel. Every time you take something personally you have found a part of yourself you haven’t learned to love.”

We recreate the patterns because we aren’t allowed to experience the pain. The key is to feel it and move through it.

I can resonate with this. I’m constantly checking my phone. I know it’s partly a way to avoid feeling emotions. The reason I know this is because when I don’t have my phone, I feel so much more. And yet I keep doing it. So it must be serving me in some way, or must have served me in some way. Avoiding emotions must have made me feel safe at some point.

To that end, we also did a lot of emotional release as a way to move through the feelings, because you can’t move through something that dominates you. If you’re scared of feeling an emotion, you’re already in it.

Anger is one emotion we worked on. You can’t really get rid of anger, you only repress it towards yourself. After all, the voice in the head is anger turned inwards. Expressing it at a pillow is a way to avoid expressing it at a person or yourself.

Shame is another emotion we worked with. If you’re telling yourself you should change a habit, that’s a great way to keep the habit. We rebel against tyrants even if the voice in our own head is the tyrant.

Shame is a stagnating emotion — it keeps you stuck. It doesn’t help you move the emotion so you can’t process it. I can feel this with my desire to get off my phone. I’ve shamed myself so much for both of those, but I haven’t changed them. Another approach is to love myself for my flaws, not in a way to be complacent, but to let myself work through the shame so I then I *want* to do other things besides be on my phone. That’s how it’ll be durable. If I actually want it, rather than want to want it.

More generally, shame seems like a poor motivator to do something — maybe it helps to *avoid* doing something, but it’s not going to get me to do something new.

This was a hard idea for me to get on board with, because I’ve been obsessed with self-discipline. Given my sports upbringing, I’ve always found pushing myself to be part of my life. I had a sign in my room since I was a kid that said “earn my way everyday”.

But Joe helped me realize that willpower is needed if it’s a desire from the head, but willpower isn’t needed as much if it’s a desire from the heart. Even the basketball players I admired, they genuinely loved what they did. They weren’t always forcing themselves to train out of obligation, even if they did sometimes. They did it out of love not out of guilt or fear. The way for me to sustainably work hard over decades is to love what I’m doing, to believe in it, and to stop shaming myself. Shame is not going to get me out of bed excited to give my all to something for a long enough time. So I’m giving up shame as an individual motivator. It worked for a while, but it’s run its course. Maybe it works for you, if so, keep it. The best thing about AOA in general is that they recommend experimenting – and finding whatever works for you.

People often get confused when AOA tells them that all they need to do is “feel” in order to stop their bad habits. Quoting Joe, “Think of your bad habits as a hot frying pans. How do you drop a hot frying pan? You feel it. That’s all. Feel it fully, and you will let go.” It’s more of an “allowing” than a doing.

Another thing they’re big on is speaking your truth. Quoting Joe, “If you’re trying to manage other people’s feelings, you’re abandoning your own. If you think you have to act a certain way in order to be loved, you’re not actually being loved. You’re being loved for someone you’re pretending to be, and that’s not being loved. Unconditional love isn’t people-pleasing or caretaking. It’s the capacity to hold space for others’ choices while honoring your own truth.”

We learned about the three pillars of unconditional love:

“1. Welcome all parts of yourself so that you can welcome all the parts of others

2. Release attachment to specific outcomes so you are present enough to take loving action

3. Recognize your agency, so you stop making other people the bad guy”

We did one exercise where we called out the boundaries we failed to withhold for others and as a result got violated. And I learned that I didn’t have much respect for my own boundaries, which means I probably didn’t always sufficiently respect others boundaries too.

I now have new beliefs instead of the negative self-talk. Here are some examples:

• I have so much time

• I’ve loved and given so much to the people in my life

• I’ve done valuable work, and I’m the judge.

• I’ve been good, and my mistakes were because I was not ready or I was not able.

• I have so much more to give and contribute.

Lastly, the retreat was just so fun. I was so moved by everyone sharing and being so vulnerable. My goal is to have more of that community in my everyday life.

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Art of Accomplishment is still run by its founders, and is a very live and agile organization. It does in-person retreats, online courses, and responds to its members interests in real time. Their podcast is also excellent.

AOA is about personal transformation but it’s done from a place of aspiration rather than weakness.

It’s interesting, I also have a broader idea — Professional athletes have the best coaches on call to help them. Imagine if you had that for your life — for your career, for your relationships, for your finances, just an all out team dedicated to your growth. Why doesn’t this exist? What’s the equivalent of getting professional athlete treatment across every area of your life?

OK, I’m excited now. I’ve got my light. I’m overflowing with it. I have no inner critic, I’m at peace.

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LOVE SCARES US ALL

by Joe Hudson, the founder

Love scares us all

And it is everywhere

There’s no escaping it

At first when we were younger

We dreamt we were scared of

Concrete things like enemies and friends

And as we got older we realized

It was always uncomfortable feelings we were scared of

We cried when we saw that

we had spent years avoiding them

Only to find out each was a gift.

And not even shame had to be resisted any longer

And so the stark reality is

That love has scared

us all along.

Every anxiety

Every worry

Is love

It is the electrically dark night.

the unbearable pleasure

Of being alive

That animator of all things

That which breathes

Life into all

those enemies

And Friends

And Feelings

and shame

It is love we are avoiding

And my friend there is a good reason to be scared

Love wants to consume us whole

Love will lay us to waste and leave us with nothing

Love will destroy everything we prop ourselves up with

And when we are destroyed

Left without

our will

or ourselves

We will fall in love

For the first time.

And it will make a home in our chests

And shine from our eyes

And speak its words with our mouths

Saying over and over again

Thy will be done

Thy will be done.