Next cohort: jun 5th

Master Class

Create a life you don't need a break from. Our flagship program and most sought-after experience. Since its inception, we have sold out every annual cohort.

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Forte Labs partner event photo

Tiago Forte

Founder of Forte Academy

"The personal breakthroughs I experienced have been nothing short of transformational with benefits across my work and my life."

The Problem

You don't have a discipline problem

Many of us believe there’s a certain way we need to do things to get what we want in life. We learn new productivity techniques, or try to improve ourselves. We resort to willpower and management to overcome the challenges we face.

But the problem with getting good at managing your life is that you end up with a life that has to be managed.

Our Invitation

Go further than willpower could ever take you

The most effective people in the world aren't trying harder than you. They've simply stopped getting in their own way.

Master Class is a deep dive into the seven core patterns that keep brilliant, driven people stuck. See through them and everything shifts, with far less effort than you think.

What You Get

Undo old patterns, reclaim your energy

The seven knots create invisible drains on our energy. Every day you spend managing them costs you time, effort, and spin. When you see through them, you stop working against yourself and free up your natural capacity to create the life you've always wanted.

Undo decades-old patterns

The beliefs you've carried for decades lose their grip through the simple act of seeing them clearly. What used to take everything out of you takes almost nothing.

Less managing, More living

You stop white-knuckling your way through the day. The exhausting habit of controlling outcomes, people, and yourself quietly dissolves  In its place: a deep trust in how things actually unfold.

Sustainable, clean fuel

The frantic busyness and compulsive doing fades. What's left is clarity about what actually matters, and the energy to pursue it without burning out.

Energy you forgot you had

There's an enormous amount of energy waiting to be unleashed the moment you stop working against yourself. Multiply that by seven.


"The problem with getting good at managing your life is that you end up with a life that has to be managed."

Joe Hudson

Course Results

97%

Cohort
Completion Rate

95%

of Alumni
Recommend

Edmond Lau, partner testimonial

Joe’s one of my foremost teachers on models and frameworks for navigating human emotions.

He has a powerful way of seeing you and directly pointing at the thing that you didn’t realize you needed to look at. And when you look at it, you get blasted open with an invitation to a completely new way of experiencing life.

Edmond Lau

Entrepreneur and Coach

Rost Shorgin, partner testimonial

Joining the Master Class in 2021 for the first time was a turning point for me.

Both my personal and business interactions improved, and many friends and colleagues joined me after witnessing my transformation. I learned the true essence of compassion: beginning with myself. This newfound compassion flowed into my interactions, making my life more joyful and my relationships deeper and lighter.

Rost Shorgin

Tech Entrepreneur

Anita, AOA testimonial

I learned the power of joy as a tool, I learned the power of anger as a tool. I learned to view my emotions as a gift.

I learned that self-love leads to self-improvement, not the other way round–and it’s effortless.

Read more

Anita Amini

Somatic/IFS Coach

Dave Hersh, partner testimonial

For the first time since I was five, I was me again.

In 2022, facing my own crisis, I started doing inner work with the Art of Accomplishment. Through their intense but wildly effective program, I wrested free of my insecurities, unhelpful voices, and limiting beliefs. I became joyful, emotionally fluid, and whole.

Dave Hersh

Founder, Jive Software

Shweta Sharma, AOA testimonial

A most deeply transformative experience.

A must do for anyone looking to live a life of joy and openness.

Shweta Sharma

Ex-P&G, BCG

Tali Kimelman, AOA testimonial

This was the most transformative online experience I've had.

It unfolded swiftly and overflowed with love.

Tali Kimelman

Fine Art Photographer

How it Works

A place to come back home to yourself

You can spend years becoming someone you think you should be. Or you can spend eight weeks uncovering who you already are.

  • Three Layers of Learning

    Each week operates on three levels: solo study to go inward, 1:1 partner sessions to practice in relationship, and group sessions to see yourself reflected in others. The three reinforce each other in powerful ways to create lasting transformation.

  • Weekly Large Group Coaching

    Every week, Joe leads a live session with the full cohort, working directly with participants in real time. You'll witness the knots being seen and undone in front of you. Whether it's your turn or not, something in it will land.

  • Gratitude as Catalyst

    Most people think of gratitude as a mental exercise: a list you make and move on from. We treat it as a superpower. We'll teach you how to do it in a way that's completely different: felt in the body, expansive, and so catalytic that it becomes one of the most transformative practices you'll carry with you long after the course ends.

  • The Art of Experimentation

    Knowledge without practice is just entertainment. Every week, you'll leave with experiments designed to take what you just felt and test it in the real world. In your relationships, your work, your and daily life. This is how insight moves from intellect into the core of who you are.

  • Shared Epiphanies

    Because the work is relational, you’re not just having your own breakthroughs. You’re witnessing others in your cohort as they move through their own patterns. There’s something deeply transformational that happens when you're doing the work together in community. Seeing others change, you change too.

Course Curriculum

The seven knots

I created this course after two decades of coaching executives, entrepreneurs, and creators and discovering common underlying patterns in what holds people back.

Over the years, I distilled these patterns down into seven key areas and developed an approach on how to break free from them. It is the foundation of how we approach transformation here at AOA.

Calendar icon

Next cohort starts June 5th

  • Embarking On The Journey

    Set your intention, understand the framework, and prepare for an experience unlike any course you've taken before.

  • Connection Over Perfection

    We begin our journey with one of the most pervasive knots: the pursuit of perfection. Learn why staying connected produces far better results than trying to get it right.

  • Enjoy Over Manage

    Learn how making enjoyment your leading indicator is the fastest path to output, impact, and a life that doesn't need to be managed.

  • Feel Over Figure

    Emotions aren't obstacles to good decisions — they're essential to them. Learn how the moment you stop trying to figure it out and start feeling what's underneath, clarity arrives instantly.

  • Want Over Should

    Should' creates internal rebellion. And in that war with yourself, you always lose. Learn how getting in touch with what you actually want dissolves the patterns that discipline never could.

  • Authenticity Over Improvement

    Self-improvement can become just another way to beat yourself up. Learn the difference between self-discovery and self-improvement, and why one leads to freedom while the other keeps you searching

  • Empower Over Power

    No amount of external power will ever make you feel fully safe. Learn why empowerment—standing in your truth despite consequences—is more powerful than anything you can accumulate.

  • Love Over Defense

    Learn how dropping your armor and letting in love is what finally dissolves the patterns that have quietly been running your life.

Course Schedule

Your 8-week roadmap

No lectures. Each week, you'll experience three live sessions: partner work, small group work, and large group coaching with Joe Hudson. You'll also get a weekly curriculum (self-paced) of podcasts, solo experiments, demos, and teachings designed to help you go even deeper.

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8

Partnered
Sessions

8

Small Group
Sessions

8

Large Group
Coaching

80

Hours
of Content

  • Week 1

    Before you can untie the knots that hold you back, you need to learn how to see them. This week you'll establish the foundations of the course: setting agreements with your partner and connection group, learning the core practices of gratitude and deep listening, and beginning to get honest about what you're here for.

  • Week 2

    This week you'll start dismantling the performance pattern through live practice: running VIEW conversations, practicing vulnerability with your partner, and learning the Upright Apology practice that unlocks real connection. You'll feel the difference between showing up polished and showing up to connect.

  • Week 3

    Begin experimenting with enjoyment as a strategy: practicing enjoying difficult tasks, externalizing the critical voice in your head, and learning to be with your partner in a way that stops trying to fix or control. The shift from management to enjoyment starts becoming tangible.

  • Week 4

    This is where the real emotional work begins. Through guided emotional inquiry, body-based practices, and partner exercises like Anger Release, you'll learn how to stop thinking your way through hard situations and start feeling your way to clarity.

  • Week 5

    Uncover what's underneath the "shoulds" that have been quietly draining your energy. Through journaling, partner work on needs behind wants, and group exercises upgrading obligations into genuine desires, you'll begin reconnecting to and learning how to own your wants.

  • Week 6

    Start dropping the self-improvement project and meeting yourself as you actually are. Through exercises like "What Has Never Changed?" and partner work exploring what's underneath the drive to be better, you'll begin to feel the freedom that comes from self-discovery over self-rejection.

  • Week 7

    This week you'll locate where you've been taking on roles that don't fit, and practice dropping them. From the Yes/No Game to the Fear Triangle Apology, every exercise this week is designed to help you stand in your truth and act from genuine empowerment.

  • Week 8

    The final week brings everything together through love — for yourself, your work, and the people around you. Through meditations on love, partner exercises on dropping defense, and a group appreciation practice, you'll leave with a set of personal experiments to carry the transformation forward.

Weekly Schedule

Each week is an arc that starts on Friday. Get a sneak peek into the rhythm of how each week looks, from solo curriculum to live calls.

View Schedule

Apply Now

Experience
Master Class

Create a life you don't need a break from. Our flagship program and most sought-after experience. Since its inception, we have sold out every annual cohort. Runs for eight weeks every June.

Calendar icon

Next cohort starts June 5th

Master Class

Create a life you don't need a break from

$8,000

  • See through the seven patterns that run your life

  • Release deeply-held patterns that drain your energy

  • Find the motivation that doesn't need to be manufactured

  • Transform compulsive doing into purposeful and clear action

  • Undo exhausting and unsustainable self-management habits

  • Access deep clarity, connection, and ease

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Master Class for Coaches

Limited spots. Led by Tara Howley

$11,000

  • Everything in Master Class, plus

  • Six sessions with Tara alongside a small group of peers

  • Integrate the Master Class teachings deeply into your body

  • Embody the teachings. Not just understand them.

  • Guide clients from pattern to truth through somatic awareness

  • Stop coaching from technique. Start coaching from presence.

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Course testimonials

Hear from Master Class alumni

The experience of this course is best described by the people who have lived it.
Here are a few of their thoughts.

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A deeply grounded, trustworthy course in a space that often feels mushy and endless and loopy and self-narcissistic.

Yatharth Agarwal

AI and Embodied Ethics Researcher at Stanford University

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A deeply effective, highly focused course on challenging your limiting beliefs.

Stephen Z.

Software Engineer, Tech Lead

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Intense self-discovery bootcamp that opens up your heart and mind.

Slava

Student

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A most deeply transformative experience, a must do for anyone looking to live a life of joy and openness.

Shweta Sharma

Transformation Advisor & Executive Coach

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Gave me an arsenal of tools to embrace the intensity of life!

Shravya Nalla

Entrepreneur, Educator, Mom

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Life embracing journey that has impacted my relationship with myself and all those around me.

Sarah Ryan

Stay at Home Mom

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One of the most life changing classes I have ever taken. It taught me more about love than I thought possible.

Samek Mulepati

Software Engineer, Meta

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Discover the depths of your emotions. Learn to break your heart open again and again to find out who you actually are.

Quinn Fitzgerald

Founder & Coach

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The education your parents and school should have given you, which only a lucky few in a million get to have. The best gift you could give yourself and those around you.

Radu R.

Entrepreneur

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Intensive self exploration program that will help you see who you really are.

Prodan

Head of GTM

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A program that focuses on challenging common limiting beliefs, along with the opportunity to experience whats on the other side of them.

Pablo Estrada

Program Manager

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Learning how to surf deeper emotional waters.

Olga Kritova

Metalworker & Fabricator

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A training in self-love and awakening, structured in various weeks with different angles, packaged for modern day people.

Max Sutter

Founder & CEO

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Master Class is like a reset for life that opens your heart.

Kirsten Corbett

History Museum Director Exhibits & Communications

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Lifechanging.

Keith McGuinness

Freelance Writer

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Master Class is a bait and switch in the best possible way. You leave a completely different person—or rather, as the authentic self you didn't know you were hiding.

Kalia Crowder

Director of Strategic Development

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Master Class is the best course you can take to get in touch with yourself. You will start seeing yourself in a whole new way.

Julia Sutter

Stay at Home Mom

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Heartbreaking in the best possible way.

Jamie Pellegrin

Corporate Development Professional

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A game changer for how I experience everyday life.

Igor Wasilewski

Coach

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Emotional summer camp for type-A successful hyper-smart nerds. White-water canoeing toward unconditional love with them.

Harry Taussig

Personal Coach

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Beyond my expectations, a way to access spaciousness while being loved and held by the community.

Eva Pianezzola

Designer and Project Coordinator

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What a ride! An amazing experience.

Esther

Strategy & Innovation Consultant

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Intense. Exhausting. Loving. Life changing. Not for the faint of heart... For all hearts.

EJ Allen

Executive Coach

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A wildly practical and pragmatic approach to cracking open the heart and encouraging life to unfold from within its depths.

Drew Smith

Founder & Leadership Coach

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A journey of love to the center of me.

Casey Galanti

Founder, Mosaic CFO

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Fantastic course on feeling more free and joyful.

Charlie Houpert

Entrepreneur

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It is a deep physical, emotional, and spiritual massage all the way to the core of your being!

Bryce Astill

Coach/Business Owner

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Expansive and beautiful. Accessible and deep. So powerful.

Brooks Barron

Founder & Lead Guide @ soulfulimpact.co

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AoA will make you see all the ways you limit yourself and walk you through the way out.

Brian Wang

Executive Coach

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A tutorial for emotional fluidity that turns into a connected community as it happens.

Brian Feliciano

Artist

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Lighting the way to the answers you always knew you had.

Brian Redmond

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Learn how your emotions run your life.

Artem Burachenok

Founder, Dawn

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Small scary steps that bring liberation.

Anton Herasymenko

Software Designer

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Master Class is what you've always been looking for, without knowing it. If you let it in, this work will change your life.

Aaron Olson

Software Engineer

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

I'm not an executive. Is this program right for me?

If you're limiting yourself based on your resume, not only is this course right for you, it will speak directly to what's getting in your way. Personal and professional problems arise from the same fundamental source. Our psyche doesn't know the difference between them. The focus is on self-exploration and unlocking your fullest potential, which transcends any specific career path.

Who is Master Class not for?

If you're not using your skepticism effectively: Skepticism before running experiments adds bias that renders them ineffective. Keep an open mind until after the fact. Then, skepticism is invaluable.
If you're not ready to be sincere: The work requires deep commitment to self-exploration. Note: Sincerity doesn't mean seriousness. Enjoying the process is one of the most effective ways to be in this work.
If you're fully satisfied with your current state of being: If you don't see anywhere you want to change your way of being, this might not be the right program for you.
If you don't want to embark on an emotionally rich journey: This is an immersive experience designed to push your boundaries and challenge you to find your edge.

What if I'm not sure I have enough time for Master Class?

Thinking you lack time to do this work is a good indication that this work will have benefits for you. The sense of lacking time is often due to over-management, perfectionism, defensiveness, fear, and shame. Which are all addressed in the course. Many of us have time to consume content and scroll, but not time to work on things that increase our capacity for a lifetime.

 Why is Master Class only held once a year?

Joe works with our team of highly trained coaches to personally track every single participant's journey. This level of care and commitment to your transformation is what sets Master Class apart, and why we can only run it once a year.

What is the difference between the Connection Course, Great Decisions Course, and Master Class?

Connection Course: Focused specifically on relationships with yourself and others.
Great Decisions Course: Deep focus on emotional fluidity and decision-making.
Master Class: Helps you see through the seven limiting beliefs that most people have.

The content and results of all three courses are different, with only a small overlap when necessary.

What are the tangible tools and things I will get from Master Class?

- Seven recognition tools that directly apply to your life and work, helping you remove what limits you.
- How to move through projects with more efficiency and effectiveness.
- How to embrace mistakes with less shame, reducing drama in your life.
- Developing a deeper, embodied intelligence to navigate life's challenges.
- Understanding the wisdom behind various emotions and their signals in work, business, and personal life.
- Recognizing that when anger shows up, there is a boundary that needs to be drawn.
- How to deal with negative self-talk.
- How to stop managing yourself and your life — and get better results because of it.
- An amazing, supportive community of like-minded and ambitious individuals. Many cohort members become close friends for years.
- Countless more

How flexible are you with timing?

Very. Solo work is done on your own time, partner sessions are scheduled on your own time, and the weekly Q&A with Joe is recorded if you can't attend. Small group sessions are available at four different time slots. Reach out if none of the times work for you.

Can I get a reimbursement from my employer?

Yes. During the application process you'll have access to a pre-written template to explain the program's value to your manager and request reimbursement. Many organizations provide professional development stipends.

Can I travel during the course?

Yes, with some planning. There is a weekly call with your small group that is decided at the beginning and set at a recurring time.  You'll need a strong internet connection, good lighting, and a distraction-free environment. As long as you can attend the weekly small group and partner calls and complete the work, travel is fine.

That said, participants report getting the most out of the experience when they allow themselves greater space to integrate the deep transformation that Master Class makes possible.

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