Success Doesn’t Heal Shame: Why the Hustle Kills Emotional Strength | (#038) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

If you take to heart what I’m covering in this episode, not just nod along, but actually start to live it, then something incredibly powerful will start to happen. You stop being afraid of your own feelings. You stop stuffing them down or running from them, or pretending they don’t exist, and instead, you start holding them, owning them, making space for them.

You learn how to meet your emotional needs yourself without depending on anyone else to fix you or soothe you, or to make you feel better—and when you can do that, when you have that kind of grounded presence within yourself, your relationships stop being landmines. Your work stops draining you. You stop feeling like you’re performing all the time. [01:01.3]

But if you don’t do this, if you ignore what we’re going to be covering in this episode, then at best, you will build success on top of disconnection. You’ll keep chasing things that look good on paper, maybe, but feel hollow on the inside. You’ll keep needing other people to validate you or soothe you, or love you just in the way you need so you don’t fall apart, and when they inevitably don’t or can’t, or can’t for long, you’ll either lash out or shut down, or collapse into self-blame.

Here’s a truth that the world does not prepare us for: the version of maturity that most people are chasing is actually a lie. That whole idea of the strong, silent type, the guy who never lets anything get to him, who never shows what he feels, that is actually not strength. That’s numbness because of fear. That’s emotional avoidance dressed up as control, and it’s usually coming from someone who never learned how to process pain without needing someone else to hold their emotions for them. [02:06.2]

Real maturity isn’t locking it down. Real maturity is being able to feel everything and take full responsibility for it. That means you can express anger or sadness or shame, or even joy, without making it someone else’s problem. That’s strength. That’s emotional power. But to get there, you can’t just read more books or repeat more affirmations in the mirror. You’ve got to train for it. You have to reconnect with what Confucian thinkers called your xin, your heart-mind, and that’s what we’re getting into in this episode, how to cultivate that core of yourself that has been buried under performance or perfectionism or pain.

I’m David Tien. For almost the past two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find fulfillment, meaning and success in their personal and professional lives. In this episode, I’ve got three points I want to walk you through today, and the first is that your emotional core is naturally intelligent and it’s trainable. [03:07.3]

Now I’m going to be referencing an ancient Chinese philosophical concept called xin. You could spell this as “hsin,” H-S-I-N, or in the modern Pinyin Romanization, it’s “xin,” X-I-N. The standard translation for this is heart-mind. It’s the core of both your mental and emotional center, and this idea that your emotional-mental core, your xin, is naturally intelligent and trainable might sound strange to some people, especially if you grew up thinking emotions were the problem, that feelings were messy or irrational or dangerous, that to succeed, you had to rise above your emotions or outsmart them, or master them by ignoring them. But what if the part of you that feels this isn’t the enemy? [03:54.7]

The ancient Confucian thinkers didn’t see emotions as weakness. Over 2,000 years ago, Mencius said that, at our core, we all have something like sprouts, moral emotional beginnings, not finished virtues, not perfect character traits, just the seeds, the capacity, the potential for moral virtue, like compassion, like a sense of fairness, or the instinct to pull a child back while he’s teetering on the edge of a well, even if the child isn’t yours. It’s not necessarily logic per se and it’s not strategy. That’s your heart-mind, your xin.

Mencius or Mengzi didn’t say that you’re born with it fully developed. He’d said you have to cultivate it like a garden. You protect it, water it, make sure the conditions are right with sunshine and so forth and remove the weeds. You don’t force it to grow, like pulling on the grass to make it grow faster. You create the conditions for growth. [04:55.8]

About 1,000 years later, the very influential Confucian philosopher named Zhu Xi picked up on this and added quiet-sitting, jingzuo, into the mix, a kind of meditative self-reflection, not to blank the mind, but to clarify it. This is perhaps the biggest misconception that most people in the world have about meditation. They think that successful meditation means that you have no thoughts, that your mind is blank or numb.

That’s not what meditation or good meditation is. Good meditation is more like how you use a snow globe and you shake it up, and then you allow the white flakes to settle like your mind is settling. So, the busier you are or the smarter you are, the more thoughts you’ve got swirling in your head, so you’ve got to take the time on a regular basis to sit quietly and allow all of those thoughts to settle. This is what Zhu Xi meant by quiet-sitting, to return to your xin, to your heart-mind, when it’s been scattered or dulled by the noise of the world, when the stress or the deadlines, or the constant striving have coated over your internal compass. [06:08.4]

Wang Yangming, my favorite philosopher, a few centuries later, brought it home by teaching that your mind is like a mirror, not broken, just dusty. You don’t need to smash the mirror and rebuild it. You just need to clean it, polish it, and then it reflects clearly. You know what to do already. You know what matters most to you, but then the world gets to you or life gets to you and adds all of these layers of burdens on top of your mirror, and then you can’t reflect clearly. You can’t see clearly.

But that mirror, your xin, is where your true guidance comes from, not just your intellect, but your heart-mind, when it’s attuned, clean and alive, and modern neuroscience is backing this up in ways that Confucius would have just nodded at and said, “Told you so.” [06:56.2]

Antonio Damasio, the super famous neuroscientist and author of Descartes’ Error, and many other neuroscientists have showed that people with damaged emotion processing centers in the brain, especially the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, couldn’t make effective decisions, even with perfect logic. Their reasoning was intact, but they couldn’t prioritize. They couldn’t evaluate risk. They couldn’t choose between two equally logical options, because emotion isn’t noise. Emotion is a signal. Emotion is meaning. Emotion is what tells you what matters most.

The researcher Jaak Panksepp took it even further, showing that core emotional systems exist deep in the brain long before conscious thought. Stuff like play or care, or rage or fear, or grief, these aren’t random. They’re built in. Evolution sculpted them because they work, because they help us navigate the world with others, with ourselves—so, no, your emotions aren’t the problem. They’re not something you need to escape or suppress or mute so that you can finally succeed. They’re the core of your most important intelligence. [08:11.5]

But here’s the issue: most people never train this part of themselves. They train their mind to analyze or optimize or outperform, but they leave the emotional part untouched. It ends up being wild, neglected or locked in a cage, and then they wonder why success feels hollow or empty, or why their relationships never work out or why they keep feeling burnt out at work or in their career.

They’re walking around with this incredibly powerful system inside them, an emotional-guidance system of sorts, but they’ve never updated the software. They’ve never cleaned or polished that mirror. They’ve never cultivated the soil. [08:53.0]

So, yeah, maybe you’ve made it work out so far in your life. Maybe you’ve hit some targets or built a business, or secured a certain lifestyle. But if your heart-mind isn’t healthy or online or active, or if it’s not clear, if you’ve never learned how to listen to it, tune into it, access it and strengthen it, then it’s only a matter of time before that deeper sense of disconnection catches up to you and it will show up in your relationships, in your motivation, in your energy levels, and in that nagging sense that you’re performing instead of living.

The good news is all of this can be trained. That’s what the research says, emotion regulation, emotional intelligence, emotional self-awareness. These are actually all involving skills. They’re not fixed traits, like either you have them or you don’t. They can be developed with practice, deliberate, grounded, embodied practice involving your physical body, but not the way that most people try, not by just reading more books or thinking harder about your feelings. [10:01.7]

That’s like trying to get fit by watching more YouTube workouts or watching somebody else do crunches and assuming that that will make you have a six pack, while eating a tub of ice cream. No, you actually have to do it, feel it, live it, practice staying with what’s uncomfortable without losing your footing, practice staying in the pocket or practice staying on the edge, practice regulating your nervous system when the pressure rises, practice tuning in to the signals of your body and allowing them to inform instead of hijack your choices.

That’s what cultivation is like. It’s not flashy. It’s not dramatic, but over time, you can accomplish amazing things. You become the kind of person who can trust yourself, not because you’ve gamed the system, but because you’re finally tuning into the core of you that’s always been there, the core of you that knows. That’s the power of the heart-mind. That’s what happens when you stop trying to force your way through life and start building from the inside out. [11:04.7]

Okay, so here’s the second point: when you suppress or numb your emotions, you don’t get stronger. You just lose connection to your core, to your heart-mind, to your xin. Doesn’t matter how successful you might look on the outside, if you’re avoiding what you feel, if you’ve trained yourself to not feel, then it’s not strength. It’s shut down.

When you shut down your emotions, you don’t just lose the pain. You lose access to joy, to clarity, to connection. You bury your ability to actually feel alive. Maybe for a while that might work for you. You can still stay functional. You can still operate in your profession and you might even look impressive with a ton of work, but inside your heart-mind, your xin, will start to dull and be buried under layers and layers of burdens. [11:58.6]

Zhu Xi warned about this a millennia ago. He wrote that the heart-mind becomes clouded when it’s overwhelmed by fear or desire or distractions, not because it’s weak and not because it’s broken, but because, like a mirror, it will collect dust over time, and the more you neglect it, the more distorted everything becomes in it.

A few centuries later, Wang Yangming took it further. He said that when you lose connection or contact with your original mind, what he called your benxin, then you will fall into illusion, distortions. You end up chasing what you don’t even really want, driven by what other people expect of you, performing roles that you never actually chose for yourself, because when you’re not grounded in your heart-mind, you get sucked up into the noise, and noise doesn’t lead to peace or calm. It leads to burnout and exhaustion and resentment. [12:55.5]

This isn’t just ancient philosophy. Modern Science backs it up as well. A well-known study by James Gross and Oliver John has found that people who chronically suppress their emotions suffer across the board on every metric. They have lower emotional intelligence, less cognitive flexibility. They have weaker relationships, more mental health struggles.

It’s not just that suppression doesn’t work, but that it actually makes things worse, and if you’ve been pushing your feelings down for years or decades, if you’ve just been relying on powering through, avoiding anything that feels messy or vulnerable, bad news is that your emotions don’t go away. These burdens build up until your system starts to fight back in ways that are out of control.

This is what trauma researchers, like the very famous Bessel van der Kolk of The Body Keeps the Score fame and Ruth Lanius have found in their research that long-term emotional suppression narrows your emotional range. It shrinks your ability to feel anything deeply, and what you’re left with is numbness, disconnection, a constant low-level ache that never quite goes away. [14:07.0]

One client told me it felt like living behind a glass. He could see life happening, but he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t enjoy it. He couldn’t connect with it on any kind of emotional level. He had, on paper, a great job. He made, on paper, good money. People respected him, but he felt like he was just going through the motions.

He was laughing when he felt like he was supposed to laugh. He showed up when he was supposed to show up, but nothing landed emotionally for him—and that’s what happens when you bury your heart-mind for too long. You don’t just lose the bad feelings. You lose your access to the good ones, too, and you lose your access to your benxin, your original Self, your original heart-mind. [14:52.8]

Then you start searching, not consciously, but subtly, through scrolling, through chasing more money, through picking fights with your partner that don’t even make sense to you when you look back on it, through overeating or overworking or over training, or over anything, because your system is starving for real connection, but you’ve trained yourself not to feel it, so you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s just that something is wrong. [15:20.4]

Many high-achievers struggle when it comes to managing their emotions or navigating their relationships, and they hit a wall when it comes to emotional mastery. Maybe you’ve noticed that stress, frustration or anger is seeping into your personal or professional life, or you feel disconnected from those you care about.

That’s where David Tian’s “Emotional Mastery” program comes in. It’s based on peer-reviewed, evidence-backed therapeutic methods to help you find happiness, love and real fulfillment. Learn how to break free from the emotional roller-coaster and start thriving in every area of your life. You can find out more at DavidTianPhD.com/EmotionalMastery. That’s D-A-V-I-D-T-I-A-N-P-H-D [dot] com [slash] emotional mastery.

I’ve seen this over and over in leaders, in high-performers and achievers, and people who’ve built entire identities on strength and suppression, a kind of bad stoicism. They try to never show weakness. They never ask for help. They don’t even know how to ask for help anymore, and inside, they are collapsing, and what’s tragic is they think it’s because they’re not tough enough.

The truth is, they’ve been too tough, too armored up. The guard has been up too long, too closed off for too long, and that armor they thought was protecting them has actually been cutting them off from their own lives. The ancient Daoist and Buddhist philosophers knew this, too. The Platform Sutra written over 1,500 years ago, where Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming got the idea, teaches that the mind is like a mirror, not broken, just dusty, not corrupted, just neglected, and the solution isn’t smashing the mirror. It’s clearing the dust and polishing it gently and repeatedly until clarity returns, and then continuing to do so to maintain the clarity. This is emotional cultivation. [15:20.4]

It’s not forcing yourself to be calm. It’s learning how to feel again without being overwhelmed. It’s learning how to face your emotions without handing them the wheel. It’s training your nervous system to stay grounded with feeling, not by numbing against it, because numbness isn’t peace. It’s just quiet despair, and it will get louder over time.

So, if you’ve been living on what feels like autopilot, if your wins don’t sink in for you, if your relationships feel thin, if you’re constantly tired for no good reason, then this probably is why. Your heart-mind isn’t gone. It’s still there. It’s still intact. It’s just covered up by years of emotional armor, and the way back to it isn’t through more performance. It’s through presence with it. [18:08.1]

Okay, so here’s the third and final point. You can’t just think your way to emotional strength. You have to train it. This is where most smart people get stuck. They think that once they understand something, once they’ve read the book or heard the podcast, or made the insight, then the problem should be solved. It should be handled, boxed up, and moved on. But insight itself doesn’t equal change. Insight is just opening the doorway. Real change happens on the other side of the door when you step through it and fall on your face a few times and get back up and keep practicing.

A thousand years ago, Zhu Xi understood this. He didn’t just write about ideas. He practiced them daily. He taught quiet-sitting, not as a mystical escape, but as a way to slow down, clear out the noise and tune into the subtleties of the heart-mind. It wasn’t passive, it was active cultivation, not zoning out, but zooming in. [19:10.4]

He believed the heart-mind, your xin, needs time, space and stillness to clarify, just like that snow globe example I gave earlier. You don’t impose virtue on yourself or force it. You discover it by returning to what’s already there under the surface, and you do that through practice.

Again, Wang Yangming took this even further. He taught that the act of knowing and the act of doing are one. If you really know something, then you will act on it. If you’re not acting on it, then you don’t really know it yet, not in the way that matters most, not in your bones, not in your body. That’s why armchair wisdom doesn’t cut it for him, or for ancient Chinese philosophy. [19:54.6]

You can recite ideas all day. You can have every quote from the Analects tattooed on your ribcage, but if you’re still reactive or triggered when someone criticizes you or you collapse when you feel like you’re rejected, or you ghost people when you’re overwhelmed, then your emotional system hasn’t caught up to your intellect yet—and, hey, sure, that’s okay from especially from a psychotherapeutic point of view. We’re going to give you lots of compassion and empathy, because emotional maturity isn’t just like a light switch. It’s not just on or off, or you have it or you don’t. It involves a set of skills, ones that you develop the same way you build any other capacity through reps, through progressive overload.

The Zen masters of China, also known as Chan masters, knew this very well. They passed this teaching down to Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming. They didn’t care how well you could talk about truth. They watched how you sat, how you breathed, how you responded when life got uncomfortable, because that’s where the real work happens, not in theory, but in the practice of it. [21:00.5]

Now we have modern science to prove it. Studies on mindfulness-based emotion regulation or mindfulness-based stress reduction, study after study have shown clear links between regular contemplative practice and improved emotional resilience. People who practice on a daily basis mindfulness or meditation, or what Zhu Xi calls quiet-sitting, learn to feel their feelings earlier, identify them more accurately, and stay grounded when things get intense. They don’t avoid; they stay present. They regulate from the inside. It’s not just a mindset shift, it’s a physiological upgrade.

Training your heart-mind works a lot like training your physical body. Let’s say you want to get stronger or more flexible. You wouldn’t go to the gym just once and then have a great workout and then expect to walk around jacked for the rest of your life. You’d understand that it takes consistent effort, and that once you stop doing it, after a while, you lose it. The progress fades. The strength weakens. The muscle memory gets sloppy. You lose muscle—and the same thing goes with emotional strength. [22:10.1]

If you want more presence, more resilience or antifragility, want to stop getting triggered or hijacked by anxiety or toxic shame, or old shame or reactive anger, great, you need reps. You need progressive overload for your emotions. You can start with small doses. You practice staying with discomfort without flinching. You get used to breathing through a hard moment instead of distracting yourself or flipping into autopilot. You get better at noticing subtle signals in your physical body. You become more emotionally literate, more somatically aware, more present under pressure.

So, this is not abstract. This is trained interoception, your ability to notice what’s happening inside your body in real time, to feel what’s happening inside. Studies have shown that people with higher interoception scores make better decisions, bounce back faster from stress, and build stronger, more honest, better-feeling relationships. [23:15.5]

You also train emotional granularity, the ability to name what you feel specifically, not just “I feel bad/good” or “I feel stressed/tired,” but instead, you feel sadness or grief, or envy, or uncertainty or anticipation. These subtle distinctions give you far more control, because if you can’t name accurately what you actually feel, then you can’t regulate it.

Mindfulness-based emotional training boosts all of this. It improves long-term resilience. It increases self-awareness. It literally rewires your brain’s emotional circuits to reduce triggering and overreaction, and increase calm and grounded presence. This isn’t just psychology. This is neuroscience. This is physiological. [24:08.4]

Here’s one that most people miss: heart rate variability, or HRV. If you’re into fitness, you’ve probably heard of HRV as a recovery metric. If you’ve got a WHOOP band, like I do or an Oura ring like I do, you’re looking at your HRV scores on a daily basis. But it’s a lot more than just a recovery metric. HRV is one of the best indicators of your nervous-system flexibility.

A higher HRV means that you can transition more smoothly from stress to calm. You don’t stay jacked up in fight or flight after the threat is gone. You more quickly return to baseline. That’s the physical signal of emotional resilience. The way to increase HRV over time isn’t just through ice baths or better sleep, though that helps. It’s through deliberate breath work, mindfulness and emotion-regulation training. [25:03.3]

So, yes, emotions live in our physiology. You can feel our emotions in your physical body. That’s where our emotions start, process and end. You can feel your emotions in your throat, in your gut, in your chest, when your boss criticizes you, when your partner withdraws from you, when you get rejected or exposed or praised, and unless you’ve trained for it, your nervous system will hijack your response. It’ll shut you down or fire you up, or lock you into an old pattern before you even realize what’s happened.

But when you train consistently over time, when you deliberately build the capacity to sit with emotional heat instead of running from it, then you’re in the arena, and now your heart-mind gets stronger, clearer, less reactive and more grounded. That clarity doesn’t come from a lightning bolt of insight. It comes from reps, from showing up consistently, from sitting with yourself day after day, until the mirror of your mind begins to clear, and then you polish it, and this is gradual work. This sort of slow pace is the only kind that lasts in the long run. [26:18.4]

You can read all the philosophy you want. You can highlight quotes and journal deep thoughts, but until you start practicing, until you start embodying it in your physical body, then it’s all just noise. This is why the most fulfilled, resilient, antifragile people aren’t necessarily the smartest. They’re the most emotionally trained. They know how to stay with what’s real. They’ve built the emotional muscles. They’ve polished their mirror. Not to make you perfect, not to turn you into some emotionless monk, but to help you reconnect with the heart-mind in you that you have buried, and train it deliberately and consistently so you can finally stop performing and start fully living. [27:01.8]

Okay, so let’s bring it all together. We covered three main points in this episode.

• First, your emotional core, your heart-mind, your xin, is naturally intelligent. It isn’t broken. It doesn’t need to be fixed. It needs to be cultivated. It’s not a flaw in the design. It’s the core operating system that you were never taught to access.
• Second, when you suppress your emotions or numb yourself to them, your heart-mind doesn’t disappear. It just gets buried under layers of performance and fear, and pressure and distraction, and you lose access to it. The longer you stay disconnected from this core of you, the heart-mind, the harder it becomes to even know what you feel, let alone what you really want.
• Third, real emotional strength doesn’t come from insight alone. It comes from practice, from deliberate training, from showing up again and again, not to push your feelings away, but to build the strength to hold them so they stop holding you. [28:00.5]

Let me illustrate this with a story about a client of mine. Let’s call him Darren. He came to me when he was in his late-30s, and on paper, he had a really good life, solid income, respect at work. He was pretty fit. He was always well-dressed and he was clearly smart. He’d also done years of therapy. He had read the book list. He had understood the theories, but inside, he told me he felt stuck, disconnected, burned out, definitely.

But he couldn’t stop himself from grinding, from doing the overtime, from traveling incessantly. He felt lonely, but he was terrified of his own vulnerability. He said, “I know I should be happy, but I don’t feel anything. It’s like I’m watching my life from outside of it,” like watching someone else play the video game of his life. [28:46.3]

So, we got to work. He stopped trying to figure everything out and started training his emotional and physical awareness. He learned how to sit with discomfort without numbing it. He tracked emotions in his body. He stopped reacting and started to just stay with feeling. It was gradual. It was slow. It was messy. It was not a straight line of growth, but, eventually, he stopped running from himself.

Then he started showing up differently in many places in his life, not perfectly and definitely not fully or completely all at once, but he, over time, more fully showed up. His relationships got realer. His leadership became a lot more effective, and for the first time in years, he said, “I actually feel alive again,” and that’s the power of cultivating your heart-mind, not for show, not for status, but to finally come home to yourself and to live from there. That’s the inner work and it can completely change your experience of life and yourself.Thank you so much for listening. If this has helped you in any way, please share it with anyone else that you think could benefit from it. If you have any comments whatsoever, I’d love to get them, any feedback at all. Leave a comment or send me an email or a message. Thank you again for listening. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [30:04.0]