3 Keys From Conversation Master

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. The show to help you break free from social anxiety, people pleasing and self doubt so you can speak up, connect and be 100% you. I'm Dr. Aziz, sharing tools that have transformed my life and thousands of others. Let's all liberate ourselves together.

Welcome to today's episode of the show. Today I want to share my top three takeaways from the supremely confident conversation master training that happened over this last weekend. It was a three day virtual workshop and if you're able to join me, it was awesome. And if you were not able to join, well, perhaps the next time in 2026 when I offer a virtual workshop. But what I wanted to share here, here with you today, whether you were there or not, this will be beneficial. Which is the top three takeaways that I had from teaching this workshop which I've taught a handful of times before, maybe man, six or seven at this point. So each time is very different in a lot of ways because it's so dynamic and the people in the room and what we cover and my own growth and how I teach things and yet there's some core themes that emerge every time. And so I wanted to cover the top three takeaways that I had that you can use in your own life. And this applies to not just conversation. So you might think of, oh, conversation is talking to people, which is extremely useful, valuable, liberating to be able to go talk to people wherever you go. But then we want to take it deeper, right? And that's what a lot of the event is about. Not just how do you perform in a conversation, but how do you be more relaxed, be more at ease, be more yourself, be more free and then also create deeper connection too, right? Because it's not just about getting through a little chit chat somewhere and making sure they don't dislike you. That's a no fun game to play, right? We actually want to be able to create deeper connections, relationships, love. And then not just a deeper conversation in that moment, but then that continues right into a friendship, into a budding new intimate relationship to ultimately you feeling deeply connected with others. And so that's the starting place I want us to begin with, which is do you feel both of those things? One would be the surface level. Do you feel like, yeah, I can talk to people, I can approach people, I can create connection wherever I go. And maybe that's not a binary yes or no. It's like, it depends, man. Well, so give me a number. One to ten. Ten is like yeah, yeah, sure man, of course, dude, bro, I don't know why you're putting those in there, but that's what a 10 sounds like, bro. Right? And then maybe it's. Or it's lower five. I don't know, maybe it's even lower two. Ah, man, that sounds really hard. It's uncomfortable. I doubt myself. I talk myself out of it, I judge myself, whatever. Okay, so that's the first one. And the second one is what about creating deeper connections? Not just talking on the surface or even having a nice back and forth for a few minutes, but really going deeper, feeling more emotional connection with people, more bonds.

And then also deeper long term friendships, relationships. So 1 to 10 there 10 being you're able to do that and you enjoy the fruits of that, which will be some deeper relationships in your life and less going down the scale, all the way down to a one. One would be feeling very alone or isolated. And it's possible to have high in the first one and low in the second one.

I know, crazy, huh? But it can happen. And maybe it's happening to you where you can approach people and talk with them. Maybe you have a lot of acquaintances, you work with a lot of people, you interact with people. I see this often. Maybe a professional is very confident. Confident or comfortable in their role as a doctor or as a server or whatever it is. And when they're interacting with people, they can do that. Okay, they can play that role. But then in their personal life, they don't have the deep connection that they want.

So there's no right answer here. There's your answer. That's an important starting point. Because if we don't make this connected, if we don't make this real, then this is like my first takeaway. You ready? The first takeaway is you gotta want it. You really gotta want it. And I'm gonna explain what that means. But you might be connected with that and you might not be. And I think that's the biggest problem. The biggest problem is not, oh, I don't have the connection that I want, or I don't know, the friends that I want or I don't feel like I can connect with new people easily. Those are, those are problems. We can solve those. But the biggest problem is this shutting down of the connection system.

We tell ourselves, convince ourselves, believe.

I don't want that, I don't need that. And this is a, sometimes a conscious thing, like, you know, we close our heart, like, oh, I don't want to get hurt again. I'm Never going to open my heart in love or connection. And sometimes that could be a conscious thing, but often it settles into an unconscious, as in you're not aware of it story that is influencing you and all your choices. So it might show up as, ah, I just, I'm too busy right now. I got so much going on. I've got work, I got this, I got that. I just don't feel like it right now. I don't know, I got something else. Yeah.

And we don't see it as necessary.

Connection is necessary and there's reasons for that, right? Maybe we feel a little hopeless or discouraged, like I can't create it or connect it anyway. Maybe we're scared of some painful situation. Someone abandoned or left us or broke up with us or friendship got painful and ended or something.

Or maybe it's just the old, old, old specters of the past. The ghosts of your worth and unworth unworthiness for friendship and connection. So why put myself out there? Why try whatever it is this leads to, not necessarily a raw hunger like, man, I want this, I need it. It's necessary, but it's so hard, I can't have it. That's a very uncomfortable place for humans to stay in. It's a very dissonant place inside. And so we try to try to make ourselves feel better by closing it down, shutting down the connection hunger system. And so the first takeaway is you got to want it. That's why I started with those one to 10 questions.

Because connection is necessary, it's essential, and we can adapt in this current environment to think that we don't need it because we have so much emotional.

It's not even regulation. Right. It's emotional coping through our devices. I don't need to talk to somebody. I can listen to a podcast. I don't need to interact. I could watch a video, I could scroll through social media and have some feeling of interaction with others.

But it's not really going to meet the need. It's like saying, I don't need to drink water. I, you know, ate some food earlier. There was probably some water content in it. Well, maybe, but you ultimately do need water. And I'm not saying you could survive. And I have evidence of this with my kids because we just always trying to get them to drink water, hydrate. It's like, nah, I don't need to drink. You haven't drink anything all day. And then you'll go try to do something active. And then they're like, oh, I feel so bad. I'M so thirsty. I was like, yeah, because you're. You're not feeling your body right? So. So even if you don't feel like you need it, maybe a little disconnected from that.

You'Re experiencing the symptoms perhaps of that dehydration, which might feel like an emptiness, a pain in your chest, a vague longing, maybe even longing for more. Something more success, more money. Check that investment. What's, oh, I gotta solve this. Obsess about this thing at work, or, you know, as we get into our head about something. And underneath that, those might be all signs of, I'm thirsty, man. Thirsty for human connection, for direct contact with other people. And so that's my first major.

Gift. Hopefully that lands with you, that stirs something inside. Now, I know this could be a little painful because if it's stirred inside, but then we also feel like it's discouraged, it's impossible, or, ah, then we want to shut it down again. But that good news leads me to my second point, which is conversation capacity and connection capacity are absolutely possible for anyone, and.

That you can create them faster than you think. And I have. I know this. I say this at the beginning of the workshop. I might say this on this podcast because I know it to be true. And then it's affirmed every time I teach one of these workshops where we have someone who's pretty isolated, hasn't interacted with that many people, and they come back after day two or three and they're sharing and they're lit up like a different person. And in some ways they are. I think of it as a different version of them. And that version is driving the bus now. It's this bolder, more alive, and they're excited and they're saying, wow, I went to this place and I talked to these people and I said hi to all these people, and I started this conversation.

I was like, whoa, where did that come from? Well, it's because in many ways, there is a skill to conversations, right? You can get better at listening, you can get better at asking questions. I teach those tools at the workshop. So, yes, there is a skill to it, but the vast majority of the capacity is innate. That means it's inside of you. It's like walking or eating or breathing. Those are. You don't need to learn how to do those. And there's an element of calibrating your body to be able to walk, right? But it's a human.

Inevitability unless there's some impairment in the physical body that they're going to learn how to walk, they're going to build up that capacity, I'd say. Well, Aziz, what about those people that can't walk? Right. I'm one of those people that can't talk. Can't talk to people. Right. And. No, no, the issue there might be that it was uncomfortable for you for a variety of reasons. Self doubt, self criticism, you know, early trauma or pain or something that made you want to move away from people. And so we avoided it. And so you just might need some reps. You know, my. My brother's got this. His. My nephew. His son is about a year, I think. Yeah. Just turned a year old. And he's got this little walker thing where it's a. It's like a. Almost like. Imagine a little shopping cart kind of thing, but instead of having a basket in front of you, it just goes straight to the ground. But it's flat. A little pallet almost, you might think it's got these four wheels and allows him to zoom around the house and helps him build his leg strength where without. If he. If he didn't have that, he'd be falling all over the place. Right. And so they let him do that sometimes just to build the balance and whatever, but when they want to, you know, take him somewhere and they let him zoom around on his little. His little walker, you know, so beautiful cycle of life, by the way. You got the walker at, you know, ages 1 and the walker at age 85. And sometimes people resist that. And, oh, it's bad. So bad that grandma has a walker. So bad to have that walker. But what if it's as beautiful then as it is when the baby is one?

Or as Candice, my wife, says, what if death were as beautiful as birth?

So there's a little side tangent for you for depth, but yes, you absolutely can learn this. You might need to walk. And hence the practice is getting into the experience. And the first takeaway, right, is I have to want this. I have to see that I need this. And then number two is I gotta get into practice with this. And the biggest obstacle here is people don't sustain the practice. They don't do it long enough. That's why I'm a huge believer in support, accountability. I call it doing the lone wolf versus doing it with a pack. And we get around other people who are doing it. We stay in that group environment, keep learning together, growing together for months, years, and then, boom, it's just different version after different version.

And one of the biggest obstacles that can come up for this is like, is that story. Right. Oh, it's not possible for me. And that. Well, that's the subject of many podcast episodes and a big focus of my work. Right. Is that story of impossibility is not fact. It's not true. It is a safety mechanism to prevent us from the discomfort of the process of that growth.

And that can apply to anything that we tell ourselves when it comes to these core things. Now, I'm not talking about some crazy outlier situation. The example I was using just the other day on a Mastermind call was, we've been watching a lot of football this season with my kids. It's fun. I don't think I'd watch it on my own, but I love talk about connection. I love doing it with them and seeing their reactions and talking about the games and stuff with them. But in any case.

Man, so I'm. I'm 42 and just still going pretty strong athletically, and I watch football now with a different eye than when I was younger. I'm just like, oh, my, how did these dudes do it to just get slammed so hard every play? How are they not breaking? You know, it's a incredible constitution, and a lot of them do have injuries and stuff, so it's pretty. Pretty intense. Uh, but if I wanted to say, hey, I'm going to go play in the NFL, that's. It's. You could say that's impossible. And that's okay. I'm not one of. Anything's possible if you dream it, man. Right. I don't know if we need to take that to. To the extreme edges, but we're not talking about the extreme edges here. We're talking about core capacities. So whether it's being able to connect with others or experience love or have a relationship, be able to steer your career, to grow, to do work that's more meaningful.

These aren't extreme outlier possibilities. Right. It's almost like saying, I can't lose weight or I can't. Actually. If you follow a certain process, you will. It's almost. That story is irrelevant. It's just, are you willing to do what it takes? And there's a phenomenal line. I was just recently watching the movie Interstellar, which I hadn't seen since it came out. I don't know if you've seen that one. Amazing. So good. Highly recommend. I liked it even more now than when I first saw it. But when I first saw it, I didn't have kids, and now I got some. Some depth in me, some time, some more of my own Time. That's a big theme in that movie. But anyway, there's a line where Matthew McConaughey, of course, Matthew McConaughey is, you know, ace space pilot. And the short version is there's some explosion and they need to dock their little ship to this spinning larger ship. And it's meant to be docked at extremely slow speeds. Everything's stationary, but they have to dock to it or they're all gonna die and all humanity is gonna die. And so he start. He wants to spin his ship at the same rotation as the main one that's spinning and then lock in. And so they have an AI on the ship, and he starts to get close towards it and he's like, we have to. We're going to spin our rotation and dock. And the AI said, it's not possible.

And he replies, no, it's necessary. And then they do it. And that's the. That's the energy of whatever it takes, right? It's. It's. I'm not going to engage with the storyline of whether it's possible or not. In fact, that can be a long, distracting by design of your safety police. It's like, well, hey, if we just have him really in his head about whether it's possible or not, then his progress is going to be slowed. And so remember, your safety police wants to prevent you from taking the action, but if it can't prevent you from taking the action, it can sure slow you down. That also is a form of maybe trying to be safer, right? So we have to defy that story and get into motion. And then the third takeaway is.

And this was a big focus of the last day, is that belonging, a feeling of belonging similar to a feeling of worth and that feeling of possibility.

Are just reflections of a temporary emotional state of a story in your mind more than reality. In other words, it's possible for you to feel like you don't belong when others are warmly accepting you and really do want to connect with you. Maybe you even had that experience.

So it's not a shared. It's not like a shared experience where someone is like, you, you, or why are you here? Right? They could be like, hey, what's up, Aziz? You know, let's chat. And then someone else is chatting and everyone's chatting. And inside I'm like, but I don't fit in. I don't belong. Right? And so we basically want to bypass that feeling because it's not necessarily giving you useful information. Now, I'm not saying that everyone accepts you in Fact that's a big part of growing your confidence and social confidence is knowing that some people are going to say no. But.

That feeling of belonging, which is really the same as a sense of self worth, right? Because if they say no to me, then I don't belong, I don't fit in, I don't connect. It's basically like I'm not worthy of connection and it blocks connection. And so we need to bypass that because it's just this big vague side quest like I'm gonna go try to go get belonging somehow. And usually it's to achieve something, to become a somebody, to prove our worth and then I can come back and belong. But you don't need to do all that. You could just move right towards the person. So here's how you bypass that. In fact, the way you bypass that is going to be through your action step for today. Time for action, action, action. Your action step for today is to get into motion. And so let's go take a risk. Let's go take a social action, Move towards somebody. Remind yourself that I need connection, it's essential. So let me go take the risk. Let me go practice something, whether it's initiating a conversation or going a little deeper with somebody. And then apply the. If there's the belonging obstacle getting in the way, then apply this, which is, what if I did belong? In fact, a little catchphrase I shared at the event is I belong at every table. I belong everywhere I go. So if that were true, you may say, wow, it doesn't feel true as he is. Well, if that were true, what would you do? How would you approach people? How would you interact? And I'm going to suggest that you can go do the thing even if you don't feel the belonging. Because if you wait for it to feel the belonging, then that's more safety police. We're waiting forever. It's elusive, it's vague, it's nebulous, we never get it. And so act as if you belong. What if I belong? Okay, I'm going to go do that thing. And you just might find that the whole thing evaporates. You don't even need to focus on that. And if the I belong at every table helps you bridge across that to see it's all an illusion, then great, use it. And the key thing is to from that place, okay, what if I belonged here? Well, then I would just go say hi to those people. Well, to make it really real in your experience, we would need to go take that risk, right? Say hi to those people. So that is your action step for today. Thank you for being with me and until we speak again, may have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. Talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com.