Being Your Real Self with Dr. Susan Campbell

Coming to you from the center for Social Confidence in Portland, Oregon. Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. Helping men everywhere go from social anxiety to social domination with your host, Dr. Aziz. Hey, welcome to the show. Today we're going to be looking at something that will naturally start happening for you as you become more confident. As you listen to these episodes and apply what you learn and start to overcome some of those social fears and anxieties, you're going to want to start to discover how to be my real self with others when I'm not doing things because I think I should or other people would like this. And you just really want to express yourself, move the way that you want to move, talk the way that you want to talk, do the kinds of things that you want to do in the world. This episode is really going to help you step into that. And I'm very excited about our guest today who has been studying this stuff for decades and teaches it with just incredible wit and perceptive mental intelligence and clarity. And at the same time, she's just got this very warm, loving energy as well that makes you just kind of feel so much more relaxed in yourself. So we're going to get to her in just one minute. If you want to be connected in the conversation, by all means call the show hotline, 206-333-8-3176. You can also go to shrinkforthshy.com and just send me a message. I love listening to those and hearing those and reading those. And of course, go to facebook.com shrinkforthshyguy or Twitter shyguyshrink. These are all ways to stay connected because I love hearing from you and hearing how the show is impacting you. So without further ado, let's jump into our awesome conversation with with Dr. Susan Campbell.

Expert Interview.

Today's guest is someone I'm incredibly excited to talk to, Dr. Susan Campbell. And I knew her first as an author. I picked up a book called Getting Real, and I don't even know how I came across it. In fact, I don't even remember if Amazon recommended it to me or, or whatever it was. What stood out to me was the title Getting Real. And there's something about that that was just speaking to what I needed to do in my life. And so I tore through that book and probably highlighted, like every other sentence and went on to read another book of hers called Truth in Dating. And she's written a number of books, nine books. She teaches seminars and workshops in different places. She works with individuals and couples. She's also worked in the corporate world with Fortune 500 companies and done so many different things in her life. And it's all about this message of living your life fully out loud and being real and honest and direct. And it's something that I think I and so many people yearn for. And she really is skillful in teaching how to do it, how to have the courage to do it, and the skill to do it in a way that really brings results in your life. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

It's a pleasure.

So, you know, I think one of the things that I love to start with is that advocating honesty is different than I think how. Certainly when I was shy and anxious, I was the opposite of that. I would hold so much inside all the time. And my biggest fear of speaking up was a, something really bad is going to happen, like people are really going to judge me, or B, I'm really going to crush and hurt people by saying the truth. And I'm sure these are objections that you hear probably daily in your work. And what are your thoughts on those two fears?

Well, those are pretty much the most common fears that people report about being honest. And let me point out to you and to our listeners here here that the thing that creates inhibition around saying what you really feel and think is something bad is going to happen, like to me or to the other person, like I'm going to get hurt or the other person's going to get hurt. So that's what we need to start with, is that fear of an unwanted outcome. So if any change is going to happen, we need to start with self awareness, like an honest look at ourselves. And so we need to be honest and go, okay, there's some outcome that I fear. And typically I fear hearing no or I fear getting this blank stare from somebody when I ask them a question to start a conversation. You listeners, you know that awful gut wrenching feeling of, oh, I did something wrong. So it's really important to study ourselves and know ourselves because if we can't know and accept ourselves, we're not going to be able to be ourselves. And it's not that easy to accept ourselves with those fears and those inhibitions. But that is the very first step to having any kind of a relationship with another person is to have a relationship with oneself. So that means asking yourself, okay, what is it that I'm afraid would happen? Okay, she'd give me that blank stare, all right, let me feel into that feared outcome. Has that actually happened to me? Oh, yes. Oh, yes, it has. It happened when I was 14 and the head cheerleader, blah, blah, blah. You know, you go into a memory and how did I handle that? And often we have past memories that haunt us about situations that we didn't handle very well. And it kind of proves that, okay, I never want this to happen again. However, that kind of emotional pain. Here's the core thing that I want to get to with everyone. The emotional pain associated with those feared outcomes is the target of our attention. Like, what if I do feel that emotional pain? What's wrong with emotional pain? Yeah, there will be, you know, there will be some emotional pain, some disappointment, some letdown mind chatter that I'm not good enough. We want to get curious about the whole inner landscape of our fears because this is the way to healing ourselves. I'll go into. You know, I don't want to do too long of a monologue here, Aziz, but it is a bit of a long answer to your question, so I'll try to complete here. If that fear of emotional pain is what's inhibiting you from being honest, from being your fully expressed, confident, delightful self, which is true of men and women, young and old, it's there in all of us. The place to put our attention is on that tender part of us that experienced that pain when we were 14. Or. Or maybe if I remember even longer, it might be when I was 2 years old and reached out for something and got pushed back, pushed away. You hear a lot of no's when you're a child. And no is not a friendly word to most children because it's interrupting our forward expression. So if we can tune into the pain associated with the no or with that, with that blank look and bring some tenderness to ourselves. See, what happened when we were children and this happened to almost everyone is when we were upset. And this is when we were really little, when we were upset, when we weren't happy. Our parents really cared about us so much. I mean, in most cases that that made them uncomfortable, too. Or even if they didn't care about us, they cared about their own peace of mind. And if. If we're yelling and screaming for something, it's inconvenient for the big people. So all of us have programming inside of us that our expression of needs, and particularly if we're unhappy and frustrated, that anything painful, that that's somehow not okay. And we're taught to feel shame when we feel hurt or pain. And if you're a boy, it's even worse because you get to A certain age and boys aren't supposed to cry and that is so debilitating to our self esteem and our self confidence. So the way out of that is finding that hurt part, that vulnerable part, that even just fears that that hurt is going to repeat itself and holding that with the attitude of, of a loving parent that says, you know, it's okay to hurt. I want to tell you that I've seen many, many videos of parents dealing with parents where they didn't know they were being videoed or they didn't know this particular part was being videoed and they deal with their crying child and there's often some very rejecting energy in there. What if your parent had picked you up and held you? And that did happen for some of us and that did happen some of the time for many of us. But if it had been a little more consistent for most of us, picked me up, held me, let me cry it out. Cry out your tears. You would not have felt this fear of emotional pain today. You would have known how to process your own pain and get back to feeling pretty good pretty quick. So we now have to do something for ourselves that most of our parents never did for us. I know it sounds kind of psychological, but that's where our fears come from. They come from our psychology and we have the power to nurture ourselves back to full self confidence and self expression.

Yes. And I mean I love so much of what you said there and resonate with a lot of it. And I found that, you know, there's, it's absolutely necessary to sort of recondition our, my nervous system and heart to respond differently to my emotional state. And I found that it's sort of like a two sided job. Like I need to be able to tend to myself in a different way and turn towards myself with more compassion and acceptance. And that's where I started my journey. But then I also realized that part of the healing is sharing those things with other people and realizing that the responses that I get are not terrible or negative. And that's really calming in a deep way. We're going to pause for just one moment and then jump back into our conversation with honesty expert, Dr. Susan Campbell. Do you want to rapidly change the way you see yourself? Do you want more confidence and better results in your life? If so, then you need to learn about cognitive rescripting. It's one of the most powerful tools that Dr. Aziz teaches. He is so adamant about everyone learning this life transforming tool that he is actually giving it away for free for a limited time. Go to www.confidenceunleashednow.com to claim your free copy of Dr. Z's new eBook and audio training program called Rewrite youe Three Steps to Triple youe Confidence.

Beautiful. Absolutely. You know, I have a quote in my book Getting Real, or maybe it's Truth. In dating, you are most lovable when you are most transparent. And, and that also means when you're coming from a more emotionally vulnerable place. And this is, this is pretty, this is new information that's coming out now in the dating scene. It's still not mainstream, but you're, you're a pioneer, I'm a pioneer. And people are realizing that just saying to yourself, you know, buck up, you gotta do it. You know, you gotta hear a lot of no's before you hear a yes. That, that's, you know, that's not a bad thing to do to take risks and push yourself a little. But if you don't do this deeper work of taking a risk and saying, you know, when you said that, I just felt like I wanted to curl up into a little ball. You know, like what if you said that to somebody? Remember, whenever you say how you're reacting to what somebody is done or said, you make sure you stay on your own side of the net. That's very important. You say, I, this is what happened inside me. And I know that a lot of our listeners gonna go, oh my God. You know, most of the women I know would just, you know, walk away with that. And I want to say to you, try it. You'll have to experiment with it to see where it's coming from in you. Because in some of our listeners it will be coming from a manipulative place. You're trying to get something. As long as you're trying to manipulate the outcome of the interaction in any way, like get the person to do something different or get the person to not reject you, you know, to not say no. For example, whenever you're focused so much on the outcome, what you do is you lose touch with your actual present experience that you're having in yourself in the now. So you're not as powerful a person in that moment. But if you share that vulnerable sensation of a knot in my stomach, feel like I just wanted to curl up into a ball, you share that from a self accepting place and just a self revealing place, not trying to manipulate the person over there, your outcomes are going to get better and better because you're going to be more present and presence. You know, I like to say Aziz, presence is The New Sexy. It's like, you know, there's a movement now, you know, the Power of Now book by Eckhart Tolle. And ever since the 60s, we've been hearing the phrase be here now. That comes more from the Eastern philosophies. So this is beginning to creep in now. By 2014, it's beginning to creep into the mainstream. That idea of being present with your own feelings and sensations. And, you know, just as I'm saying that, I'm asking you to kind of ground yourself. You feel your feet on the floor, you feel your body, you feel the heart flow, throbbing. You feel the anxiety, you feel your palms sweating. Whatever you are present to yourself, and that is a very powerful magnet to other people. When you can just be on your own side of the net, speak what's going on inside of you and feel yourself, you become a magnet. You really do.

I absolutely agree with that. And that's something that when I started to apply because I spent. And this is something I want to get a little more in depth with you about. Kind of the. What would be called the pickup artist approach, which is what is often taught to men if you go to the Internet to look like, how to get more comfortable and more confident meeting women. That's mostly what you'll find. And that's what I first came across. And at some point I broke from that and was much more drawn to truth and dating and the stuff that you teach. And I found that when I was able to, really, there was a difference between sharing it and owning it versus, like, sharing it and kind of wrapping it up in all of my shame. Because I think when we're coming from a place of, like, you're going to reject me for saying this, we say it in a way that brings a negative reaction towards us or we just interpret whatever they do as the feared reaction, whether or not that's happening. But the result is like, it's so different. If you can just say, wow, I notice my right hand is shaking a little bit. I do that when I'm nervous. I guess I'm nervous talking to you and you just, bam, put it out there. It has such a different effect than if you're trying to hide it and you're ashamed of it and, oh, God, you're going to reject me for this. There's so much power that comes from when you can just be present to it.

That's so true. I love the example you gave and that just sharing it the way you did. Some of our listeners may think, yeah, well, you know, I could never even think to do that. And what I want to say, or maybe or how do I know if I'm doing it right? What I want to say to those of you who go, yes, but is you will have some trial and error on this path to being more honest in dating and revealing yourself more. There will. When I say trial and error, I mean, you won't always do it the best way. You won't always do it like Aziz just did it or like I was just demonstrating. It won't always come out the way you want and your, your self expression won't come out the way you want.

It's going to be messy.

How are you going to learn if you don't, you know, just get on that bicycle and try riding it? I mean, how did, how did we learn anything? You know, there was some trial and error involved. So, you know, it's definitely worth the few errors that you're going to experience on the path if you take on, if you take on this path.

Absolutely. And you know, I really resonate with what you're saying about the underlying, you know, what we're really scared of underneath it all is just that emotional pain. And I was actually working with a client just this week and he was trying the push through method. Like, okay, I, he's gotten to the point where he can interact with women, but he will exit before there's an opportunity for a conversation to start to grow. And even if there's signals that she's inviting him to keep talking, he'll kind of pull away and seemingly do so out of habit or instinct without really consciously choosing it. And he's like, I need to break through this plateau. I need to push through. And you know, from my perspective, it was like, well, he's been trying to push through for a while and that's not working. And let's find out what's underneath. And it turns out that not too long ago, maybe a year ago, he'd started a relationship with a woman, very brief, maybe just three or four dates. And it turns out she was moving out to a different state. And so just because of the timing, it wasn't going to work out, but they were really starting to get into each other. And then he tried to be more honest on their last date and she kind of pushed him away a little bit, like, oh, it's too late, you should have told me earlier. And anyway, it got a little, it didn't go the way he wanted it to and it really, really hurt. And there was just so much pain there. And then. So some part of him has linked up. Okay. Connecting with a woman equals emotional pain. Yeah.

And being vulnerable means it doesn't work. You know, I did it and she moved away anyway.

Yeah. And I think there's just something so powerful about what you're saying about, okay, being able to identify that and tend to that part of myself with compassion and patience. So we were doing some parts work, and I was having him. Okay. We had that part speak, and it shared all this stuff. And then I was like, okay, why don't you sit over here? And how would you respond to that part? And he did what I think a lot of people do, which is he gave that part a pep talk. Like, oh, yeah, okay, come on, you gotta get out there and you gotta try again. And. And it just doesn't work as well as being compassionate. So I'm wondering if. Do you have any tips for how people can relate to that part of themselves, that fundamental human part that's just scared of loss, scared of the flip side of connection, that we're going to get hurt or lose people that we love?

Yeah. Well, if you do experience that kind of hurt and you want to talk to yourself, the pep talk approach is too shallow. It. It doesn't go deep enough. What your scared part generally needs is think about when you were a teenager and you took a risk and it didn't go well. What would you have needed? Maybe hard to know, because maybe a lot of teenage boys are completely out of touch with their softer needs. But one thing you would need is somebody to appreciate that you took the risk. That's what, you know, like, if you didn't do well in a game, do you want your father to criticize you, or do you want your father to say, wow, you got in there, you were scrappy, so you appreciate what you did. Do you empathize? I mean, this is what a good parent does. And all of us have a good dad. And whatever gender we are, we have a good dad archetype inside of us. That's one of our parts. And a good mom archetype. And it's just like part of the whole inner human family. And we need dad to say, you know, good job, you tried, and mom to say. Or, you know, this could be dad saying it too. You know, your inner coach, I sometimes call it your inner coach, your inner wise person to say, you know, I'm here for you. I'm witnessing you doing this. I'm by your side. Like the whole wingman concept in the Pickup world. You know, I'm your wingman, but it's a wing wingman that is supportive and there for you. When you fall down and could say, yeah, that, that did hurt, that's all you say. You know, you just give empathy. Yeah, that. That was. That was. That was horrible. You know that she tells now. She tells you. No, now, let's say now. I don't think it was exactly this way in your instance, but now she tells you she's moving away. You know, you get vulnerable and then she. And you just give empathy to that part of yourself. Some of us haven't had a lot of good training in empathy, but that's the essence of empathy is going put yourself in the shoes of the hurt part and go, yeah, that hurt. And that is enough because you're accepting of the pain. And we need a lot of. We need a lot of reconditioning. We got conditioned to act like things don't bother us too much and not act weak and needy and all that. Oh, man, we do need to recondition ourselves. Yeah, that's so. And that happens to both men and women, by the way.

Absolutely. So deep in there. You know, I just actually was having more insight about this. I was having a conversation with my wife this morning, and we have a six month old baby now, and I talk about lots of opportunities to increase honesty and getting real. And one thing I've noticed, we've had two conversations about it. This is the second one is it is really difficult for me to say this to her. I really want your attention right now.

Oh, yeah.

You know, because she's giving her attention to our saving.

And.

And then I get home from work and I'm either helping take care of him or she needs to feed him. And I'm cleaning the kitchen, and there's some part of me that's like, ugh, I want. You know, I'm like, I call that part big brother Aziz. It's like, I want your attention now, mom. But because of this training, you know, this conditioning as like a man to ask that is. Even all the vulnerability work and stuff I've done, I just realized there's layers of wow, this is. It makes me look just. I just can't ask for that. It's weak. But what I end up doing then is trying to get it indirectly and then being upset that I didn't get it. And then, you know, so it's just. It gets a lot messier rather than just finding that underlying need and having the courage to just say it. And then when I do, I mean, she just melts. She's like, oh, it's very powerful communication.

Yeah, yeah. And I want to, I want to put in the note here that when you see yourself doing something in a, like in a dating or relationship encounter where, you know, a few minutes later you start to cringe and you go, oh, boy. That, you know, that was wrong. Either that, you know, I mean, that didn't come out right. It was manipulative or. Or I was covering something. Or like you said, you're trying to get something without actually being straightforward about it. Like the hidden agenda thing, you know, people can feel when you have that hidden agenda and they're put off. And you sense it. You may sense it later, you may sense it an hour later, 15 minutes later. You can go back and redo the conversation with anybody almost. I mean, let's say you're at a cocktail party and you say something stupid. You know, you think it was stupid. I hope when you, when you call yourself stupid that you have affection towards yourself. That's. I do when I say that to myself. So you can still say, oh, that was dumb, and feel affection. It's coming from that wise place. Then you can say, okay, what was my more authentic. Take a moment, check in. What would my more authentic response be? It sounds like you did this with your wife, Aziz, without even maybe going through this process. And if I was more from my feelings, from my heart, what would I have said? And if I was willing to really say what I wanted, was willing to take a bigger risk, what would I have said? Okay, and then you can go through the little exercise. What am I afraid would happen and when did that happen before? And give yourself a little tender loving care around the pain that's buried in there, around asking for what you want. Because many, many of us have a lot of old buried emotional PA about asking for what we want and having it frustrated. Who didn't have a lot of that as a kid and as an infant? For sure, we don't remember it, but it's part of the human experience. So we're all bit and hinted about asking for what we want. Even if we're very bold about it, we're probably doing it a little bit over the top. So let's say you do something that's over the top or under understated, and you want to go back and revise, go ahead and say to yourself, if I had a to do over, and if I was being more authentic, here's what I would have said. And kind of feel into what that would be. And then ask yourself, and this can all happen in less than a minute's time, right at the cocktail party or wherever you are. Okay. Would it be appropriate to go and say that to the person? And would I have the courage to do that? And certainly with your wife, you know, it's appropriate. Some people, it might not be, you know, maybe now they're in the arms of some other man. So, like, maybe forget that until she's alone again. But you can go back and redo these things. And that's one of the greatest practices. That's a chapter in the book Getting Real. It's called revising. It's one of the 10 truth skills, and it's probably the most often used truth skill by people that I coach in my seminars. They learn that you can't always do it your best the first time, but you can go back and try again.

That's so good. And that's one of my favorite questions to ask someone I'm working with is, okay, in that situation. They tell me sort of the story that involves inhibiting or doing all these things that are indirect. And it's like, if you were. If you were totally honest in that situation, what do you think it would have gone like? And it's just really fun to hear that. And I love the idea of asking yourself that question as close to the moment that you realize it, and then going back and taking another shot. And what a great way to build a skill. I want to switch to something that I think is going to be so important, because this is an area of a lot of frustration when it comes to dating on the men's side of things. And I think you can offer some really interesting perspective on what's happening here. That is the extent of the time that we have for today's interview. We're gonna take just one more minute here to do an action step, because we always gotta end with an action step. And then we're gonna conclude today's show, and you can hear the rest of the interview in next week's show when she's gonna get into all about how to take this authenticity stuff and direct it towards dating. And when I read her book Truth in Dating, it literally changed everything I was doing and helped me break free of so many stories that I learned from pickup artists and other things about how you're supposed to be to get the woman. So you're definitely gonna want to check out the show next week where I conclude my interview with Dr. Susan Campbell. But for today's action step, time for action. I want you to just apply one thing that you learned from the conversation from the interview. So I'm leaving it pretty vague on purpose because everyone's gonna get something different out of that conversation that I've been having with Dr. K. Campbell. And I want you to find the thing that just spoke to you and then take action on it. It could be something really small. It could be the way that you greet someone. It could be putting a bid in for connection as she was talking about. It could be chatting with someone in a line, or maybe it's just having a deeper conversation with a co worker or with a friend. But find a way to apply this stuff because intellectual understanding is only going to get you so far. You got to get into the game, into action, into the field, and just take the risk. That's what I encourage you to do today for your action step. And until we speak again next week in the show, hopefully, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know 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 shrinkfortheshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com. It.