Dr. Aziz explains why you freeze in social situations and how to stop. Start with small challenges outside your comfort zone, use power poses and music to shift your nervous system, and practice self-compassion when things go wrong instead of beating yourself up.
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Have you ever experienced the freezing phenomenon? When you want to go do something, maybe that scares you, but you're excited about it, like talking to that attractive woman or speaking up in a meeting at work, or maybe sharing your ideas in front of a group presentation or any other setting and you're about to go do it and then you, it feels like you literally freeze and you're stuck and it's frustrating. If you've ever been in that place, then I'm glad you're watching because in today's episode, you're going to learn three ways to never freeze again. Welcome to another episode of the Art of Extraordinary Confidence. I'm your host, Dr. Aziz, the founder of the center for Social Confidence and best selling author of the Solution to Social Anxiety business edition. And today we're going to look at how to break through the freezing phenomenon. You know where you want to go talk to that person, you want to go do that thing. You might have prepared yourself, you might have said you were going to do it. Practice your speech, practice what you would say, thought about it a lot. And then when you get into the actual moment of doing it, though, something like your throat squeezes up, your mind spazzes out and goes blank, your body gets tense and you really feel like I'm frozen. And that's what the word people use. I feel like I froze up. I was frozen. I freezing. And let's discover how we can break through this fast. So there's three things I'm going to share with you today that are going to help you never freeze again. But before we get into them, we got to look at one subtle thing that you're doing that's going to keep you stuck. And I see this all the time with clients, as they say, I wanted to go talk to that person, I wanted to speak up. And then in the moment, I was so scared I just couldn't do it. Have you ever said that to yourself or to someone else? Here's the thing, every time you do that, you are pulling yourself further and further back from ever actually doing what you want to do. And here's why. Because when we say I couldn't do it, it's a language trick that we play on ourselves and we believe the language that we use to ourselves. And you got to pay attention to that stuff. Because I couldn't is not actually accurate. I mean, like, could you physically not open your mouth? It might have felt like that in the moment, but the reality is, unless you have a medical condition or a genetic condition that prevents you from being able to speak then you could. And what's more true is I could speak up here, but I didn't want to feel discomfort. I didn't want to feel the pain or discomfort of potentially getting rejected. I didn't want to feel the discomfort of them giving me a strange look or whatever it is you imagine bad is going to happen if you speak up. Right? And so that's the. We want to switch our languages. I could, but I didn't. I chose not to because I didn't want to feel that discomfort. That puts you back into a place of power, of ownership in your life. And only from that place are you going to build a breakthrough. Freezing. And I'm going to share three ways to do that right now. So anytime you notice yourself saying I couldn't, you catch that stuff. Switch it around. I didn't want to because it was really uncomfortable. Gives you a lot more power. So let's dive into it. What's the first thing? The first thing is you got to start gradual. You got to work up to this stuff. So if you want to say, I should walk in there and talk to those three beautiful women sitting at the coffee shop, that's freaking hard to do. Most guys can't do that. You have to really work. You have to be like in great social shape to pull that one off. So don't just start with that or I'm just going to roll in there and just share my ideas in the meeting in front of the VPs and everyone else. Like a rock star. That's hard to do. It's nervous, it's uncomfortable, it's nerve wracking. Anyone would feel nervous in that situation. So what we want to do is we want to start smaller. We want to build up the muscle of being able to jump into something that's a little scary. Don't start with the, you know, 400 pound gorilla. Start with something easier. So whatever the areas that you want to start speaking up in, find the easiest, smallest stretch outside of your comfort zone and do that for a couple of weeks. Build up to being able to do that. So in the case of dating and relationships, start saying hi to people. Start just saying hi to attractive women as you walk by them. They often don't respond because they're like, what does this guy want? Right? But that's fine. That's part of the practice of getting comfortable with whatever responses that you get. Practice complimenting a woman as you walk by her. These little things are much lower risk, much easier than walking up to Three beautiful women and starting a conversation with them, eventually you'll get there. So if you're freezing at some level of activity that you want to do, drop it down. That's okay. It's a process. You don't need to be right at that top right away. Same thing in the work setting. If you're afraid of speaking up in a bigger group of people, try sharing your idea with one colleague or maybe two colleagues. Try just speaking up in the break room. Try just making connections with people. Try sharing your ideas when there's like four of you working on something. You see what I'm saying, where it's a little bit easier. It still might be a little bit of a challenge, but you can build up. So that's the first thing is gradually build up. If you're freezing, drop the challenge level to something that you feel like you can handle. The second thing is you got to learn how to activate power. I mean, so many people in now don't know how to activate power in their bodies. They walk around, like kind of shuffle around and small in their bodies. And we feel how we use our bodies. If we're kind of tense and shrunken up in our bodies and our voices and our heads forward, we're not going to be coming for much power. But if we can activate power in our bodies and say yes, and just get intense in our physical body, get more power. And I teach people exactly how to do this in my live weekends. And also inside of Confidence Unleashed, so you may want to check out that program if you want to learn. We go deep into a module all about how to activate power in your body like you've never done before. And when you do that, you go from that, you know, because you're in that fight or flight when you want to do something scary, you learn how to go from the flight, which is like the freeze, to the fight, which is to be able to step up and charge in and you can activate power in your body. One simple way to do that is, other than checking out Confidence Unleashed would be to just put on a song that gets you pumped up in the morning for three minutes and walk around your house and make noise and feel and activate a sense of power. Electronic music is great for this. Rock, metal, whatever you want. It could be country, I don't know. Anything just gets you in a strong, powerful state. Make noise, use your body, jump up and down, yell, say yes. You activate power in your body when you do that. And inside of Confidence Unleashed, I talk about how to create a move that you do that activates power for you. There's a whole science to this. But the short version that you can take right now and use in your life would be to get powerful in that song in the morning. And you'll be amazed at how that activates you for the rest of the day. There's interesting research that shows that you actually activate more testosterone in your body. You decrease your stress hormones, all kinds of valuable stuff, by getting into a powerful state. That's the second thing. The third way to never freeze again is to commit, to decide, here's a big one. That no matter what, you're not going to beat yourself up. You're not going to attack yourself. Because here's what we do. We freeze. And then for what, five hours, five days, a month afterwards, you're just playing. Oh, how could you have done that? Oh, that was terrible. Oh, I suck. Oh, I'm the worst. What's wrong with you? No one else has this problem. Everyone else can do that kind of thing. What? You know, ah, you're never gonna figure this out. And we just go to town on ourselves for a long time. And that crushes you, crushes your self esteem, crushes your confidence and makes you way less likely to go do it the next time. And you increase the likelihood that you're going to freeze in the future. So we got to commit to say, you know what if I do it, that's awesome. I'm going to congratulate myself if I don't do it. If I freeze again, I'm going to say, hey, man, I know it's a big pattern. It's been happening a long time. It's frustrating to freeze. I know. And we're working on it here. Let's try this thing. Let's figure something out. I know, I know you want to be able to talk to her. And it's tough and it's hard. You know, treat yourself like you would a good friend, not like some person that you hate. So we want to switch that. And when you do that, when you commit to compassion, no matter what, then you'll be amazed at how much more rapidly you'll grow, you'll break through, and you won't freeze again. So apply these three techniques in your life. Share below how they work for you, what you learned. Please add a comment of any other things that you've learned to help you break through freezing. We can all help each other here. And if you want to take this much further and much deeper, go to confidenceunleashednow.com and get started. You can get a free ebook there and a bunch of stuff will teach you the power moves, everything. So go to confidence unleashed now.com until we speak again. May you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. I'll talk to you soon.
