Ask The Shrink: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

And now it's time to Ask the Shrink. Hey, welcome to this bonus episode of Ask the Shrink. We got a question here from John George. He says, hey, Dr. Aziz, we'd just like to say your work is amazing and thank you for sharing your knowledge with myself and others who struggle in these areas. I'm 25 and I've never had a girlfriend. I'm not a geek. It's good to know. I'm a British infantry soldier, but because of fear and childhood experience, I've been afraid to talk boldly to women. So, anyway, I read your book Solution to Social Anxiety about two months ago and the Art of Extraordinary Confidence about a month ago and have been listening to your podcasts. Started out just talking to strangers at the gym more and more and then went out a week ago, went to a bar for Christmas and asked four girls for their numbers and got three, which is an amazing success for me. I've also had Tinder for the past few weeks and I've flirted with and asked out women on there as well. I've not had any successes getting any of these girls to go out with me yet, but at least I'm taking action. The thing is, though, over the last few days, I've been going out day and night expecting to repeat it, and my fear has stopped me dead. It's like I've taken two steps forward and one step back. Is that what you call the backlash? I mean, I've been talking to shop assistants more and to random guys, but the fear has all of a sudden become more intense. Would appreciate if you could either reply or make a podcast on this. Thanks anyway. Hope you have a good new year, John. Yes, I love the question. Thank you, John. So two steps forward, one step back. As you're listening to this, can you relate? I think that's how growth works. I don't think there's any sort of linear progression to glory that does not involve any backslides, any regressions, anything like that. So, I mean, first and foremost, that's just the process and we might be able. I'm going to give a couple theories or things that stand out to me from what you're talking, but overall, that's kind of like someone saying, you know, I'm running every day or whatever, five days a week. And, you know, some days I run and I have a lot more energy, and then other days I kind of feel a little heavier in my legs and a little more tired and like, okay, yeah, we could look at diet and how much you're Eating and recovery and rest and stretching and rolling and all this stuff. And there's just a natural quality of, like, some days you're gonna have a little more energy, and some days you're gonna feel a little more tired. And there's all kinds of. There's like a thousand factors, including stress levels and seasonal changes, and you're affected by moon cycles and who knows what. We're extremely complex, sensitive, interconnected organisms that are part of our environment. And so we can make some changes, but we can't. Like, that's a natural part of the process. And the same thing goes for growing your confidence. Like, some days you're gonna feel naturally, a little bit more confident. Some days you're gonna feel more anxious. Some days you're gonna just crush it. And some days you might have, like, a total, like, I don't wanna talk to anyone. I feel all nervous again. So the biggest takeaway here, John, and anyone else listening is like, don't stress too much about regressions. I think we have an episode. You can go back to the archives and type in the word. I think it's called. We call the episode. Regression is inevitable. But regression just means going backwards. That's the one step or two steps or sometimes five steps backwards. And what I talk about in that episode is one of the most important things to do is just not make the regression mean too much and not freak out about it. So that's the first advice. I'll throw a few other specifics in here just from what you're sharing. One pattern I found is that when people make those two steps forward, one of the reasons why the anxiety increases is because your safety police redoubles its efforts to try to get you back in the cage of social anxiety, or the cage of niceness, or the cage of whatever old pattern you've been running to keep yourself safe. So the reason you have not talked boldly to women until the age of 25 is somewhere in your mind you learned, it's dangerous to talk to women I'm attracted to. I'm gonna get hurt emotionally. I'm gonna be rejected and feel embarrassed. It's gonna be awful. And so your safety police said, hey, never do that. And obviously that kept you sort of, quote, safe from those rejections. But you weren't living the life that you wanted, and you weren't having the dating life that you wanted. So then you found my books, and then you found this podcast, and you're like, I'm gonna do it. And you did, which is fucking awesome. I Wanna give you credit for that. And then though, so, you know, you kinda push through the fear and you make it happen and you have these breakthrough experiences. But your safety police is not. You break through it once and it's gone. It's an think of like a police force inside of a totalitarian state or something. Like, you know, someone riots or someone breaks through or breaks the law or something and somehow gets through. Doesn't mean like the police force dissolves and is gone. It reformulates and comes back with a counter initiative. Right? It's like, oh, this is how we're gonna bust and stop that. So your safety police recalibrates and then comes at you again. And so I've seen this again and again. Someone will, you know, interact a lot or free themselves in a way, and then they'll all of a sudden have a lot more anxiety about doing it. And then their safety police loves to take that and say, you see, you see, that's a fluke. You can't really do that. You're not really that confident you can actually make that happen. And then we believe it and we're like, oh no, it's right, you know. So I would say be very aware that it's just your safety police redoubling. Stay the course. And here's the thing, you made some pretty rapid progress. You know, you started talking to people and then you had a night where you went and talked to a lot of different women and got numbers. Think of this less as like, oh, a one night kind of thing and more like, oh, I'm gonna be practicing this for months. And honestly, it's even most optimal to integrate this as part of your practice in life for years. Make it a practice of saying hi to people when you walk down the street, you know, when you park your car from there to the whatever, you're going to a concert, you're going to the store or something, you know, park five minutes away and say hi to 10 people. Some of the people that I know that have the highest sustained confidence from working with me on my mastermind other programs, you know, years later, I'll talk to them and like, oh yeah, yeah, I do friendly greetings all the time. Like they've taken it into who they are. Not just something they do once to get over it and be done with it. So I would say extend your timeline, stay in the process. You're awesome. You got this. You're taking the action, you're studying, learning and applying. And that is the way so you keep doing what you're doing. And you're gonna have unlimited success in your dating life and beyond. So thanks for joining me today and until we speak again, may have the courage to be who you are, to know on a deep level that you're awes.