20 Tips From 20 Years Of Confidence (Part 2)

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence, first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Welcome to today's episode of Shrink for the shy guy. I'm Dr. Aziz. I'm excited to be with you. We're going to be talking more about key tips for you to build your confidence and have it sustain. Because confidence is not a fluke. It's not something that just comes when you're having a good day. I mean, yeah, we all have good days and more challenging days, ups and downs in your moods, but you can build a sustainably high level of confidence. So your center of gravity, your normal, is radically different than what it was a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. Another way I like to think about this is you can become a new version of you. And I'm excited to share in this episode more tips on exactly how you can do this. This is part of a series called 20 Tips from 20 Years of Confidence. And it's a reference to me being 40 now and having started studying this when I was 20 years old. So it's been two decades and I've already shared the first five tips in a previous episode about this. This is going to be part two where I want to share more tips. We'll see how many I get through today. I'm going to give you a quick recap of those first five. Obviously, if you've not listened to that first episode in this series, do so because they're good tips. Ready? So I'm going to quickly, quickly just go through these first five tips and then we're going to dive into more tips. You ready? Here we go. Number one, first tip is confidence is a byproduct of action. You don't have the confidence first and then take the action. You take the action, and confidence comes as a result of that action. Number two, you got to get good at catching and labeling your limiting stories, seeing them as such, as opposed to just living in the cloud of believing them and then feeling afraid and foggy and confused. Number Three, social confidence is a learnable skill. You might have some stories like I did that that's not the case and you either have it or you don't, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a learnable skill. And when you really see that and you really get that, everything changes in a fast way. Number four, you will never feel not afraid before taking meaningful risks. That means if you're waiting for a moment where the fear is gone, then I'm going to go do the thing. You're going to be waiting a long time. And number five is take it slow. So when you're leaning into your edge, you're doing something that's uncomfortable, you don't want to lift the 500 pound weight. Lift the 5 pound weight. Build yourself up through gradual exposure. It's tried and true in building bajillions of studies on behavioral psychology. So stick with what works. All right, those are the first five tips. Let's get into number six, which is fresh. Those first five are in the previous episode, which is called 20 tips from 20 years of confidence part one. And now we're gonna get into more tips in this part two. So tip number six is social anxiety doesn't go away on its own, it gets worse. Social anxiety doesn't go away. And that might sound dooming or pessimistic. It just seems to be what's so. In my experience, that's like saying if you have unhealthy eating habits and you're very sedentary and you smoke cigarettes, like you're just not going to get healthier all of a sudden, right? You need to do something different and then you will get healthier. It's the same thing. Because social anxiety is not in your genes. It's not some curse that you just have to have for the rest of your life. It is a result of very specific patterns of how you think and believe, the actions that you take or don't take. How you relate to yourself. Are you on your own side? Are you hyper self critical? How you relate to your own emotions? Do you run from uncomfortable feelings? Do you spend your whole life trying to avoid certain feelings, in which case all those build up patterns of social anxiety and symptoms of social anxiety. So if you just keep doing those things and move to a new city or get a new job or even get a girlfriend or a boyfriend, oh my gosh, now I have a partner. Of course I'm gonna be confident. You might not. So when we try to change the circumstances and hope that it's gonna change the Situation. I had a client who said, you know that anxiety thing, it moves with you. So in order to change your social anxiety, you must change by applying what you're learning in these tips. But I think it's very important to see that it's not gonna go away on its own. You can look at your own experience five years later, 10 years later, 20 years later. A lot of people I talk to, it's the same challenges. It's still there. So that's number six. It's not gonna go on its own. You gotta do something to make that change. Number seven, social anxiety is egomania. It's egomania. What is egomania Here? I looked this up a minute ago. Let me see if I can find a definition of it. So egomania is obsessive egotism. But what does egotism mean? Egotism means the practice of talking and thinking about oneself excessively because of an undue sense of self importance. Obsessive egotism. I mean, so it's like egotism to an extreme. Right? Now you might say, well, hold on a second, Aziz, I'm not overly focused on myself because I think I'm so great. No, that's not what it says. Because of an undue sense of self importance. If you look up self importance, an exaggerated sense of one's own value or importance. So it could be about, I'm the greatest, My value is so great. But it could also just be how important you are. Now, I know that might be a bit of a blow. You're saying, I'm not. I don't matter, I'm not important. Not as much as social anxiety makes it seem. Right. It's like all the people there are thinking this about me. If you look at the stories of social anxiety, it's like you're this main character of everyone else's story. They're thinking about you. They're analyzing your every moment. They're thinking about what you said in a conversation in a passing moment two days later. So you're nervous to go talk to them because maybe they think this about me. If you look, if you think about it, there's kind of this obsessive self important self absorption there that is really diluted, like egomania. You know, the classic example of this is the teenager who's got a pimple on their face. And they're like, everyone in the school is going to care about my pimple. It's like, dude, nobody cares about your pimple. It's like, oh, no, it's so important. And that's how we Are. Oh, my gosh. Everyone noticed how I started that conversation. They noticed that I looked down there. They noticed I'm not good at making eye contact. They noticed this. They noticed, oh, my God. And I get it. It's very convincing. It seems so real, but it's kind of delusional, isn't it? That's number seven. Number eight. Most people prioritize comfort over liberation. Are you. Most people. Most people are going to do that. Comfort or familiarity over freedom. Familiarity over freedom. So I know what happens if I go into a conversation and I don't say much that's familiar. It's comfortable. I don't know what's going to happen if I say what's really on my mind or if I'm more playful or I take a. Take a risk to say something more real or more direct or more challenging or more humorous. I don't know what's gonna happen there. You know what that is? That's freedom. But it's also uncomfortable, so I'm gonna avoid that now. Most people don't say, hey, I'm gonna prioritize comfort over living a free life. They don't say that. They might even say, oh, I want to feel more free. I want to feel more relaxed. I want to go be able to talk to that person. I want to be able to give a public speech and have it go, great. I want that. Okay, so are you going to create that? Oh, no, no, no, no, no. You mean, like, go practice and talk to people and stuff? No, no, not that much. How much do I got to do? As little as possible. Right. And what's happening is you can just see they're not going to say that, but you can see that they're prioritizing comfort over liberation. And I'll see this all the time. I'll see this as people are starting to take action and. And then they pull back. Or maybe someone is circling around, joining a coaching group with me. They've been to several of my events, and they want to do it, and they're like, yeah, but it's like, I don't know. It's uncomfortable to invest in myself. It's uncomfortable to show up to all these things. It's uncomfortable to commit in this way. Okay, well, what matters more, and for me personally, my liberation has got to be one of the most important things, right? Because it unlocks everything else. It unlocks you being fully alive in this world. So that's where the turning point for me was way back when, 20 years ago, was I realized I'M if I don't do something, I'm not going to live, I'm not going to have. I'm going to just go through life as kind of a shell, not really being who I am, not really being on purpose, not really living fully. And. And it freaked me out. It really spooked me to the point where I was willing to do. I was. All of a sudden my priorities shifted. Like, I want to be fully alive, I want to be free, versus I want to be safe, I want to be comfortable, I want the familiar. And this isn't something to just intellectually say the right answer like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'll choose liberation. See what's really true in your experience, because it's not just something you say once or you decide once. It's something you choose between many times a day. And it's reflected in how you show up. All right, what number. Where was that? That was number. Number 8. People choose comfort over liberation much of the time. But that's not you because you're not most people. Right? All right, number nine. Pleasing and authenticity are mutually exclusive. What does that mean? Well, mutually exclusive is a fancy pants term, which means you can't have both. It's either one or the other. Day and night are mutually exclusive. And you might say, well, there's twilight and there's sun, you know, there's dawn. But it's either day or it's night. They're mutually exclusive. You can't have pleasing and authenticity. Now, I'm not saying that if you're your authentic self, you're always pissing everybody off. But what you're playing at, what you're going for is either one or the other. So if you're going to be a pleaser, like what I mean by going for it, I mean, like when I go talk to you, the way I'm acting in the world, I'm choosing how I want to be and I'm choosing what my top value is. And it might be pleasing others, not rocking the boat, keeping things smooth. Those are different ways of saying the same thing. Be nice. And so I'm gonna not say that thing. I'm going to smile a lot when you're talking, and that's so funny, I'm gonna laugh louder, more intensely than I would, right? And then I'm not gonna say much when I'm revealing about myself because I don't want you to know too much about me because you might judge me, right? So I'm choosing there being pleasing when I'm choosing that I'm not choosing authenticity. So when people want to be more free to be themselves, they want to be more authentic. They want more social confidence. If you're choosing that, then you're not choosing the pleasing behaviors. And that's scary. I mean, I don't immediately laugh after what they said. I might ask them a critical question. I might challenge them. I might disagree with them. Yeah, maybe. And now you're choosing authenticity. And look, if you're choosing to be real and to be authentic, people might really like you. They might love you, they want to sleep with you, they might want to hire you. They might want to. Whatever. I'm not saying it's all bad, but you're not going for pleasing them. And so just know, if you really want to be more fully authentic, more fully yourself, boldly, authentically, you living your life on your terms, the life you're meant to live fully, then those pleasing behaviors, every time you're practicing those, you cannot be fully yourself. That's another hour, another day, another year of your life in which you are living someone else's life, being somebody else for somebody else, until you wake up and you really start to challenge that on a fundamental level. All right, what was that? That was number nine. We're where? What time are we at here? I think we're blazing through. Oh, yeah, we're getting through more tips than in the first one. This is a tip heavy episode. That's good. I got to catch up. I thought I was gonna get through, like, seven per episode, but I only got through five last time. Now we've already done five. No, we've done four. Let's get into number five in this case, number 10. 10 total in the. In the large count tip number 10 is all our fears are fears of feelings. That's a phrase I learned from one of my teachers, Christian Michaelson. It's a good one, and it's really liberating. It's really powerful to take that in. All of our fears are fears of feelings. And he highlights this by saying, well, you know, let's say you're afraid of losing your job. Okay? You're losing what's going to happen after you lose your job. How are you going to feel about losing your job? You might say, well, I feel embarrassed. I'd feel ashamed. I feel scared. Okay, so you're afraid of feeling embarrassed, feeling ashamed, feeling scared? You might say, no, no, no. I'm afraid of, like, not being able to pay my rent. Okay, so imagine you can't pay your rent. What are you Feeling? I'm feeling uncertain, I'm feeling desperate, I'm feeling scared. Okay, so you're afraid of feeling uncertain and desperate and scared. Right. And when you really get down to it, we're afraid of our feelings. Not the actual experience, but the feelings we're going to have. Because let's say you lost your job and you felt elated, you felt inspired, you felt optimistic, you said, you know what, this is perfect timing. This is divine guidance because I really want to start my own business and I've been waiting and I've been too scared and now this pushes me over the edge. So I'm going to do it. And you feel excited and charged up and finally ready. Right. So same experience, getting laid off or getting fired, whole different reality. Why? Because you feel differently. So what you're scared of though you're not probably not scared of feeling elated, charged up and determined. You're scared of feeling shame and bad and worried and insecure. Right. So we're afraid of our feelings. Now I'll take this one step further, which is what is the feeling that we're all afraid of? There's a thousand different nuances, but at the end of the day, we're afraid of pain. We're afraid of painful feelings. Grief, anger, hurt, sadness, disconnection, fear. These are the things we're afraid of and they're all painful. So we're afraid of pain. And so all of social anxiety and niceness are born out of this. And there's a fundamental unwillingness to feel pain. So I'm going to organize my entire life behaviors and ultimately my personality around trying to avoid pain. The pain of you judging me, the pain of disconnection, the pain of discomfort, the pain of being rejected. And so when you really see that and you start to say, wait a minute, if all my fears are fears of feelings, then I can face anything, I can work through anything. I just have to be willing to feel. And that's a lot of part what I do with people, especially when they join my longer training programs, my year long mastermind to really transform. It's a lot of teaching them how to feel the feelings you've been running from. So if someone takes an action and they get rejected, you know, the person doesn't want to call them back or they're waiting for the text back and they don't know if they're going to get ghosted or if the person's into them and they're like, I'm crawling out of my skin. You know what I do I just hold them right there, like, yeah, let's go right into that feeling. And I teach them techniques to soothe their nervous system so they can handle those feelings. Because when you can feel any feeling and work your way to the other side of it, well, then you become fearless. All right, number 11, you're going to want to accumulate corrective experiences. Accumulate them? You know, like you might accumulate money or coins. If you're into coin collecting or stamps. Does anyone do stamp collecting anymore? I don't know. But you're going to accumulate them. Whatever you'd like to accumulate, make sure you also accumulate corrective experiences. Now, what are corrective experiences? This comes from the field of psychology where people. The idea is that someone has had a painful experience in their life in some area. Painful experience in dating and relationships, a painful experience in anything in a sport. Painful experience. Walking down your stairs, you fall, right? And when we've had a painful experience, our conditioning brain kicks in and says, don't go do that again. You know, don't go talk to. Don't go ask someone out again. That went really badly. Don't get into a relationship again. We know how that ends up. Don't. Don't take a risk at work. It's awful. Remember what happened. Don't walk down the stairs. You fell, you're gonna die, right? So we have this primal, protective survivor self that looks at the past and tries to protect us from pain. And then, though, you also know that walking down the stairs doesn't always mean pain and death. In fact, most of the time, it's quite fine and usually necessary to live a full life. You gotta be able to walk down stairs. Not necessarily. You know, you have some disability, you're not able to. You figure it out. But, you know, if that's not the case and you have just like some phobia of walking downstairs, you're gonna be kind of limited in your life. So the same goes for. I don't want to ask someone out. I don't want to get into a relationship. I don't want to open my heart again. I don't want to take a risk at work again. I don't want to speak up again. I don't want to try to make friends again. So you need to have what are called corrective experiences. And a corrective experience is basically when you get to go do the thing again, have a new experience that's corrective of the old one. It teaches you that actually it's okay. So in the simple example of walking down the stairs, someone Fell down the stairs. They injured themselves. They're kind of spooked. You have to help them go downstairs and realize that it's okay, you know? How do you do that? Well, you don't put them at the top of the Empire State Building and say, walk down the stairs. You know, you take them to, like, a little porch. It's got two steps, and you say, let's walk down. Why don't you hold my hand as we do it? And then maybe they do that and they're like, oh, okay, all right. And you start to work your way into it. So it's the same thing. But at some point you gotta. You gotta have these corrective experiences. And this really dovetails when, you know, you gotta take the actions in order to build the confidence, right? Tip number one. Confidence is a byproduct of action. So going on a date and having an experience of connecting with someone that's healing and fun and beautiful, that's a corrective experience. You know, initiating a potential friendship and the person being interested in wanting to spend time with you, that's a corrective experience. Now, the problem with this, people say, but I don't know if it's going to be a corrective experience or not. You know, what if I ask that person out and that person says no, too? What if I take this risk at work and it goes even worse than the first time? That's the risk, my friend. That's the risk. And yet if you never go for it, you never will have the corrective experiences and you'll never be free. You'll never be confident. So you gotta go for it. And that's another big part of what I'm doing with people is helping them get into the place where they can go take these actions. You know, I do that a lot. My virtual events and live events is like helping people get to take those actions. And so one simple thing that you can do that'll support you in being able to take the action is, you know, your mind's gonna say, this is how it's gonna go. It's awful. It's like, remember last time? And it's trying to get certainty from the past. Because the truth is, I don't know. And that's a really liberating first step, is just to say, I don't know how it's gonna go. I don't know. And here's the thing. If you put everything riding on one action, right? So last time I got my heart broken. I'm gonna put everything on this one. Date. And if it doesn't go well, then I'm gonna swear it off forever. It's like, so much pressure, man. So instead of making each one individual thing so freaking significant, just commit to a process. I. I'm going to go out on 10 dates over the next three months. I'm going to speak up at work in every meeting that I go to, or, you know, 50% of the meetings, I'm going to speak up. I'm not trying to specifically get an exact result. I'm just going to show up differently. And over time, you will accumulate more corrective experiences than you'll know what to do with. All right, let's hit one more. In today's episode, which is tip number 12, incidentally, 12 is my favorite number. Live in your reality. That's why I put this one on number 12. Cause it's so good. Tip number 12 is live in your reality. Now, that could be a whole episode. I probably even have a whole episode dedicated to that. But the short version is, when you're in social anxiety, you're living in someone else's reality. You know, so you've accumulated all the judgmental thoughts that you've heard. You know, maybe you got some judgmental thoughts from dad when he was frustrated or mom was hard on you, or the kids at school made fun of you or whatever, and you've smushed it all together into some horror nightmare reality in which everyone hates you and is judging you and sees the worst in you. It's an awful place. Is that your reality? Is that truly your reality? I know you live there for a long time, but is that really yours? And what do you really think? What do you really feel? Do you really believe? And when I do this with clients, usually there's an initial like, yeah, no, I suck. I suck. And then I kind of pierce through that, and it's like, okay, that's what your mom thought. Your mom thought it was not okay to have feelings. What do you think? What do you really think? And, you know, a great way I like to do this with people is whether they have kids. It's. It's very accessible. But even if they don't have kids, I'll say, if you did have kids, you know, what would you want to teach them about? Blank. Whatever. The thing is that they're living in some old reality. What would you want to teach them about feelings? What would you want to teach them about failure? What would you want to teach them about their worthiness or their beauty for dating or friendships? What would you want to teach them about their potential and their career or what they want to do with their life. All of a sudden, people, their whole demeanor change. Like, well, I'd want to teach them they could do anything and they put their mind to it, you know? Is that true for you? Oh. Oh, I guess that is my reality right now. There's one thing of identifying your reality, then you got to inhabit your reality. In my reality, that's something I guide people through in some of my events, particularly the not nice live event. In my reality, it's okay to, you know, you strengthen the sense of self. This bill of rights. In my reality, it's okay to say no. In my reality, I'm interested. In what? What are you interested in? What are you passionate about? Oh, I don't know if they're gonna be interested in it or not. I don't know. So maybe that's not okay. Wait, then, yeah, maybe in their reality, whatever you're interested is boring. But that's not my reality. And whose reality do you live in? Hopefully your own. So there's a lot more I could say about that, but that's good for tip level of depth here. So let's recap the ones from this episode and then get into your action steps. So tip number six, social anxiety doesn't go away on its own. It gets worse. Sounds like bad news, but it's the best news possible because you can change it. Number seven, social anxiety is egomania. Just remember that the next time you're super obsessed. How did I show up there? Oh, my gosh, everyone's thinking about this. No, they're not. It's a weird egotism delusion. Number eight, most people prioritize comfort over liberation, the familiar over freedom. What are you really prioritizing? It shows in how you show up in your actions and your life, not what you say. Number nine, pleasing and authenticity are mutually exclusive. If you're pleasing people, if you're running pleasing patterns and pleasing behavior, you're not being yourself. You have to take the risk to be authentic, and people might sometimes be upset. Number 10, all our fears are fears of feelings, with the root feeling that we're all afraid of being loosely categorized as pain or painful feelings. Number 11, accumulate corrective experiences. Not just go for one, but accumulate a lot of experiences, and you'll get some great corrective ones in there that'll show you that good things can happen, that you can be loved, that you can. Whatever it is you want to really create in your life, you can experience that. And you just gotta get enough corrective experiences. And number 12, whose reality do you live in? Oh, that's right. You live in your reality. Right. Okay, let's talk about your action step for today. Time for action. Action, Action. Your action step for today is gonna be the same action step as the very first episode in this series, which is I want you to add to your list of the 20 tips of confidence garnered over the last 20 years. So maybe you wrote the first five down if you listened to the first episode. If you did not, go back and listen to it now. And all I have you do is write down these tips, but I want you to write them down, because writing them down or typing them in a digital file on your phone, whatever, that's fine. But it's a place where you're cataloging it and you can read it. And if you read this list just a couple times a week, it will blam. Start to prime you for that whole day. You'll get thinking about different things or even just read a couple of them, have a few that just show up sometime. You know, put them somewhere. You see them on a sticky note or somewhere on your phone. And trust me, it will really start to permeate into your consciousness. You'll make different choices, you'll lean in, it'll keep it top of mind, and you'll be growing faster than ever before. So thanks for being with me today. Look forward to sharing the remaining tips in a future episode until we speak again. May have the courage to be who you are, to know on a deep level that you are awesome. I'll talk to you soon.

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Sam.