The Golden Algorithm: The One Key to Unlock All of Life's Problems
Get what you want by going into what you avoid
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There’s a mystic who says there’s only one really good question, which is, “What am I unwilling to feel?”
-Tara Brach
It’s a hyperbolic title, I know. But this is the single most powerful viewpoint I’ve found in my exploration of consciousness and conscious leadership to date.
I recently learned about a concept called the Golden Algorithm, coined by Joe Hudson from The Art of Accomplishment. The idea goes something like this:
When you avoid an emotion, you invite that emotion into your life in exactly the way that you avoid it.
Here’s a quick example. Many of us (*cough cough, not me at all, cough cough*) are conflict-avoidant. We dislike conflict and the emotions, physical sensations, and tension that comes with it. So we avoid it like the plague, unless or until we absolutely have to engage in it.
But, in one of life’s crueler twists, when you avoid conflict, you tend to make things that would be no big deal erupt into explosive conflicts. When you don’t materialize your anger upfront and say “No” or “I’d like to change this”, your unmaterialized anger grows as criticism, blame, and resentment, leading to conflict that is much hotter than it would have been to begin with.
There’s an implication of the Golden Algorithm that is core to your journey to becoming a more evolved and conscious leader. That is:
All of your unconscious and reactive patterns have, at their root, an emotion or emotions that you’re trying to avoid.
It’s an extreme. But in my experience it’s extremely true.
Whenever you get unconscious, reactive, or below the line, it’s because there’s some emotion that you don’t want to acknowledge, welcome, or feel. You want that feeling and the associated sensations to go away, and as a result you employ a reactive strategy in an attempt to avoid and expel them. Per the Golden Algorithm, that exact strategy invites those same feelings back later on, usually at an even greater magnitude.
Any of this sound familiar?
I don’t want to be in conflict so I avoid it, leading to more and greater conflict down the road.
I don’t want to be mean and angry, so I bottle it up until I get really mean and really angry.
I don’t want people to be disappointed in me, so I make myself anxious and procrastinate leading to disappointment.
I don’t want to feel like a failure, so I avoid doing necessary things that I’m bad at, resulting in failure.
The simple, beautiful, and devastating thing about the golden algorithm is that there is only one way forward: let yourself feel that which you don’t want to feel.
The sole road out of reactivity and into consciousness is to feel your anger, your heartbreak, your vulnerability, the regret and shame and embarrassment of failure, the knot of anxiety in your stomach, the loss of connection of a lost relationship, or the disappointment in yourself when another is disappointed.
I can already hear you saying: “Great! Well then I’ll feel it all so it’ll finally go away.” I said it too. And unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.
When you feel in an attempt to make feeling go away, you’re just employing another strategy to, well, make it go away. It doesn’t work. You’re still reactive.
To feel those feelings is to genuinely invite, welcome, allow for, and accept them exactly as they are. To be with the feeling without making it good or bad, without making it mean anything about you, and without needing to fix it or make it go away. Then and only then, once an emotion has been welcomed, heard, and manifested, will it allow you to return to center.
The Golden Algorithm and Being
There’s an expansion that I’d like to make to the golden algorithm based on my training with the Conscious Leadership Group.
The Golden Algorithm tells us that when we avoid things, we inevitably bring those exact things about in the manner by which we avoid them.
This applies to more than just feelings. It also applies to ways of being.
Finish this sentence: “I don’t want to be…”.
If you struggle with this, ask yourself what you judge most harshly in others. Common things I hear from myself and folks I work with:
Mean
A Dick/Bitch
Contentious
Controlling
Judgmental
A pushover
Full of Myself
Arrogant
Self-obsessed
The work here requires you acknowledge a few things.
First, when you notice that you don’t want to be a certain way, you verify that you are.
No one says “I don’t want to be afraid” unless, beneath the surface, there’s fear. Similarly, when you say “I don’t want to be a dick”, I know that part of you is feeling like a dick about the situation, and that you’re fighting that part of yourself.
Second, per the Golden Algorithm, your efforts to deny those parts of yourself only makes them show up even bigger and less conscious to you:
I don’t want to be Mean/A Dick/Contentious so I suppress that part of myself, leading it to express as passive aggression or an explosion of meanness when I can’t contain it anymore.
I don’t want to be controlling, so I suppress is until things feel so out of control that I rip the reins out of everyone’s hands and back into mine.
I don’t want to be judgmental, so instead of letting it out I silently judge in my head and accrue evidence validating my judgments, making me even more righteous and judgmental.
I don’t want to be a pushover, so I force taking a stand until I run out of energy, collapse, and get pushed over altogether.
I don’t want to be full of myself, arrogant, or self-obsessed, so I obsess over hiding those parts of me so I seem perfect.
Do you see it? It’s inescapable! In all of your efforts to suppress parts of yourself, you only reinforce them and make yourself unconscious to how they show up.
This is why bypassing fails, every single time. When you bypass around the parts of yourself that you dislike, they don’t go away. They go covert. They still exist, but now they’re hidden from you.
You’re still a dick (or controlling, or full of yourself), but now you’re unaware of it.
The only way through is through. It’s to acknowledge, allow, love, and honor these parts of yourself. They have so much wisdom! In acknowledging them and becoming aware of of their gifts (more on this later), you can consciously wield them to your desired end.
You might be saying to yourself “it sounds like many of these traits are tied to emotions or emotional experiences that we don’t want to feel. Aren’t you just saying the same thing twice?”
To that I say: winner, winner, chicken dinner.
They are tied to each other. Frequently we don’t want to be a certain way because that way of being comes with an emotion we don’t want to feel or a possible emotional experience that we want to avoid. In noticing the ways that we don’t want to be and identifying the emotions we associate with that way of being, we can welcome that emotional experience and unlock conscious access to exiled ways of being.
The Golden Algorithm as the Key to Liberation
I am, generally speaking, not a fan of “liberation” or “enlightenment” language. It too easily lends itself to woo-woo mystification, hierarchies of the enlightened and unenlightened, and guru-ification.
That being said, if I take liberation or enlightenment to mean freedom, as in the freedom to be you, in your life, flowing your flow, living your purpose and genius, then all that lies between you and that freedom is contained in the algorithm.
Every emotion you’re unwilling to experience is a bar in the prison that confines you. Every part of yourself that you’re unwilling to be is another brick in your cell wall.
You’re not free to be you when there are things you refuse to feel or be. In fact in those moments you are the exact opposite: you are fleeing from yourself and your full brilliance, right into a prison of unconscious reactivity.
You’re certainly not free to pursue your deepest wanting, your soul’s calling, your life’s purpose. You are only able to run away from that which you avoid.
It can be easy to miss that reality. Sometimes the reactive strategies you employ overlap with paths to what you want. But even when they do, you’re not really pursuing what you want. You are fleeing from that which you deny and just so happen to be going toward what you want to create. Even then, I ask, is that how you want to live your life?
This is the paradox that the Golden Algorithm illuminates: only in welcoming and accepting what you don’t want to experience can you be fully free to pursue that which you do.
What if you could free yourself from the cage and simply live your flow?
Every emotion you allow yourself to experience removes a bar in the prison that confines you. Every part of yourself that you let yourself be removes another brick from the cell wall.
It turns out that the key to your prison is feeling every feeling, to the very last drop.
The Golden Algorithm in Action
One of the more common pieces of feedback I get about my writing is to include more stories and examples.
My god, y’all are so needy!
I jest. It makes sense. There’s a part of me that gets off on dancing in the purely conceptual, even in practical/tactical matters like leadership.
So let’s get specific. There are a handful of common ways that I see the Golden Algorithm operate for leaders. I’ll highlight each of them here.
Expectations and Meanness
One common pattern I see in new leaders is a withholding of their high expectations for fear of being perceived as mean (or a dick, or a bitch).
This one is particularly hilarious to me. Do you really think that by withholding your expectations that they’ll go away, or somehow magically be met?
The inevitable experience here, every time, is that you get so frustrated about your unmet expectations that you erupt in an explosion of frustration and meanness. This eruption is orders of magnitude beyond what would have happened if you made the expectations clear upfront.
The superpower that you lose in not letting yourself be mean is the firm clarity that anger holds. Being mean all of the time isn’t great, but allowing for meanness is to allow for clarity and for others to know exactly where you stand.
When I work with leader who integrate their inner meanness and set clear expectations, the team is nearly always grateful. The expectations are known, and people know they can rely on the firm clarity of their leader.
Conflict
I’ve covered this above, but I don’t think it can be over-stated: The avoidance of conflict only brings about more and bigger conflict down the road. It’s an iron law.
If you’re conflict-avoidant, it’s because you’re anger-avoidant. You fear your anger and the possibility of loss of connection, rejection, and abandonment that it could bring.
As a result, you avoid the impulses that anger sends you, such as “no” or “that won’t work” or “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” This withholding of anger almost always results in resentment and blame.
I’ve seen conflict-avoidance lead to huge conflicts time-and-time again. I’ve repeatedly seen cofounders and key members of leadership leave companies because of pent up resentment from things they didn’t say and boundaries they didn’t hold.
The gift of conflict is the possibility of better, more aligned solutions. When leaders can approach the tension of conflict from the potential to create something better instead of the fear of loss, conflict becomes a force multiplier for teams.
To unlock conflict for yourself, ask yourself what you fear would happen were you to start conflict. Then feel into the emotions that show up for you when you imagine that happening. There’s usually something about abandonment, rejection, and loss of connection.
When I see leaders embrace their anger and ability to have proactive conflict, I see teams get closer. Tighter. Usually trust for the leader goes up, as folks know they can trust their leader to say what they’re thinking and not hold back or get resentful. When leaders do this masterfully, their people feel that they have space to pushback as well, and entire teams can sit in creative tension to manifest better solutions.
Failure
Allow me to generalize: Every ambitious person I know hates failure. Myself included.
But what happens when you can’t allow for the possibility of failure at all? Here’s what I’ve seen. Any of it sound familiar?
Procrastination
Avoidance
Focusing on minutiae
Stagnation
Blinding yourself to the possibility of failure
Pushing hard and burning out
Reactive decision-making
In having no tolerance for the possibility of failure and the emotions it brings, I see leaders reliably get stupid whenever failure gets close. Avoidance, bad decisions, emotionality, burning out. All signs of a discomfort with the emotions that come with failure, and all increase the likelihood of failure.
This is a hard one for most leaders. There’s a narrative you probably carry that goes something like “If I allow for the possibility of failure, I increase it’s likelihood. So I can’t even let myself think that I can fail.“ To which I say, nay!
So long as you can’t allow for failure, you’re only ever operating in avoidance of failure, not in the authentic pursuit of success. And those things are not the same.
There’s a way that leaders who can’t allow for failure don’t actually go after the big things that allow for success. They don’t email the top VC that could make a difference. They don’t reach out to the big customers that could double or 10x their revenue. They don’t try to build the challenging product feature that would open a new market for their company.
While these are the things that would really give them a shot at success, they’re also things they could fail at. And they’re not actually invested in success. They’re invested in not failing.
If this resonates, ask yourself: what are the emotions that come up for me when I consider failure? What don’t I want to feel? Usually that list looks something like:
Disappointment
Fear
Frustration
And the big one: Heartbreak, Grief
To fail at something you genuinely care about is to invite in heartbreak on a magnitude most folks would rather eat glass than experience. If you want an unlock around failure, let yourself feel all of the grief and heartbreak that you would feel were you to fail.
Because the superpower of failure is freedom. When you can fail without it being a big deal, you can do anything that you want! Nothing is off the table.
When I see leaders allow for the possibility of failure, I see a unique resilience form. These leaders aren’t afraid of failure. They know that it’s a real possibility, and that they can survive it. As a result, they’re free to operate consciously in the face of failure and fully pursue success.
Arrogance & Being Full of Yourself
This is a big one, especially for the women and minority folks that I support. Many of them have been punished by the system for even appearing arrogant or full of themselves.
Yet, once again, suppressing this part of yourself doesn’t work.
Time-and-time again I see that when this part is suppressed out in the world, it leads to an ever-growing jadedness and arrogance in private, ultimately manifesting in “screw all of it, I’m better than this/them!”
Don’t get me wrong, I love it. Especially for folks who struggle with self-assuredness and self-trust. I love when I feel the arrogant part of them coming out.
But this arrogance-manifested-in-private doesn’t actually help you. In fact it’s keeping you powerless and in the position of victim out in the world.
What we fail to see when we can’t be arrogant is that the gift of so-called arrogance is self-assuredness, self-trust, and self-belief. Most folks are so afraid of getting burned for arrogance, either by being rejected by others or risking delusional optimism, that they opt to disempower and not trust themselves. This, of course, per the golden algorithm, then increases the likelihood of rejection and delusional puffed-up optimism.
If you’re avoiding arrogance, make space for it. Find a trusted friend you can experiment being arrogant with, or journal and allow the arrogant one in you to brag.
Feel into the possibility of rejection and missing something because you were too self-assured. Welcome those feelings and feel them all of the way through.
When I’ve seen leaders I work with integrate their arrogance and allow for these feelings, there’s a deep well of self-assuredness, self-belief, and self-trust that they gain access to. This cascades across their team. As the leader’s authentic self-trust grows, so does the team’s—for themself, their leader, and their company.
Applying the Golden Algorithm
If any of this resonates as true with you, I encourage you to commit, right now, to applying it in your life. Here’s how:
Think of the biggest problem you’re facing, be it a relational challenge, a decision you’re struggling to make, or somewhere you’re feeling stuck. Now:
Plug into the issue. Let yourself bring it clearly into your mind’s eye. As you visualize the issue, checkin: what feelings show up for you? Make sure to get specific in naming the emotion (irritation is better than angry, for example), and identify where you feel that emotion in your body and how (hot pressure in the shoulders). Notice if there’s a way you’re trying not to be. Name that and notice how it feels in your body.
As you get clear on the feeling, see if you can allow for the feeling or part of you to be there. Can it be okay that you’re feeling how you’re feeling? Can you stay present to the physical sensations of the feeling without needing to change them, solve them, or make them go away? Breathe into and with the feeling. As you do this you may notice that the emotion starts to get bigger—that’s okay. The feeling won’t kill you. It’s common for them to get big before they crest like a wave and get small again.
Now, imagine that the absolute worst comes to pass around this issue. How would you feel then? Get really clear—what’s the emotional experience you don’t want to have?
As you do this, repeat the above: What are you feeling? Where? Get specific. Can you first welcome, then allow, then accept and then totally love yourself for feeling the feeling? For being a human being who is having a human experience, and that being totally okay and meaning nothing more than that? Once again, the emotions may get bigger before they get smaller. They may start to move through as tears or sounds or body movements. That’s all okay. Let yourself have the experience. It’s aliveness and intelligence moving through you.
If you did the exercise, congratulations! What I often find is that it’s not that the emotions go away, it’s that there’s more spaciousness available to me around the emotions, and that I’m more identified with the spaciousness than the emotion itself.
From this place I’m able to shift from operating to “fix”, “solve” or make the emotion go away, and instead operate from my principles and values, in the interest of what I really want.
That experience is what I call freedom, and I wish endless amounts of it to you.
With love,
-Justin
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