How To Get Unstuck

Joe: The thing about the person who was stuck and feeling trapped is typically any kind of resistance makes it more and more stuck. You have one option, you can go, oh, look, I'm frozen. I wonder when I'll thaw. I can just relax and check this out and you'll thaw quicker, for sure. 

Brett: Thanks for joining us this week on the Art of Accomplishment, where we explore living the life you want with enjoyment and ease.

This week we're talking about stuckness. We're gonna talk about how stuckness forms in childhood, how it shows up in adulthood, some of the trauma patterns around stuckness, and how to move stuckness in your life emotionally, on a nervous system level and intellectually,

Joe, you were working with somebody the other day who was feeling really stuck in their life, in a life that they really didn't wanna live, and within five minutes they started seeing all kinds of new possibilities. How does that person get unstuck and move on in their life? 

Joe: Yeah, that's a great question.

So I think the first thing that you have to do is decide, like actually define what stuck is. And the most simple thing to say is, stuck is an emotion. It's an emotional experience, meaning that if you don't feel stuck, are you stuck? So for instance, we're stuck with gravity. We're stuck with the sun. We're stuck on earth. But we don't feel stuck in these ways. Typically, most of us don't. Maybe a couple people do. I like that. 

Brett: I've spent years fighting gravity. 

Joe: Yeah. So it's a feeling, it's not a reality. Meaning that we're stuck in tons of ways and we don't feel stuck.

And oftentimes we feel stuck in ways that we actually aren't. So that's the first thing about the definition of stuckness. But the other thing that I think is really important is that there's, I would say there's a distinction between two forms of stuck and one is, oh, I'm working on a problem and I'm stuck.

And the other one is I'm trapped. I'm trapped in my marriage, i'm stuck. I'm trapped in this depression, i'm stuck. I'm trapped in this way of thinking, i'm stuck. I'm trapped feeling these emotions, i'm stuck. 

Brett: So one's like I can't get out of where I am, and the other one is I can't get to where I'm trying to go.

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. One is, oh, there's this problem that I'm trying to solve. And one is I am trapped and I don't know how to get out. 

Brett: Okay. 

Joe: And there's almost always an oppressor with it. There's almost always this thought process of oppression. What I notice is that when people who have a tendency to get there often, who often feel that feeling of stuck, often had a childhood where they were put in no win situations where they couldn't get out of the situation, meaning that they couldn't be themselves and please their parents, or that they had to be a very particular way or they suffered some sort of abuse, that was no win. All they could do was just freeze. Typically, that's something that happens with somebody who feels that trapped often over and over again. 

Brett: Yeah. Trapped becomes the best strategy in that case. 

Joe: Yeah, exactly. 

Brett: Yeah. The best thing you can do is just stay where you are and hope the situation changes. 

Joe: Because you know any move you're gonna make, you're gonna get yelled at because the mom or the dad or the brother, or the sister, or the teacher, they were going to attack you no matter what they were gonna do, whatever, because it wasn't about you, never was about you. So that's the second form. And the interesting thing is that the solution for both is often very similar. 

Brett: In the former, the kind of solving a problem, you can see this in a lot of places.

People who are looking for their soulmate for 40 years. People who are trying to find their purpose or there can often just be some sort of mythical unicorn that they're after. It can be something that's right in front of them. I don't know what to do about this job offer. And it can also just be something that just lasts for decades that they just continue to play out this pattern with. 

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: With finding a meaningful career. I'm remembering now a time when I was doing a base jump. I jumped from some bridge in Idaho in December. I was just learning to jump, and I had gotten dropped off by my instructor who had to go to work.

He just gave me a bunch of parachutes and said, go for it. My first jump, I landed in the freezing water and then I had to climb out of the canyon, and I'd never climbed that route before, but it was basically just a sheer face. And there was a moment where I got totally stuck and my clothes are freezing, my feet are freezing, and I had to step on a little wedge of rock with my frozen shoe and balance my weight on it to not fall a hundred feet. And I didn't know the next move. And it was interesting how while I was moving, I was just moving, but the moment I stopped and didn't know what to do next, I felt oppressed. I felt like everything was mean to me personally. How did I get into this position? Why did this happen? What's up with this stupid cliff? Why did I get dropped off and not have somebody like walking me out? Showing me the way and the moment I started moving again, which it was about 20 minutes, I was just hanging out there, just feeling stuck. 

Joe: Oh, wow. 

Brett: And so I made like a leap of faith. I made the step balanced on it, reached and just happened to find another thing to grab. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: The moment I was moving again, I was unoppressed. I was just on an adventure. 

Joe: Yeah. And that's the amazing thing is it literally is like that except for we believe our thoughts far more when it's, i'm stuck by this political party, or I'm stuck by my wife, or I'm stuck by my kids, or I'm like, we'll, believe the story of blame even more when our brain can actually wrap a story around it.

It's harder to wrap a story of this fucking rock, it's trying to kill me. But we still do it. We still have that feeling. Oh, how did I do this to myself? It's a really interesting thing how our mind does that. And you're dead on in the fact that oftentimes the reason that someone feels stuck is 'cause they can't figure out how to get to the end that they wanna get to.

And so oftentimes one of the things is just what's the next most obvious step? What's the little bit of movement that you can do? What's the little thing you can do to find out a little bit more? The other thing that I think is important is that downtime is really important. There's a huge amount of studies and we can put them in the notes that show that you need to have a time where you don't understand and you don't know what to do if you are gonna integrate new knowledge.

So we can call that good if we're not resisting it, and we can call that stuck if we're resisting it. So in our work, for instance, we talk about something called the 404, which is system error, page not found, right? And it's where the person's like they can't put their world back together in that moment and that is critical. We are really happy when somebody has that space. We'll tell them, hey, okay, don't try to put it back together. Don't try to create a new story yet. Be in the unknown for a while. Be in the place where you can't figure it out for a while, because the longer you're in that place, the quicker you integrate.

There's a tremendous amount of studies that show, like if you're pushing for results, if you are trying to get unstuck too quickly, your epiphany comes slower if it comes at all. I had a friend who was an artist and he said 80% of his art was just looking at the canvas. He would just sit there and look at the canvas, or famous mathematician who I think won the Nobel Prize, was asked about his process and he said, I think about the problem as much as I can, like I exhaust myself thinking about it, and then I refuse to think about it until the solution presents itself in whole. 

Brett: Yeah. Or you've got Michelangelo and the statue of David, right? Like how stuck was he when he was just sitting there staring at a rock for a long time?

Joe: Exactly. 

Brett: If he had been in self-criticism about that or if somebody in modern times was watching him and being like, this guy's a stone carver, and he is just sitting there staring at a stone for how long? 

Joe: Yeah. And there's actually some evidence that shows about epiphany or solving problems that liminal space is really important but there's also, there's a guy named Newberg. He's an MD and he basically does brain scans and stuff of folks who are having epiphany or awakening experiences, and he talks about that same thing being necessary. You go into a space and then you drop out of it and be in nothingness for a while. That creates the epiphany, and we see that all the time in our work.

People have these massive breakthroughs, but it comes from being in that 4 0 4, comes from being in that space of unknown. And if you're digging it, if you know it's good, you're like, cool, I'm in wonder. Cool, I don't know what's happening and this is a really good sign. But if you are afraid of it oh, my whole world's gonna fall apart. I don't know what's around the corner. I don't know that the thing's gonna be there in the cliff, then you feel stuck and trapped and oppressed because you don't have a story to put to it. 

Brett: So in that sense, you could frame stuckness as intolerance for the unknown or for uncertainty? 

Joe: Yeah. Especially when it is the working out of a problem.

Oftentimes, what's happening in the other side is there's more going on. When you feel trapped, there's something else going on besides that. Yes, there's also, oh, I don't feel like I'm in control. I don't have patience for the uncertainty. But there's also that feeling of oppression and that feeling of oppression on an emotional level is repressed anger.

The natural reaction to oppression is getting angry is being pissed, and so there's a fear that's going on. The fear is, oh, I don't see a result I can get to that pleases me. So I might be able to see the next step, but I can't see a way to get to the result. So I feel trapped if I do this, I'm screwed. If I do that, I'm screwed. So you have that thing. 

Brett: If I tell my wife I'm upset and she leaves me, then I don't get the thing that I want. So I can't share my feelings about what's going on. 

Joe: Exactly. 

Brett: And now I'm stuck and I'm oppressed by my wife. 

Joe: But if I don't share my feelings and I can't be myself and I can't be love, so I'm stuck. So I'm stuck sharing my feelings. I'm stuck not sharing my feelings. 

Brett: Yeah. So you mentioned oppressed anger. I'm also curious about the fear here 'cause freeze is one of the canonical fear responses. 

Joe: That's right. So typically the stuck feeling comes, like I said, when people in their childhood were put into situations where they couldn't win.

And so there's fear with that, and there's the feeling of oppression with that. The first feeling to move to get the most bang for your buck is to move the anger.

The second feeling to move is often the fear. But it is oftentimes like that person in that situation, all they could do was be still, 'cause any move was gonna get them yelled at.

And if they got yelled at for being frozen, it didn't last as long as if they actually participated, if they didn't play back. But oftentimes that fear can't be expressed without a whole bunch of anger moving because being trapped like that, it's shitty, like of course we're gonna get angry. 

Brett: Right?

Joe: Of course we're gonna get angry. And then there's the fear as well. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: And so typically when people feel trapped, they have plenty of options. 99.999999% of the time when I'm talking to somebody, they think they're stuck, but they're not at all stuck. To make this really apparent, there are people right now in the Ukraine who've been in trenches for months at a time in cold, muddy, crappy conditions and they don't feel stuck. But there's somebody right now behind a keyboard in an office, and they feel stuck.

As if they can't just get up and walk out and leave the office and never come back as if they could be stopped. And what's actually happening there is that they feel like, “I don't want this consequence and I don't want this consequence, and my brain can't show me anything besides these two consequences and so I'm gonna go into one of those places and I'm stuck.” 

Brett: Yeah. I'm curious to go back to the anger and the fear there, 'cause there's a symmetry. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: Where like you could say, the opposite of stuckness is I will express myself, I will be myself despite the consequences. 

Joe: Correct. 

Brett: So if you move the anger, that's the, I will express and be myself part and then moving the fear, feeling the fear all the way is the, despite the consequences part of that. 

Joe: Yeah. And feeling the fear actually puts you in touch with the excitement and the aliveness of what happens when you are yourself. 

When you are being yourself, it's actually quite invigorating.

It's energizing. My daughter right now, she's moved off to a college and there was a way before when she was in high school, she was just always herself and in college you're making new friends, you're learning new things and she was wrestling with, oh, I'm made fun of for this, or I'm doing this, and okay, I've started to accommodate people by not being myself. And that started to feel like shit. It started to weigh on her, started to make her feel worse about herself, which made her feel more stuck because then you're in this mental trap. And when she decided, which luckily didn't take her very long, oh no, I'm gonna be myself despite the consequences because I'm not loved as myself unless I'm being myself.

All of a sudden she's just feeling so much more invigorated, so much more alive, so much more good about herself. And so there's this weird thing that happens when you convince yourself that you can't be yourself despite the consequences it like creates depression. It creates like this low level and then higher level of depression. And so one of the things I noticed is someone who's constantly feeling trapped, they're usually getting closer and closer to deeper and deeper depression. 

Brett: Maybe depression is some form of like self-oppression, like you are shutting down your own natural impulses. Which I don't even wanna say you are 'cause that implies that it's a personal choice that you're making.

Joe: If you say you are, that's great. You say you are the person who is feeling that way is, feels will take that as more shame. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: More I'm bad. And then they're more self-oppressed. So it's usually like a horrible way to think about it.

Brett: But also just to double click on this further, there's you can go anywhere on the internet and you'll find people saying, oh, just be yourself and duh, life will be better. Be yourself and you can intellectually buy that. 

Joe: Right? Yeah. 

Brett: And yet, how does that translate? How do you get that deeper into your body, to the place where the freeze isn't happening anymore? Or if the freeze is happening, you do something with it that's more constructive and more, 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And you can see the freedom in it? 

Joe: Yeah. So let's talk about that. Nervous system level, the gut level, the freeze is a real tricky, slimy thing in the fact that the more you try to get outta the freeze, the more you freeze.

The more you try to get out of the liminal space, the longer you're stuck there. So trying to get out of it really doesn't work. And anybody who freezes knows this, they sit there, they freeze, and they're like, don't freeze and they just keep on freezing. So you have one option, you can go, oh look, I'm frozen. I wonder when I'll thaw. I can just relax and check this out, and you'll thaw quicker for sure. The other kind of hack move is, hack as in, it's a hack, like it can speed it up, is to double your freeze, triple your freeze, quadruple your freeze because what that is doing is it's not resisting. So the thing about the person who was stuck in feeling trapped is typically any kind of resistance got more of the thing that they were trying to avoid, but all of the resistance makes it more and more stuck.

Brett: You could even say that the stuckness is putting pressure on yourself. And if you are trying to resist the stuckness, you're adding more pressure. 

Joe: Exactly. 

Brett: So you're just fighting the part of you that's fighting yourself. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: Harder. 

Joe: Yeah. So the nervous system, that's where you go. The emotional, it's the, what we talked about, which is moving anger is probably, for most people, the quickest way to move out of stuck. Moving fear also really important, sometimes grief. But just generally moving your emotions is gonna make people feel very unstuck. We've seen that hundreds, thousands of times now. And then there's the intellectual part of being stuck, which is understanding that your stuckness is basically trying to avoid an emotional state, and most likely that emotional state is the removal of love, or we're gonna get in trouble.

So we're generally in broad strokes, trying to avoid the removal of love or getting in trouble getting attacked. That's what is actually happening. And the weird part is if you intellectually see this, is that what's actually happening is you are removing love from yourself and you are attacking yourself, so you're actually not avoiding it. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: So when you can really see the click oh, I'm feeling stuck because let's say that wife example or husband example, I can't say my piece 'cause they'll attack me and if I can't say my piece and I can't be happy in this marriage, and I can't leave the marriage because then I won't have any love.

That's basically that feeling of trapped. You're not giving yourself love by not speaking who you are, speaking your truth. You are attacking yourself by constantly beating yourself up for being stuck, right? Or for not saying your peace in the marriage or whatever the thing is. And so you're basically doing it all to yourself already.

And so if you can intellectually see that, oh crap, this is all happening. And that's typically what we do. When we were kids, is what we did was we convinced ourselves, basically it's easier, it feels better to attack myself before I get attacked by somebody else. 

Brett: Remove my self-connection before someone else pulls something away in a way, it's super painful. 

Joe: Exactly. Because if it's not my fault, then my parents are fucking completely incompetent and holy shit. I'm only three years old. What the fuck? 

Brett: So to be clear, these strategies worked as they were developed. 

Joe: Of course. Yeah. 

Brett: They were the perfect strategy at that time. And now you're just continuing them and it doesn't need to be the same world now. You may recreate a world that's somewhat similar. Find the partner who is that way with you and who's ready to criticize you or let you take the blame. Whatever it is. And the one who will attack you when you are like, you're just gonna attack me.

And they get angry when you say that, right? And there you are in the dynamic. 

Joe: Totally. Totally. 

Brett: And yet you are doing it first in the sense like you are choosing to remove the love from yourself. 

Joe: Correct. 

Brett: By deciding that your needs don't matter enough to express. 

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: That your feelings aren't worth bringing to the relationship, that the relationship isn't gonna be improved and the other person's life isn't gonna be improved by you bringing up the scary wants, the scary truth for you.

Joe: That's right. 

Brett: And you're also attacking yourself. You have to physically shut that down. You have to physically constrict and close down that impulse. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And create stories about blame for yourself to keep it all locked in place in a little cage. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And that is self-aggression. 

Joe: Yeah. So basically the healing that happens if you're in a perpetual sense of stuckness, the healing that happens is you have to go back into those childhood moments.

You don't have to actually do it, but you have to feel the anger and the fear that was actually there that you weren't allowed to feel because doing any of that stuff would just get you attacked more. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: And then the intellectual part of it is to see that you're actually not a kid anymore. And so as trauma is, trauma pulls you back in time.

So the person who was in Fallujah under attack, when they get to Cleveland, a car backfires, because they have trauma, they go right back to Fallujah. People who feel stuck are going right back to their childhood, but it's not actually, that's not the reality anymore. And so it's to see that's not the reality. It's to move the anger and fear that couldn't be moved then. And for the nervous system, it is gentleness, which is what they didn't get as a kid, or the actual reverse movement of stuck. It's the, I'm gonna double-stuck. Triple-stuck. Quadruple-stuck.

Brett: To exhaust the stuckness, 

Joe: It's to exhaust the stuckness. Yeah. 

Brett: So Like the Psoas release exercises where you lean up against the wall in certain ways. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And it tires out all the muscles around your Psoas muscle, which is this biggest muscle in your body that holds a lot of tension and trauma. And once you've finally exhausted all the muscles around it, you can lay down and put your knees up in a certain way that you're Psoas just shakes, and releases a lot of held tension. 

Joe: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Or there's all sorts of modalities where you push up against something for a while and then you have the bigger stretch from it. 

Brett: Yeah, 

Joe: exactly. 

Brett: Yeah. So I wanna double click a little bit on the mechanism of moving anger or moving fear.

Joe: Yeah.

Brett: Cause there's something here. We're just talking abstractly. Oh. You move your anger and then X happens. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And I'm curious, what I imagine happens if somebody's got the pattern where when their fear comes up, they shut it down. Then what that teaches them is I can't protect myself.

Joe: Correct. 

Brett: Which means you are very oppressable. 

Joe: Very oppressable, I think is incredibly important phrase. And what I mean there is that usually people who oppress, people who are looking for victims for their behavior can actually spot that exact quality with laser precision. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: There's this study that was done of some aggressive people who, I don't think they were rapists, but there were people who like stole purses or something and they just had them watch people who were crossing the crosswalk and they could just say that person, that person, they all agreed on who was the victim. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: And so there's a weird way in which you're inviting it. If you actually feel stuck, you're inviting an oppression, you're inviting oppressors. 

Brett: Or at least you're putting off something that people will recognize and they can manipulate. Or the aggressive abusive boss will tend to find the person who's gonna acquiesce to all of their demands until eventually the whole thing falls apart and it doesn't work for anybody.

Joe: Or freeze right? Oh wait, every time I am a little frustrated, you freeze. So now I feel like I can't depend on you. That really fucking frustrates me. I'm gonna even be more frustrated, right? There's all these ways in which that pattern invites the oppression. 

Brett: Yeah. So functionally moving anger is the process of taking space to fully, deeply feel your anger in a way that's not gonna destroy anything, in a way that's not gonna recreate or re-invite any of the patterns.

Joe: It's not gonna hurt anybody. It's not gonna be, it's not gonna make anybody feel threatened. It's just moving anger. It's just yelling, screaming, hitting, getting angry. 

Brett: Yeah. And getting to a place where you feel, in your own anger oh, this is what it's like for me to be really angry. What does it feel like to really stand up for myself? To really protect myself, to really care for myself? 

Joe: Yeah, exactly. 

Brett: To really draw a boundary, to present my aggression in such a way that I'm gonna push on the world. If it pushes back on me and I'm gonna assert what I care about, I'm gonna assert what's mine and I can be met with someone else's aggression and if I don't want to do this job that I'm doing in my work and I feel overtaxed and I can just speak to that, if I know that I will say something about it, then I don't need to be so afraid of someone handing me an extra task. Absolutely. I can just say, oh, if I feel overloaded, I'm gonna talk about how I feel overloaded and what I need in a way that doesn't put blame on anyone else. 

Joe: Like the classic story in movies is the kid who felt oppressed by the father and at some point just goes bam and hits and gets big enough where he hits back on the father and then doesn't feel oppressed by the father anymore. And it's the same thing. It's basically if you were a kid and this emotional experience got stuck and you're unsticking it, you couldn't run, you couldn't fight, you froze. Now you can move that run and you can move that fighting and you can like unstick the pattern. 

Brett: Yeah. In that canonical movie example, typically the father's response is first shock.

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: Then fear. 

Joe: Yes. 

Brett: Then. Respect, 

Joe: Right? Yeah. Often. 

Brett: Oh, you know what? Okay. 

Joe: Yeah. Often, right? 

Brett: This was coming and, 

great, or leaving. 

Joe: Or leaving, yeah.

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: So I wanna move on to the fear side. When removing fear, what does that look like? How is that functionally moving through us and. What is the psychological experience? 

It's a 

Joe: shaking of the body. So if you have a deer who got caught by a mountain lion and then somehow gets free, you'll see them. They'll shake their whole body. And so making sounds of fear, shaking your body, that's what it is to be moving fear. And it can be very subtle shaking, and it could just be like howling yelling, but it's allowing your body to move the fear.

And it's particularly powerful if you go back to the environment. The issue with moving fear by yourself is that oftentimes fear comes 'cause you're by yourself. So it's far better to be in a group to move your fear, have love and support while you're moving your fear because otherwise you're still all alone in it.

So that's one of the things I really recommend to do with people. I recommend moving all of your emotions with people. So that's why in Masterclass or Decisions Course, we move emotions with people. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: And then all of the in-person work, we move emotions with people, but fear in particular really important.

Brett: Yeah. And coming back to the veteran's example, there are modalities like therapeutic shaking where people just lay down and they shake. You just let your body shake. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: It's what land mammals do. 

Joe: Yes. And some other animals that some even not, I think even whales. I think I read somewhere that whales actually have some shaking behavior.

Dogs do it all the time. And as a matter of fact, there was this, I remember, I think we talked about this in another podcast, like it was 60 minutes, it was 1980s or something, and there was this 90-year-old guy dancing on the dance floor. It was just like, just post disco in that area and I remember they like what's the trick for being 90 and living such a vivacious life?

And he said, oh, that's easy. And he just laid down on the floor and shook, like he was an epileptic seizure. And I was like what? Because I was very young at the time. I was like, what? What? What was that? And I remember what was it like whatever 20 years later I'm sitting on the ground shaking like that and I'm like, oh yeah, that's so good. But yeah, I remember that reflection. 

Brett: Yeah. There's something also that I think is often missed in the way people talk about like trauma release and like fear release and it's not just something that happens where your body shakes and moves and then you get up and move like nothing happened.

Yeah. I've noticed that the biggest movements happened in me that also included some form of meaning adjustment in my system. Like my body shook to represent a real fear of something like death, and I had to actually reckon with and feel that, and having felt that. I then move forward in a different way. I see life differently, like back on that cliff and I didn't know what to do. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: I was between a rock and a cold place. Literally, if I stayed there much longer, I was going to get weaker and weaker until I died. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: And I could move forward and I might slip and fall and die. So I had to hang out with that fear of death, knowing that it was, there was a significant chance of death either way, but eventually had to recognize that there was guaranteed death this way. So I had to continue moving. 

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. 

Brett: And I think that's not so dissimilar from the experience that people have when they are stuck where the thing that they needed to do when they were kids, when they were in, those formative experiences was freeze, not make a big fuss, not move, wait for the storm to pass and survive. And there comes a point where you can recognize in your life now that I am doing this to myself every day, I am removing the love from myself every day. 

Joe: I'm trapping myself with my mind every day. And what I see when people really solve this puzzle about feeling stuck all the time in their life, and one of the things that I notice that is really clear in them is that the only thing they were ever stuck with was the thoughts. It was a set of thoughts, right? 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: It's, if you're not scared of death, just to be extreme about it, person with a gun can't oppress you. You can't be stuck. You just have some choices to make. 

Brett: Yeah. Even if you're in a prison cell. 

Joe: Even if you're in a prison cell.

Brett: There are many people who've been in prison cells for a very long time, and they were not stuck the moment they got out. They were moving as though they had been cooking that entire time. 

Joe: That's right. Yeah. 

Brett: Their consciousness constantly transforming into whatever it was that made them. 

Joe: Yeah. It's amazing, right? Three years in prison for one person is completely stuck. Three years in, what is it like, I think some monks sit, they're in like for three years or two years or something, they're in a two and a half by two and a two-and-a-half-by-two-and-a-half-foot room and they can't even lay down. It's like far harsher. 

Brett: Yeah. 

Joe: And they call that like awakening, 

Brett: Right? 

Joe: Somebody else calls it stuck in a prison. 

Brett: And that I've heard of somebody who did like a six-year meditation, silent darkness retreat in a house. And afterwards they were like that was a waste of time. 

Joe: Oh my God. If you ever find that person, I want to talk to them. Because I could see saying that in meaning it in a very particular way, which is so much freedom. And I could also see it like, oh, I like some sort of shame cycle of doing it, which would be, yeah, unbelievable. 

Brett: Again, it's like it's a very specific nuance in how you wanna frame that internally. 

Joe: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. 

Brett: But I can see that going a lot of ways.

Joe: Which is exactly the metaphor for stuckness. It's an internal framing. It is not an actuality. We're all evolving until we die and then we're all decomposing. 

Brett: Yeah. This reminds me of the beginning of another coaching session that you had with another person who was stuck, and your first question was are you stuck or do you feel stuck? 

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. 

Brett: Because they came in saying, I feel stuck, literally, that was what they said.

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think also for people who are really interested, the next thing I would watch or pay attention to is the Anger Podcast. For people who feel stuck, they're gonna get a lot of freedom out the Anger podcast, that usually is the first move. 

Brett: Yeah. Then we've got several on fear. 

Joe: Yeah, as well.

Brett: Helplessness, the cayenne pepper of fear. What else could somebody do if they really want to go down the rabbit hole here and work with their stuckness? 

Joe: We have those five free workshops that we do that are the gateway of transformation or really how to approach self-work that makes it really effective, and all of those things really help people get unstuck as well.

So that would be a great one. And you just sign up for the newsletter and then you'll be made aware of them. We do about one a month or something like that. 

Brett: So you just go to our website, artofaccomplishment.com, sign up for the newsletter, and then those will start coming to you? 

Joe: Exactly. Yeah.

Brett: Awesome. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Brett: All right. Thank you, Joe. 

Joe: What a pleasure. Good to be with you.

Brett: Thank you for watching The Art of Accomplishment or listening. The show is hosted by myself, Brett Kistler, and Joe Hudson. Mun Yee Kelly is our producer, and this episode is edited by Reasonable Volume.