Dr. Aziz teaches seven concrete practices to build social confidence as a skill. Start with a five-second countdown before speaking, give strangers compliments, and tackle uncomfortable tasks early in the day. Open posture and quieting your inner critic round out the toolkit.
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Do you want to significantly boost your confidence quickly? If so, watch this video. Because you're going to learn seven things that you can do now that will have an immediate effect on your confidence. And this is something I've been obsessively studying for the last 18 years. I'm Dr. Aziz. I'm the founder of the center for Social Confidence and author of numerous best selling books on confidence. And if you're benefiting from this video and this channel, click the subscribe button down below so you don't miss any future videos. Now, let's talk about seven ways you can boost your confidence. And. And some of these are simple. And don't let the simplicity trick you into thinking that it's not going to do anything. In fact, some of the simplest fundamentals, if you look at any great basketball player or any sports figure, or anyone who's good in business, they focus on the fundamentals. They do the little things again and again and again and again. And that is what is part of this. Now, in order to apply these seven things, you have to know one thing, which is that confidence is a skill. Or another way to think of it is that confidence is a muscle. And so if you build that muscle, it will get stronger. And these are seven ways that you can start to build that muscle. Number one, stop the hemorrhaging. So your confidence drains significantly by the minute, by the second. When you are letting that inner critic run around and pull you by the nose and it says you're a loser and you say, oh, you're right, they're not gonna wanna talk to you. Yeah, good point. I know. And you are just getting pulled around. You're under the thumb of that inner critic. So the first thing you must do is gain control of that process. And you can check out my E course down below for free. It's a five step video course called Five Steps to Unleash youh Inner Confidence. Get access to that instantly. The first one is all about firing that toxic coach. So that's. The first one is you gotta stop the hemorrhaging of your confidence. Cause no matter how much you grow or take on or succeed, if that's happening, it'll all turn to ash. Because your perception just demoralizes you when that critic is super active. Okay, that's the first one. The second one is you have to lean in rather than avoiding. Now what does leaning in mean? Well, there's all kinds of things that you could do. In fact, the question I love to ask people is if you were 100% confident. If you had 10x the confidence, what would you be doing? Whatever, you know, on the next Tuesday, the next Wednesday, the next weekend, like right now, not some future date, what would you be doing right now? They say, well, I would go talk to people, I would do this, I would do that. Okay, great. That is where you need to lean in. Now what does lean in mean? Well, lean in doesn't mean jump into the deep end of the pool and try to force yourself to do everything in one day. That's not how you build a muscle. That's how you pull your muscle and then get, you know, sidelined for six months. Right. So you have to build it slowly, systematically, step by step. And the way you do that is you just lean in a little. So what if you could just be. There's that one thing you're avoiding. Just lean in and do a little bit of it. Just lean in. And I usually avoid those people. Well, lean in and just move towards approaching them. You don't have to be the center of attention and have a huge display of it. Just say hi as you walk by and just those simple things over time produce a radical shift. Speaking of saying hi, the third thing you can do to boost your confidence, literally today, is to say hi to people. Now I know in this day and age, that's weird. This is weird. Why would I talk to other people? Not through a screen. Get out of here. And so what this looks like is you can go to a specific place that there's people walking around these so called real humans that have tactile bodies, not in the digital ecosphere, and wave at them and say hi. And you know, you can integrate into your life, park three blocks from the supermarket and walk to the supermarket or walk through, say hi to people in the supermarket. Oh my gosh, outrageous. And you might say, wait a minute, that's weird. I don't want to do that. That is showing you where you're under a spell of fear of what they are going to think of you. And you're being controlled by the cultural field. And some vague person's judgment is determining not just whether you say hi to people. That's just a place to experiment with this stuff. It's showing you that it's controlling you in your life, probably at work and your social life and dating. It's like, oh, I can't talk to that person. Why? Well, someone might hear me get rejected and that's not okay. Oh, I can't speak up at work. Why? Well, well someone might disagree with Me, and I don't know, that's okay. So you get to challenge that immediately. I call it friendly greetings. Walk to a busy area, say hi to a bunch of people, maybe 5, 10, 15, and that's your daily rep. And if you do this for a couple days in a row, you'll start to notice an immediate shift. We'll tack onto that one, the fourth one, which is called a drive by compliment. Also, just liberally give compliments to people in life. I mean, the drive by version is you're out and about and you say, hey, nice shirt. Like those boots. Or you can start doing it to people in your life. You know, you see someone come into the office, say a nice shirt, right? And this might seem trivial or inconsequential, but this, these are the small reps. What is that? You're building the rep of expressiveness, of social leadership. You know, think about like a social follower. They're passive. Like, I only speak when I'm spoken to. I don't make much eye contact. I certainly don't compliment people. I kind of reserved. And if someone tries to talk to me, I give him short answers, right? The opposite of that, being a social leader is I take responsibility. I move towards who I want to talk to. I actually see people who might be uncomfortable, and I move towards them to try to welcome them in. And then I go to them and I say, hey, nice shirt, right? It's part of the conversation. It's just part of what I do. And you'll notice that this actually expands outwards to your social life, your friendships. You can just compliment your friends more easily. You can compliment a lover more easily. And guess what? People love it's compliments. So it takes confidence to give compliments. Start practicing that. That's number four. Number five is to ask yourself this question, what am I scared of today? Or sometimes we're like, no, I'm not scared of anything. I'm too macho, right? Well, then actually ask yourself this. What would be uncomfortable to do today? And do that thing as soon as you can upon waking. Or maybe if your workday starts at a certain time and it's a thing at work, do that right at the beginning of your workday. Brian Tracy had a great phrase for it. He said, eat the frog first. Like at the beginning, eat the frog is. Do the uncomfortable thing. Like eating a frog is kind of gross, right? So you do that right away. Because if you put it off and you say, I'll get to that later, you won't. And you Just simply do it. And one other thing to add to this, which will be number six is from Mel Robbins. She's got a great book called the five second Rule. If you haven't read it, check it out. But simply to get yourself to do the uncomfortable things, practice the five second rule liberally throughout the day. What does that mean? That means when you think about, oh, there's a thing I wanted to do at work, oh, that's uncomfortable, I don't want to do it. Start counting. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. By the time you get to 1, you're moving towards it, you're doing it. And this is a muscle. You can practice this with simpler things like getting out of bed. Our alarm goes off, five, four, three. And you're like, okay, fine, fine, fine. They might say, well, who's making me get out of bed? You are. And there's something about that countdown. It's almost like a parent, right? It's like you're gonna return, you're gonna give that back to your brother. I'm count five, four, three kids like, fine, fine, right? And it's kind of what you're doing with yourself. You're like steering the inner child inside. It's like, I don't want to do the uncomfortable stuff. So give yourself that five second countdown. Okay, what's number seven? What's the last thing that you can do today to boost your confidence? It is so simple that you're going to think there's no point in doing it, but trust me, it is. You ready? Watch this. What was that? How is that a confidence boosting tip? It is your physiology and your posture. Carry yourself with dignity. Carry yourself like you matter. When I do this all the time with clients, if I see them in kind of this like hunker down position, I'll have them shift and move their body. I'll say, walk around the room like you own the room. You know a lot of stuff is virtual these days, right? So I'm not in a physical room with them. We're in our own places. So they're in their bedroom or their office or whatever and I'm like, freaking own your own bedroom. Own your own kitchen, own your own office. That's my toaster over there. I own this place, right? I'm being silly, I'm being playful, but it really is bringing your shoulder blades together so your chest is open, your head is up versus down. And especially with cell phone neck these days, you know, we've entrenched this even more and more modern day nerd posture, which I have too, you know, but we got to counteract that. So bring it open. Eyes on the horizon and intentionally move not just when you're talking to people, but move around your house. This way, when you're going to make a sandwich, when you're going to go get, you know, walk towards your car, just move with this and that will start to shift your confidence. What else are you noticing? Share down in the comments below. What are some tips that you have to help other people build their confidence? And if you want to take this one way further, then check out my course, Confidence University. It's actually a series of four courses and a full comprehensive program where you can learn everything about social confidence, connection, friendships, career confidence, dating and relationships and that core confidence to make you feel rejection proof and not so afraid of what they are going to think of you. So if you want to take things further, check out TheConfidenceUniversity.com and until we speak again, may I have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.
