3 Things You Should Know About Transforming Confidence

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 the show. Today I'm going to be talking with you about three things that you should know about transforming your confidence. And if you have social anxiety or niceness or people pleasing or any other thing that might have led you to this show, you read one of my books or watch some other videos of mine, you're in the right place because this is, this is how you change it. You absolutely can. I just finished running a virtual event about maybe about three, three weeks ago or now. It's called End Social Anxiety Now. And if you were there, it was amazing to spend that time with you and it doesn't have to hold you back for life. That's what I get so inspired about. And I know this because I experienced it myself and I helped a ton of other people do that. But when we're in it, it's like, let's say you grew up in poverty and then there's someone you know from school or that you grew up with and you look at them and they're doing really well and they're whatever, they move to a different place and they're successful and they're thriving and they have money and you're like, oh man, lucky. Or I don't like them or envy or maybe self pity or why didn't happen to me or there's something wrong with me, shame, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. And that's what it can be like when you hear about someone transforming their confidence, especially if you've felt stuck or frustrated. Like you've tried a lot of things. Look, I did therapy, I read this book, I tried to take action and it dug you deeper, perhaps into a sense of I can't change this. So I'm so excited to share this with you because there's three things you need to know about transforming your confidence. And the first one, well, the first one is the key to the others. The first one is that it is possible. And you might don't just like roll your eyes and be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, it's possible. That's like saying it's possible for anyone to come out of poverty and become wealthy. Yes, it's possible for you to be president, young man, or young lady. And we kind of roll our eyes. Anyone can be anything. Sure. But we all know that you're probably not going to be in the NBA or the NFL unless you're, you know, a super small subset of the population. But the good news is this isn't like some crazy unicorn result like starting your own company in your bedroom that becomes a billion dollar tech company or something. Right? I would say the odds of that are pretty darn low. No matter who you are, you could be brilliant, you could be involved in tech your whole life. You could. And those people might, you know, make great money or have their own business and do well. But the fact that they become, you know, one of the few companies that goes to billions or multi billions and goes public and all that, it's real low odds. Same thing with these things like the NFL and the NBA. I mean you gotta be like the best of the best and you know, not get injured and get into the right opportunities and, and, and. But transforming your confidence is not one of those extreme things. It might seem that way to you. Like, ugh, that's like harder than getting into the NBA. It's not. It's not. And all the things that can come with a transformed confidence, like more social connection, friends, community, feeling like you belong, a romantic relationship with someone that you love and are excited to be with, who loves you back. These are not one in a billion type things. These are inevitabilities. When your confidence transforms, they're the reflection of a more confident you. The world around you starts to respond differently. You start to create different circumstances around yourself. So make no mistake, this isn't just a, I don't know, a pump up or an Internet meme like you can do anything. This is a fundamental first step. Because if you don't believe that you can, if you have certainty that you cannot, then we just. What's the point of learning the next two things in this episode? What's the point of continuing to listen this episode or watch any of my materials or read any of my books? Because then what you're doing is you're looking to confirm certainty rather than for freedom or transformation. There's an uncertainty in change. I've seen this in my own life. The periods I mean There's a part of me is like, I'm stuck, whatever it is, right? For a long time I was in social anxiety and then niceness in relationships and then physical problems and then challenges at times in career or business. And every single time, you know, when I'm going through the hard time, which might feel awful, and it's been going on for months or years, some cases decades, and when I'm in it, you know, at times I'm so frustrated, like, oh, I just want things to be different. Oh, I just wish I wish I could have that. Or this sucks, I'm so frustrated. And then when my life really does change in that area, instead of it being just this pure roller coaster of excitement, adrenaline, endorphins, like, this is the greatest ever. It's actually a time of a lot of discomfort. I feel ungrounded. There can be a sense of excitement or possibility or optimism, like my life's changing or this is changing finally. And then some other feeling, I don't know, anxious. It's almost like wanting to grab for the familiar ground to stand on of helpless, hopeless, stuck, the old identity. And so when we look to this podcast or something else as a tool or insights on how to make a change, there's a part of us that of course wants, that hungers for that or you wouldn't listen to this. And there's another part that also hungers for demands, is addicted to the ground of certainty, of solidity, of I know who I am and I know where I belong in the world and I know that people aren't going to like me and I know that I'm a loser and I know that I'm less than and it feels awful, but at least I know what's what. And so to really open yourself up to this first thing, this first truth about transforming confidence is you have to see it's possible. And look at what inside of you resists that, wants things to say the same, wants to fight that possibility. And that right there is a. That's not your official action step for the episode, but it is a, well, could be a life changing action step for you to really investigate that. Okay, so that's, number one, you should know about transforming confidence. Number two is it requires something of you. I'm going to share specifically what requires your firstborn son. No, it requires something of you, though. In other words, you don't get something for nothing. And I believe that in all things in life, you know, you can get more than you put into something. Right? You can receive even More benefits. You can get an asymmetric setup where you put in a little bit. You get a lot that does happen sometimes in investing or other things in life and you still have to take the risk to put the something in in the beginning. And people look at people who make money in business or investing like, oh, lucky, yeah, I could have done that. I would have done that. It's like, no, you wouldn't have. You would have been too scared, scary, scary to risk and lose money on things, right? So put your heart into a business and see if it grows. So no, you wouldn't have done that or you wouldn't, or you would already be there. So we have to put something in. And this is true when it comes to building confidence. You need to put something into it to get something out of it. You don't get something for nothing. And usually more is needed than you think or that you might want to put in. You know, a lot of people would want all kinds of results in their life, whether it's their fitness, they want to look shredded and lean and have those six pack abs, they want to make a certain amount of money, they want to have whatever, a certain level of friendship, all of those things requires you to put something into it. And oftentimes I'll see people when they're trying to change their confidence is they, they put a little bit in and then they say it's not working. And that's what I break it down with. I'm like, well, what did you try? What did you do? And when I say put a little bit in, let's make it very practical. So if you want to build your social confidence, let's say, and we were breaking this down at the end, social anxiety now event, you know, coming up with very specific practices you can do on a weekly basis to build that confidence, treating it like fitness, treating it like a muscle that you build over time. So what are you doing three times a week to quote, work out. And if we're not, we're not going to get that much stronger. We're not owed anything. I believe in life, but certainly in the area of confidence, it almost actually has to learn how to swim upstream because if you just don't paddle at all, the current of how you've been of avoidance will kind of pull you downstream further and further perhaps from where you really want to go. We have to learn how to swim upstream, challenge that. And the issue is not that it's massive amounts of time. I was just talking with some of this the other day Like, I don't have time, I don't have time. And I'm like, okay, well, what action are we talking about? And she said, well, I was going to do that friendly greetings thing you talk about a lot. I said, great, great. Well, how. How many times do you plan on doing it this week? Well, I. Oh, man, I'm so busy, you know. Okay, well, where are you going to do the friendly greetings? Ah, well, I mean, I'm going to go to the supermarket. Like, where are you going to go to the supermarket this week anyway? And she said, yeah. I said, okay, so you're going to be there anyway, so this is no extra time to go do it. Yeah. I said, okay, well, how many people are going to say hi to? Like, well, I don't know, you know, maybe like, I didn't think about it. I said, great, let's set a target. Because just look at that. If you said, I'm going to go somewhere to do friendly greetings sometime, period, what's going to happen there? Nothing's going to happen there. That's what's going to happen. We're going to avoid it. Right? So we got to make it clear. I'm going to go there twice this week, three times this week, and I'm going to say hi to 15 people. You might say, that's so weird. I don't want to have to plan it out like that. Well, wasn't there like a. The Benjamin Franklin. There's some old wise dude quote that says if you fail a plan, you're planning to fail whatever he said. Look that up later. You can go look it up yourself right now if you want. I think it's. I'm gonna say it's Benjamin Franklin. I'm gonna put my money on Benjamin Franklin. Correct me if I'm wrong. You can Message me through shrinkforthshyguy.com or maybe go to doctoraziz to message. I'm not sure if you can mention message through shrink for the shy guy, but go to draZ-R-A z I z.com and let me know if I was wrong there. In any case, we need to come up with some level of plan to hold ourselves accountable or else we don't do it. So he said, I guess, you know, three or four. I said, you could do that. And that might be a great entry point just to get familiar with that. You're okay to say hi to people here, but ultimately to get the results that you want. I'd bump that up to 15 or 20 and the story of I don't have time. By the end of the conversation, we broke it down that the whole thing would take her out of her time in the supermarket where she was already there five extra minutes. Right. It's not about time. It's about fear. It's about avoidance of what scares us, of what makes us uncomfortable. But that's exactly what we need to go into in order to create the change. If you're wondering where to go, what's my compass? We really want to make it over complicated. I got to have new exercise, I got to do new things. No, no, no, no, no. Just look at your life right now and see what scares you. And in terms of kind of pre created exercises, we'll just look. You can find all kinds of stuff about that inside of Confidence University. I have tons of examples and very specific exercises. But just think about what you might be uncomfortable to do in your social life. Would it be talking to somebody, starting a conversation with somebody, saying hi to somebody, asking for something, approaching somebody? It's not really elaborate, complex stuff. I see this, I've said it a lot around strength training over the last maybe four years, but really over the last year, a lot I would say I've been doing it very consistently. And you know, there's all kinds of weird random new things on the Internet. Like buy this crazy exercise and you're induce your afterburn effect and try this upside down, you know, weird strange pose. And it's like, no, no, just do the regular stuff, right? You know, frequently, consistently. You know, your compound lifts like bench and squats and other stuff like that, and then targeting other muscles and then just doing like bicep curls and sit ups and all these basic things. But are you doing them three, four, five times a week for months and longer? And I discovered after a period of time. So it's been this last round has been about year and a half of very consistent lifting. And about, I don't know, eight, nine months into it, after doing my research, I realized, oh, I'm really shying away from those last few reps and going into that edge of closer to failure and discomfort. Now why would I do that? You know, I get to eight and I'm like, eight's great. I did eight last week and I realized like, no, you want to be generally. Can I get nine, can I get 10? Last week I got eight. Let me see if I can increase the weight by five pounds and get eight again. You're looking to constantly put an edge on that. Just a Little bit. So that your muscles have to adapt, right? And it's the same thing with this. You want to look in and lean and find that edge. And what you need, though, is a baseline of consistency. What I see sometimes people do is they try to do stuff that really scares them, or they just wait for life to give them opportunities. Like, well, I got to speak up with my boss today. I'm freaking out, man. It's like, how much training have you done? How is saying hi to people at the supermarket going to train me? It's exactly going to train you because it's helping you build your ability to go into risk and rejection tolerance. So many things. So we have to be able to step into that and do the work. Now, that leads us to the third thing that you should know about confidence transformation. This one's a little bit of a paradox. It's going to sound kind of like I'm saying the opposite, and maybe I am. So it can happen faster than you think, way faster than you think, and it will probably take longer than you want. Now, how does that sentence make sense? Well, it'll happen faster. Can happen faster than you think, because we've been living in this pattern for 20, 30 years or more, 50 years, whatever, and it seems like, oh, my gosh, this is going to take me, like, five years to change this. No. If you're willing to practice what you hear in this podcast or go through Confidence University or come to one of my virtual events or, you know, people in my Mastermind program, there's ways I can support you. But if you're willing to do the work or even just go out there and do it on your own, if you're willing to put in the energy and the effort, you can see, like, major inspiring changes in, like, a couple of months. You know, does that mean the problem's solved and it's gone forever and everything's fixed? No, no, no, no. There's like a. There's like a pattern to change over a season of your life, and you can have some serious breakthroughs, or you're just like, wow, I did that thing, or, wow, I was used to be so scared of that, and I just did it. Wow. Where you can have those wow moments where you impress yourself. You can have that. You can have one of those in, like, the next week. So that's fast in my book. And then there's a momentum effect where you start to shatter the stories, and you're like, wait a minute, if that story was false, what else could be false? And you move on to the next thing. Right. And at the very same time, this process will probably take longer than you want. Why? Well, one, we want it now. We want it yesterday. We want it with no effort yesterday. We wanted to have put in the work last year, so we have it now without the effort. Right. So, you know, it doesn't happen instantly and overnight. It does require effort over time and practice and leaning into your edge and getting uncomfortable and doing it again. And it's going to involve some setbacks. Yeah, I know. For reals. That means moments where you feel like, oh, my gosh, I just got rejected. I feel so awful. I never want to do this again. Oh, I feel so embarrassed. Oh, my God. Why did I even try to have that conversation? Oh, God, you're gonna have some failures. Maybe some flaming failures. If you're doing it right, if you're taking action, if you're taking risks. And we don't want that. We just want to kind of leapfrog over all of that and just be in the I got it and it's done zone. But there is no done zone. The done zo. Done zone. There's no done zone. In fact, this becomes a lifestyle. And then you build your confidence and you realize, oh, now I need to build more confidence to go do the next thing I want to do. And then I get to build more confidence. And the shift is not in getting there and being done. The shift is you start to really embrace the process. And that's how it is for physical fitness, too. Right. It's like, I got in shape, and I'm going to go back to not exercising and eating Doritos. Well, then you won't be in shape anymore. But if you want to be in shape for your life, you adopt the mindset, the mentality, the identity of, I'm an athlete. I take care of myself. I want to do this. I want to be athletic when I'm. I want to run around when I'm in my 80s, whatever. Running looks like that age. More like shuffling. But still, I want to do that. Right? So then it changes everything about how you approach it. It's not about getting to the end. So let's talk about how you can put this into action. Time for action. Action, action. Your action step for today is to just recall those three things that we talked about, the three things you should know about transforming your confidence. Let's go in reverse order. Right? Right. Because we just heard that last one. It's gonna. It can happen much faster. Right. But it's probably going to take longer than we want. So maybe you could start to ask yourself, is there anything I could do to speed things up? Interesting. And that relates to number two, which is essentially do the work. Right? We don't get something for nothing. We got to put in the effort, put in the discomfort, practice, right? So what could I practice? How could I lean into the edge? How could I actually make sure that I'm getting uncomfortable? Not crazy, but just a little bit at my edge. Practiced over weeks or months, Right. And then number one, the first thing, the most important thing is that it is transformation is, for you, absolutely possible. And anything else is just a story to avoid the discomfort, to stay in the certainty of, I know who I am. Here I am in the center of my own cage, and I don't think you'd make it this far in the episode if that's what you really wanted in your soul. So I'm so glad you made it here. I invite you to practice something that you're learning from this episode as your action step. And if you know deep down or think or feel or sense that something more is needed and you don't want to just, you know, do it all on your own, know that I'm here. And we have a community of amazing people who support you in making these changes into 2025. The main way that I do it is through my Mastermind program. It's called the Unstoppable Confidence Mastermind. You might have heard about it. If not, you go to draziz.com and click on coaching and it's right there. It says Mastermind or Unstoppable Confidence. Mastermind can tell you all about all of the program, what's in it, how to apply for it. It's application based only because I want to make sure that the people in there are really ready and it's a good fit. And you can see testimonials of people who've just made these radical changes which could inspire you. For number one here, that transformation is possible no matter how long these things have been in place. So we have some exciting stuff planned and special opportunities for 2025 for mastermind members. So if you're drawn, if you're curious, go check that out now. And I can't wait to see you in the next one 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 blogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter. Com.