Jack Cohen and I explain why emotional inner game is the foundation for everything else - and shows how to practice it. Also check out Jack’s course (not sponsored, he’s the real deal and been a huge influence on me for the last 15 years).

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Overwhelming Emotions for PMs

Product management is an unfair role. By definition, we’re the cushion for all the rough edges and bad trade-offs of any organization. And step one is just acknowledging that’s not going away—it’s actually a feature of the role. Every organization direly needs people who can be really flexible. We all have worked with people who are not flexible, who need things to be really well defined, structured, to set them up for success. And there needs to be people who can be really, really flexible, adaptable and just be able to handle and have a really strong inner game.

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Why Inner Game Matters More Than Ever

This has nothing to do with AI. Also, this has everything to do with AI. These skills to manage difficult emotions are really, really important. Not just for our own happiness and wellbeing, but also if you look ahead at an AI future and what that means for product management. Inner game is a prerequisite for using AI. Think about your role today and how you feel like a bottleneck sometimes. Now imagine if all the people around you suddenly got a lot more horsepower. A lot more help, and things that took them a long time, now took them not very much time. Imagine how we’re gonna feel as product managers as bottlenecks then. Beyond just a prerequisite, having a strong inner game is an accelerant to using AI because what skills are gonna be selected for in the future for roles like product management? It’s gonna be thoughtfulness. Clearheaded judgment. Being able to basically have a really strong inner game is gonna be who’s gonna be the most successful in this future. Can AI help us with our inner game? Yeah, but like almost every skill that AI can help you leverage, we first have to be really good at it offline without AI. The foundation is inner game—mindfulness, inner dialogue. Once you have strong inner game, you can have strong outer game, which is more like the tools for productivity, the tactics, leadership to change the culture and the team around you. And finally, the icing on the cake is having an AI copilot that leverages these two really critical foundations. But if you jump straight ahead to using AI, it’s gonna be a flimsy foundation.

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Understanding Emotions as Signals

Jack Cohen, who’s coached 49 founders and hundreds of executives in Silicon Valley, defines emotion as having two central components: a signal and energy. Emotions are a signal that we’re moving closer to or farther from something that we care about, plus the energy to act on that signal. If you don’t care about something, you’re not gonna feel anything about that. If you do, you’re gonna feel something about whether you’re making progress towards it or you’re feeling like you’re getting distance. Jack shares an example from a few weeks before a really high stakes customer meeting. He was doing something completely unrelated, but had this really intense background anxiety that kept distracting him. The background voice was some kind of ambiguous “I’m not good enough.” That voice got loud enough that he paused. He stopped what he was doing. He turned toward the feeling toward that voice inside himself, and just listened. He didn’t try and say, “I am good enough.” He didn’t argue with it. He just listened to what it had to say. And a moment later, he got this clarity: “I’m not prepared enough.” “Oh my goodness. You’re right. So what do I need to do to prepare?” He pulled up his next actions list and just listened to that voice, wrote down A, B, C, D, E. He wrote down four or five things and it was profound, what happened. His body just exhaled on its own. He wasn’t doing some grounding exercise. He wasn’t trying to relax. He had just turned towards the anxiety inside himself, listened to what it wanted him to know, captured that, and boom. All of this in under two minutes and he could move on with what he was doing with a much greater sense of calm.

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The Art of Separating Yourself from Your Emotions

It’s first of all about noticing that you’re having an emotion. The emotion is coming up and it’s separate from you. And then, not resisting that emotion. In fact, turning towards it in Jack’s words. A metaphor I really like that I’ve heard is I actually try to imagine the emotion as like this little monster that I actually offer a seat next to me and then offer it a cup of tea. And then, little monster accepts in cute little way, accepts the cup of tea. And then I say if this little monster could talk, like what would it say? Another thing that helps me—this is very individual to me—one of my favorite places is McWay Falls in Big Sur California. This is a little waterfall. It’s a fresh water waterfall that goes into the ocean. When I try to do that first step of notice, what really helps me is I imagine McWay falls on a beautiful sunny day. And then I imagine it in a rainstorm like just like a shitty storm. And I can clearly see that the storm and the rain and the cold are not McWay Falls and they’re not the same thing. Then actually in my head, I imagine this like National Geographic time-lapse where like storms come, storms go. It goes back to being sunny. It reminds me that like this emotion is very temporary, just like weather is.

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Beyond Traditional Meditation

If you’re familiar with traditional meditation practices, what’s often taught is just to let the thoughts pass like clouds in the sky. That practice helps us see that we’re not our thoughts, and our thoughts are not facts. And yet some thoughts and accompanying emotions, they don’t pass, they don’t go anywhere. They sit here like a storm cloud just raining and raging all over us. Sort of like a persistent colleague who won’t leave you alone until you actually get their message. Like with those colleagues, it can be really useful to turn towards these thoughts, these emotions, and engage in a dialogue with them.

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Practicing Mindful Awareness

You don’t need to sit in any special position. In fact, sit in whatever sitting position you sit in for work so you’re practicing in that position. Find a point to hold your focus on. Count the first three thoughts that arise in your head. When the first thought comes up, just say to yourself, “first thought.” And then bring your focus back to wherever it was. And so on with the second and third. Then do the same practice but for sensations. Draw your attention to your left shoulder. Just keep it there for a moment or two and notice what sensations arise there. Once you’ve counted just one sensation there, move your attention to your right shoulder. Then move your attention to your throat, your neck, just noticing what’s already here. Finally, down into your chest. All of this relies on noticing to set it in motion.

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The Slack Test: Meeting Your Emotions

Open Slack. If you use Microsoft Teams, open Teams. Take your hands away from the keyboard and the mouse and put them on the table. Don’t answer any messages. Maybe just the counter of messages is enough, seeing unread messages from a particular person, like your manager. The feeling is anxiety, it’s nervousness. There’s all sorts of feelings that happen when you just open Slack or Teams. Now close the window.

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The Inner Dialogue Technique

When we feel whatever this feeling is that gets activated for you, what do we do with it? One of the most helpful aspects of the inner dialogue is conversing with the emotion so that we don’t get trapped in the emotion. When learning this exercise for the first time or when you’re doing it with an especially strong emotion, it helps to physically embody this dialogue by switching chairs or places.
  1. Sit in the emotion: Scoot to one side in your chair. You’re sitting in the anxiety, you’re in whatever the overwhelm, the emotion is for you.
  2. Switch positions: Literally stand up, even if it’s the same chair, and switch to the other side. You’re leaving. You’re now looking at the emotion. You left it behind in the spot where you started. You’re back in yourself.
  3. Ask with curiosity: Once you feel that calm, turn towards the emotion with a sense of curiosity and see what question comes out of you. Maybe it’s, “Hey, what are you showing up for now?” Or “How are you trying to help me?” Or if it feels maybe protective, “What are you trying to protect me from?”
  4. Let the emotion answer: Switch back into the seat of anxiety. Come back into the feeling. Maybe even turn the volume up a degree on it so you’re really feeling it again, and just let the emotion answer that question for you.
  5. Empathize: Come back into the seat of yourself and just—not agree, not disagree, just empathize with it. Play back: “It sounds like you’re trying to help me by whatever it’s doing, ‘cause what you really care about underneath this is blank.”
  6. Receive: Switch back into the seat of the emotion and just take one or two breaths just to receive that appreciation from yourself. To know that you are offering a signal to yourself, a signal to listen to, and it’s being listened to in this moment.

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The Chihuahua Method for Difficult People

Once you have really good inner game, that allows us to suddenly apply other outer game tools. As product managers—we deal with lots of different kinds of people, we don’t have authority, we can only influence, it’s a difficult place to be. There’s all sorts of people we encounter on the job, off the job, that try to get under our skin. Usually these are people who actually have nothing they can actually do to us, which is why they’re trying to get under our skin. This method only works if you have really good inner game in the ability to be able to see yourself as separate from the emotion. You visualize that person who’s giving you shit as a chihuahua. A chihuahua that’s barking and making a lot of noise and going crazy, but is still a chihuahua behind a window pane or on a leash. Ask yourself, if I was a chihuahua, how would I react? If there’s like a really big dog walking down the street and there’s a chihuahua going crazy, like the dog wouldn’t react and the person wouldn’t react. The windshield wiper just keeps going, it doesn’t really care about the chihuahua. The ability to remember these things mainly comes from having really strong inner energy and being able to do that.

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Bringing AI into Your Inner Game Practice

One of the most helpful aspects of this inner dialogue approach is that we get to step outside of the emotion and engage with it. By stepping outside of it, we’re immediately returned to the sense of ourselves that’s already calm, already centered. We can do this with ourselves. We can give the emotion over to a friend. And Jack has been experimenting with doing this with AI. He put this prompt into Claude: “I want to do an inner dialogue exercise with you where I’m currently feeling some anxiety. I’m getting in my own way of moving forward. So I wanna have a dialogue with the anxiety where you play the role of the anxiety, channeling that in a conversation with me.”

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The Path Forward

There’s also things like micro-overwhelm (feeling flooded) and macro-overwhelm (feeling like everything’s gonna collide). These all have tools and outer game, but that’s really difficult to apply if we don’t have the ability to take a moment and realize that that’s what’s actually going on. While PMs have a lot of real estate in the overwhelming emotions realm, there’s no monopoly on it. If you’re watching this and not squarely in that role, know that you too can have a claim to overwhelming emotions, and this will be relevant to you as well. The foundation remains the same: Build inner game through mindfulness and inner dialogue. This enables strong outer game with productivity tools and leadership. And finally, add AI as the icing on the cake that leverages these critical foundations. Skip the foundation, and you’re building on sand. But with practice, these skills become the difference between being overwhelmed by emotions and using them as valuable signals. Because in a world where AI accelerates everything around us, the PMs who thrive will be those who’ve mastered what happens inside. ➡️ Master inner game first, then add AI. Without the foundation of noticing and turning toward emotions, AI becomes a flimsy band-aid rather than a force multiplier.