3 Secrets To Total Conversation Confidence
3 Feb 2021 · 26 min
Dr. Aziz shares three ways to feel confident talking to people: have lots of conversations to build skill, assume others like you so you stop people-pleasing, and focus on them instead of yourself. The shift from self-consciousness to genuine connection happens when you stop monitoring how you come across.
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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. Hey, welcome to today's episode of the show. Today we're going to talk about conversation confidence. Specifically three secrets that I'm going to share with you today that you can apply today to increase your confidence in conversations, which I like to say, you know, the better, better conversations equals a better life. So where do you want to be able to talk to people more? And if you can have those conversations, you can have better connections, better responses, and better results. And the results can be very business and career oriented. Right? If you're able to talk to people better, you could possibly sell better. You can get your job better. You can change jobs and elevate your position and get a promotion through changing jobs. You can negotiate better for a promotion, but also you can show up more as a leader. Because I talk to people all the time who are very technically skilled, but they don't get to that next level in their career, not because they don't have the technical ability, because they don't have the people ability. They gotta learn how to talk to people and work with different departments and work with people under them and manage people. That's what leadership is, right? So that is a conversation, a series of conversations. Obviously, your love life is about conversations, whether it's connecting with someone new or continuing to connect and deepen and build a better and better relationship. That's all a series of conversations. And your social life, whether it's connecting with brand new people and having that confidence to be yourself right from the gate, right from the get go, as opposed to like, okay, I'm going to be this guarded, weird, slightly tense, restricted version of me until I know you like me, and then I'll be me. That's how I did it for years, or even worse, I'm going to avoid even interacting with you, so then you can't judge me. Right? That's gonna be, that's gonna take a hit on your social life. So the opposite of that is gonna be what being able to move towards people freely, confidently, easily. That's what we're talking about. That's the promise of conversations. And I'm so excited about this. I have a live event that we're right in the middle of doing a early bird, super early bird promotion for right now. So you can get your ticket at an incredibly discounted rate. Just $97 for the standard ticket or 297 for the VIP if you want. And I encourage you, if you are benefiting from this episode, you can also listen to the last one, which is about how to free yourself from social anxiety in conversations, if you like. That last one and this one, we're going to be doing a ton of this for three days. Much deeper. We can go into much more depth because we have three full days together. So I highly recommend you go to shrinkforthshyguy.com and under this episode there will be a link to get that super early bird ticket right now. Shrinkforthyguy.com and I will share that. I got some messages. This is like, rare, but once in a while I get a message from someone who's like, I love your podcast, but why are you always pumping your live events, man? I mean, come on, stop it. Don't you make enough money from your books? And I said, no, I make enough money from my crypto. No. Maybe, maybe someday. But yeah, no, the live events. And the reason why I'm such a big fan of them is because that is what radically transformed my life. And before I'd gone to live events, I'd done therapy and I'd done online courses and I'd read books and I had grown, definitely, definitely grew from that. But it wasn't until I attended my first in person or virtual event, I've done both, that, that my life really started to radically, radically change because you're around other people virtually or in person, and that changes everything and the depth and the interaction. And there's an energy exchange that goes way beyond information. And you can feel some of that here in this podcast. It's not just the words I'm saying, it's me here with you and us working together on this. So imagine intensifying that. And there's something about being around other people. So it's not just you and the teacher, you and the therapist, you and the book, you and the author. It is you and others working on this. And boom, that opens up everything. So the reason I talk about them, the reason I offer them, and the reason why we make these online ones so accessible is because I want to change people's lives. That's what I'm here to do. It's called Operation Mass Liberation, how to inspire unstoppable confidence in as many humans as possible. So that's why I'm passionate about it. And if you don't like the announcements about it, my apologies. And you could probably just Skip ahead like 15 seconds. Is he done talking about his freaking event, man? And continue with the episode. And, you know, also, just keep in mind, this is free. This whole thing is free. Free. So, you know, sometimes I think we can get. It's funny, right? How we can get entitled to things like, I should get all this, like, hundreds of hours of free training and basically free therapy. And now he's talking about his event for three minutes. Come on. But that's okay. So I just wanted to share, though, where I'm coming from with that, because some people, they're not gonna like it no matter what. And that's okay. I'm not for everybody. But there's someone, maybe you listening right now, who are like, the events, huh? I don't know. And maybe you saw in my emails or something about it, and you're like, I don't know. And I would just. You're gonna be on the fence here, and I would just invite you to take the leap. And I would love, love, love, love to see your life totally transform in that way. And let's talk about transforming it right now with these three secrets to be confident in conversations. Okay? Now one more thing I'm gonna share about this is don't just listen to these and be like, nah, I don't know. I'm already doing that, or I don't know about doing that, or I don't know, don't listen with, like, your head and analyzing. If it's going to be maybe useful or something like, I would encourage you to listen and then apply. Because this will not be useful as an intellectual set of data in your head. It will only be useful through your action, through your behavior. Does that make sense? That's why we do end all these episodes of the action step. So here we go. Number one, if you want to be extremely confident or more confident or just a little bit confident in conversations, then number one secret, number one is have a lot of conversations. And that one already may have lost some people like, oh, man, shit. But trust me, after you hear these other secrets and start practicing this stuff and learn from me and work with me or go to this podcast and listen to other stuff and just apply these things and grow in your social confidence, all of a sudden they don't seem so terrible. So at first it might seem like I'm saying you don't like root canals. You want to know how to enjoy root canals more. You get a lot of root canals. So stick with me and it will all make a lot more sense and seem more accessible soon. But we have to start with that one because we need to get out of this quick fix one and done. What's the secret bullet pill mindset. There is no magic pill. It is repetition. That's what gets us better at anything. That's what gets us more confident at anything. You want to be more confident public speaking, you got to do public speaking. You want to be confident speaking up in groups, you got to speak up in groups. You want to be confident in dating, you got to date a lot. You want to be confident in a certain proficiency at your work. You know, whether it's programming skill, a software skill, the software that you use, graphic design, speaking, teaching, surgery, whatever, the thing that you want to do for work, you practice it a shit ton. And then you get good at it and then you feel more confident. So that must happen. And so we must shift from like, I always want to interact with people, not that much at all, and then feel really confident in conversations when I rarely have a conversation. It's just not going to work. You got to start to open yourself up now. That doesn't mean that you have to become the kind of person who loves to talk to people all day long. That's not my jam. You know, I love to connect with people. I love to go deep. I love to have life changing conversations or deeply connecting conversations. And, you know, I could have, you know, a little bit of time here and there to connect, maybe a couple hours throughout the day. I could have six, seven hours of the day where I'm not talking to anybody and feel fine. And some people are like, no, I gotta talk to people all day long. So you don't have to become one of those kind of people. But you do need to be able to have a lot of conversations to be able to start to get more fluent and fluid and confident with them. And so where can you get practice having more conversations? That's a question I have for you. And no, the answer isn't, in a year when vaccines have saved us all and we're quote, back to normal, how about now? How about this week? Where can you have more conversations? It might say, as these I'm already having a lot of conversations, and I have a lot of social anxiety still. I'm not confident. Well, stick with me. I'll give you more secrets. This is just the first secret. But if you're not doing this one, then the other ones aren't going to work. Because if I share something and you're like, oh, yeah, I applied that once a month when I had a conversation then. Not going to work. Right? And not just any conversation, but opening yourself up to conversations that maybe are a little uncomfortable for you with the kind of people that are a little uncomfortable to you. So lean in. I remember when I was practicing this stuff, I went from not talking to women I was attracted to, not talking to strangers, not talking to people that I thought were attractive or powerful or worthwhile, which was everyone that was better than me in my mind. So I didn't talk to her. I talked to, like, my two friends and maybe some colleagues at work, but I even avoided colleagues at work, too. It was just this default habit of avoiding conversations. That's what we got to change. That's the first secret. You got to change it. You got to shift. You got to start to move towards approach instead of avoid. And then I started to take this on, and I looked for opportunities to talk to people, especially if they intimidated me. I'd walk over and talk to that guy who was really well dressed and seemed like he was cool. I would walk over to the woman that I thought was really attractive. Now, if you're hearing that and like, whoa, dude, that's a big jump for me. Well, you can get there. You don't have to jump straight in, but just lean in a little bit. Lean in 3%, 5% into your edge. And of course, if you want to really radically boost your confidence to where you can walk over and talk to anyone, then I highly recommend that online live event I was just talking about. But however you're gonna get there, you gotta be able to get into those conversations. Okay? Secret number two is assume approval. Assume approval, and here is why that's so important. The actual secret is not only to assume approval, but not be at peace or relaxed or unattached to how they perceive you. Right? Whether they like you or don't like you, want to be your friend or not love you or feel aversion towards you to be. Okay, okay, if they like me. Okay, if they don't like me. That's what we're going for. Now, that's kind of a little bit of a stretch at first. People are like, oh, my gosh, I do really want them to like me. So one way to kind of stair step there is to assume approval. So assume approval goes like this. How are you around people that you already know, love you and like you? Maybe a good friend, a lover, a parent, a sibling, a co worker. And it could be someone from the past, too. It doesn't have to be, you know, just currently, but when you're around that person, you just. You relax, you hang out, you have fun. They're a good buddy, they're a. A mate, something just. They match you. You guys connected and you're at ease together. So when you're around that person, for the most part, unless you guys are having a fight or whatever, for the most part, you assume that they're gonna like you. You assume that they love you. That doesn't mean they might not, you know, judge you here and there or dislike or have difference of opinions or whatever, but for the most part, you know, like, oh, yeah, this person likes me. And then just think about and focus on how do you act around that person? How do you move? How do you speak? What kinds of stuff do you talk about? How do you talk? Are you fast? Speaking slow? Do you smile a lot? Do you laugh a lot? Do you make jokes a lot? What do you like? That is what you're like when you're more authentic, when you're assuming approval, you just know it's already there. So the goal is to be that way around anyone. And you might change it slightly. You know, the way you talk with your buddy might be a little bit different than the way you talk to someone in a workplace setting, but that's just like a small percentage change to fit the environment, right? You know, you change your clothes. Maybe you're not in your sweatset, you're meeting. Although in these days of Zoom meetings, maybe you are. I don't know, maybe you're wearing sweats on the bottom and a business shirt up top. But whatever it is, you might use a little bit different language to talk about the particular issue or whatever, but your energy is kind of the same. You know, you're kind of a little bit more light or fluid. The way you move, the way you use your hands, the way you talk, the animation in your voice, and especially if it's like a social situation, whatever, you bring a lot more of you. In fact, I think a marker of authenticity is how much are you similar with a lover, with your friends, with your kids, with a colleague, with a co worker, with a boss, the superior With a waiter, with whoever. You're just you. That's the goal for me. How can I be as much me as possible? So I'm not like, well, I'm really restricted around this person. I'm really open around that person, and I don't want that. That's all coming from. I don't want that person to dislike me. Which leads me to the second part of this secret, which is that assuming approval is moving us towards the real liberation, which is freedom from what you think of me. It's okay if you like me. It's okay if you don't. It's okay if you feel attraction or aversion towards me. And that could be romantic or just, you know, we're drawn to people, right? Moving towards people. And it's okay if you want to spend more time with me or you want to spend less time with me, it's okay. And we can get there by first assuming more approval and acting that way and acting on that. And you might say, is this faking it? Is this fake it till you make it? Is my pretending. Well, no, you're not pretending to be someone else. You're being you. You're accessing your authentic you in a situation where normally you're pretending to be not you. Does that make sense? That's a whole game changer if you get that. So I'm not being fake when I am restricted and just hiding a bunch of myself and talking in a different way. I'm being fake then to guard myself, to hopefully have you not dislike me. And it's a losing game. And you will never have conversation confidence, and you'll have poorer responses in those conversations because you're not being authentic. And authenticity is attractive. Authenticity magnifies your energy the most. It makes you the brightest. You're the brightest candle, the brightest flame that you can be when you're being 100% authentic, because you're not restricting that natural essence and life force that moves through you. That's what's attractive. Not your fricking shirt or your belly or your nose or whatever you think is the determining factor. It's you being 100% you that is magnetic. And so we want to access that by first assuming approval. It's a bigger practice to get to that place of neutrality around people's responses to you. That's for people who really want to master confidence. You know, I find there's people that want to just get enough confidence to, like, get by. And then there's people like me who are like, I don't want to just get by. I want to transform this. I want to feel fully confident. I want to feel like, how far can I take this? How confident can I be? And if you're one of those people, obviously the event is a great place to start. And also if you're interested, you go to the coaching page on my website, draziz.com,-r-a z I z.com and on there there's a tab called Coaching. And if you want, you can just enter your name and email there and someone on my team will connect with you and they'll guide you through a process where you can experience more confidence in that moment and also see what's getting in the way and then explore what some of the options are for coaching. With me, I run several different groups. One is three months and one is a year. And those are extremely powerful. The 90 day one, the three month one, is called total social freedom and it's entirely focused on liberating you from the fear of judgments of others and becoming completely solid in yourself. And of course, the mastermind is that. And even more so, those are just some options. But the key thing here is the more you are needing other people to like you, the more your conversation confidence will suffer. So start by assuming approval. How would I act, how would I approach if I already knew they liked me? It's going to unlock the more confident you and then the next step would be to really build up that practice of yours. So it's like, yeah, someone doesn't like me. I am. Okay. And I'll have another episode coming up in a little bit here about how to tolerate rejection and disapproval because that's extremely important too. Okay, what is secret number three? Secret number three is. Well, first recap, number one, you want to have conversation confidence. Have a lot of conversations. Number two is to assume approval and move towards being letting go of the need for people to respond to you in any way. And then number three is upgrade your focus. Upgrade your focus. Because when we're struggling with confidence in conversations, we're generally focused entirely on ourselves and how we're coming across, or maybe not entirely on. But that's a big chunk of your bandwidth. And the more anxious you are, the more that's. Your bandwidth is more and more absorbed by that, which makes you less engaged with the other person. They feel it energetically. It's a vicious cycle. Then they're not as interested or engaged with you. So we need to upgrade our focus. And the first step in upgrading is instead of Focusing so much on me. How much can focus on you? Right. That's the first step. That's kind of the broad way to think about it. Let's focus towards myself, about myself, and more focus on you. Energy going towards you. Just think about that. Imagine for a minute you stripped away all the content of the conversation and you just thought of humans, like flamingos. You ever seen any nature footage or been at the zoo or something? And there's like a bunch of flamingos and they'll just be like making sounds, squawking. I don't know if that's what it sounds. I think it's kind of. That's pretty good. I gave myself a 8 out of 10 on my flamingo impression there. I've been practicing that all month. But whatever. They're honking. And I'm sure if someone studies birds, they're shaking their head like, this guy doesn't know anything. They're honking. Flamingos are honking. Flamingos be honking and. And you just look at them and they're just making sounds. Now imagine it was humans and humans be honking. And we're like, it's all the content and all the back and forth and whatever, but just if you just observed it and you just imagine it was an exchange, right? A conversation is just an exchange. Exchange of what? Exchange of. Well, you could say an exchange of ideas, Exchange of emotion. At the end of the day, it's exchange of energy. We like it, we don't like it. We want to move towards you, want to move away. Information is energy. So we just got energy. We got an energy exchange. And when you are focused primarily on you, or at least even 30%, 40%, 50% or more on you in the conversation, then you are withholding a lot of that energy, exchange a lot of that attention. And people feel that. And what lights people up. People open up. Attention is magnetic. Attention feels so good. You know this. When someone gives you their attention, you feel good. And so when we can give that to others more and more and more fully, they feel better and better and better around us. So not only do we have the byproduct of feeling more confident because we're not all in our head observing ourselves and judging ourselves, we also are more connected with others and they feel it and they like us more generally. Now, we can't control if everyone likes you or not, but it generally is going to trend towards people appreciating that and wanting more. And then of course, that gives us more confidence because we're getting More positive responses in those conversations, which we're having more of. And it's a virtuous cycle where you get better and better at conversations. So when you notice yourself kind of imploding inward, did they like that? How did that go? Just think, you know, out of me, onto you, out of me and onto you, out of my head and into my life, out of my head and interacting with that person. Now, it's not bad to have any awareness on yourself, but it's very different to be in your head, like reflecting on how am I coming across versus being aware of your body and how you're feeling. That's important, right? You know, do you like something? Do you like interacting with them? This is important for dating and other things, right? Like, just because you don't be like, I'm gonna focus on the other person and then I don't matter. Like, no, your thoughts, your feelings matter. It's just not that self evaluation that's absorbing all your energy. Does that make sense? Okay, so you've learned three secrets today. There's so much more. I would love to share more with you. Come join me for Supremely Confident conversation master online 2021 in March. You can find all the details@shrinkforthshyguy.com you can also go to the draze.com website, Dr.a z I z.com and get yourself the go to the Events tab and find the access there. It's super early bird right now for just a few more days, I believe. So now is the time to take advantage of it. For the standard ticket, it's just $97 and you can access it from anywhere in the world. And it is powerful. We've converted all the stuff we do into online format. We can do all the exercises and interactions and it's so important. And if you're waiting for life to not be on zoom anymore and everything to be normal, quote, unquote, that's problematic. How long, how long until it gets, quote, back to normal? Will it get back to normal? And where are you missing out on conversation confidence right now and waiting and waiting and waiting. And do you want to. If things do become more interactive in person again, wouldn't you rather be 6, 9, 12 months ahead in your confidence and growth, rather than just sort of putting on ice and atrophying? So that's my philosophy. That's how I've approached this change. You know, flex, adapt and grow. Let's do this. So speaking of doing things, let's talk about action. Time for action. Action Action. Your action step is to have three conversations as swiftly as possible, like in the next day or two or three. Seek them out and then practice assuming approval and getting that focus on the other person. Assuming approval and getting the focus outside of you, outside your thoughts and outside of your evaluations of yourself. And of course, getting into those conversations. So three is the magic number there. Maybe you'll get all three today and just notice what that can kickstart for you and your life. And if you notice that you listen to this and you're like, yeah, three, that sounds great. Yeah, I'll totally take that action. Maybe never. That's another reason why I love the online events and stuff is because you're going to do it. You're going to do a lot more. You're going to lift a whole lot more weight. You're going to get a lot more stronger. A lot more stronger. A lot stronger. More strong. I got my grammars. I went to schools. And the best school. I went to the best schools. I got the best words. We missed you, Donnie. Alright. Actually, we don't. I don't. I don't personally. It's relief, honestly, to not see such rampant egomania all the time. Anyway, I digress. Until we speak again. May have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. 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 vlogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com it.










