Celebrate Your Victories To Unlock Unlimited 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. Hey, welcome to today's episode of the show and the end of 2022. Whoa, we're almost there. Just a couple days away from the new year. Maybe you're listening to this right after the beginning of the new year, and if so, welcome to 2023. And there's something I think could be really valuable for you to do here at the end of the year, which is to celebrate your victories. Celebrate your wins. That may be something you do or do not do. Perhaps you have read or listened to my latest book that was released earlier this year called 100 wins in 100 days. And if you haven't, you should go check it out. Go to 100winsbook.com that's 100 wins. W I n S book probably don't need to be spelled book book.com and there you can click a link to get it from Amazon or audible, get it on Kindle or paperback. Or you can also go there to get bonus materials for the book as well as download or get access to a free 10 day training course called 10 Day Winning Streak that will get you into some serious momentum. So maybe you've already read that and listened to that and you have been practicing acknowledging and owning and celebrating your wins. And maybe not. And if so, you should definitely check out that book if you haven't. But it becomes especially important to do so I think with milestones like the end of the year, beginning of the year, especially if you like to set goals or have things you want to create for this next year. Sometimes we skip that step of acknowledging and celebrating our wins and just go straight into like, yeah, what's next? And there's a whole host of problems with that way of being where you kind of dismiss or don't acknowledge or don't really let yourself even feel your victories. In fact, you might even have such an intense dismissing pattern that you don't even label them as such. There are no victories. There are no wins. There is nothing to celebrate from this year because, frankly, I didn't do enough. So what am I going to celebrate that for? And if you have that attitude towards yourself, or even maybe not that intense, but it's like 50, 60% of what I just said, even that's enough to significantly diminish your energy, your enthusiasm, your motivation to keep going. Because we do not thrive on failure. We thrive on success. And yes, you can become resilient to failure, determined in the face of failure, but success is like, it's easy fuel, right? So let's say whatever success is to you, the win is to you. So let's say you want to date more or you want to sell more, or you want to get hired, or you want to make more friends, whatever it is you want to do as a more confident version of you feels more capable, more successful. And let's say you're doing sales and you have a sales call, and the person's like, yeah, I want to buy it. And you're like, okay. You ask someone out and they're like, yeah, I want to date you. And you're like, okay. You just naturally, yeah, all right. And then another person's like, yeah, I want to date you, too. And another person's like, yeah, I want to buy from you, too. And you're like, all right, I'm on a roll, baby. It's just naturally fueling. Of course you want to do more. You're like, yeah. Now let's say the person's like, no, don't want to buy from you. No, don't want to date you. No, don't want to hire you. The initial response is like, and maybe if you've done a lot of work and preparation, you could be like, okay, you know, like, well, I'm not for everybody, and I trust that there is more opportunity out there, and I'm going to keep going. So you can have a good attitude. You can keep your energy pretty good and pretty strong, but it's not so easily reinforcing. It doesn't. You know, it's like trying to make an uncooked head of broccoli and you just bite into it like an ice cream cone. Like, yeah, you can eat that. You can. It's not going to taste as good as some, like, you know, delicious salad dressing. Salad. Or, you know, insert your favorite healthy food here. I don't know, a smoothie or something with dates and fruits in it and stuff like that. That's going to naturally be like, yeah, I Want more of that? Right? Broccoli head. Okay, I can do it. So the key takeaway here, though, is that it's not just the circumstances of life out there giving you success or failure. It is you focusing your attention. And I've seen this again and again and again in myself and with clients where you have a lot of different things that a lot of different results that have happened over the course of this year. Some are, quote, success, some are failures. Some are what you want, some are not what you wanted. Some are wins, some are losses. And you focus on the losses, or you focus on the gap of where you are now to where you want to be. And then you remember a lot of the losses of the past, and you're like, that's a pretty far gap. I don't know how that's going to ever be filled. And what if you focused on the wins, though? You might be like, wow, look how far I've come. Yeah. Okay, I can go a little further. Oh, yeah, we can cross this chasm. I don't know exactly how, but, you know, what is that? That optimism, that sense of possibility, that's just you being in a more energized state. When your energy is low, you're gonna see the gap is impossible, and you're gonna feel discouraged and hopeless. When your energy is stronger and better, you're gonna say, yeah, yeah, I think I could do. I think it's gonna. Yeah, I just feel like it's gonna happen. There's more optimism. There's more confidence. Why? Because there's more energy. Where did the energy come from? Focusing on your wins. So enough talking about it. Let's do it. What are some of your wins from this year? Let's expand. Not just this day, this week, this month, this, like, the whole of 2022. And it is a ways back now, right? 12 months is a long time, so you might have to go see how you can anchor yourself to different moments of the year. Maybe you think about the seasons. Right now we're in winter again, but, you know, last January, we were in winter. So the early part of the year, January, February, the winter seasons, what was happening for you in your life? Where were you? What was happening in your work, in your love life, with your kids, if you have kids, with your health? What are some of the things that were occurring the winter at the beginning of this year? Any wins from that purity or any things you did, any actions you took, any circumstances that went the way that you wanted? And be sure to acknowledge actions that you took. Even if you didn't get the outcome that you wanted, because maybe you know, when it comes to wins, like when does the win occur? So I like to say that action is the win because action is what you have control over, not the exact outcome of any given moment. And you might have to take the action 10, 20, 30 times before you get the outcome you want. And so is the action number three or action number 14? Let's say you get the win on action number 14. You get the outcome you wanted. Which was the best action? Was it number 14 or number 3 or 7 or 12? Well, you can say, well it was number 14 because that's when I got the result. Yeah, but what if what you did at number three helped you be ready to get better, to get the result? And so all of those actions, we can make them discrete, separate things, but they're really part of a process that's all glommed together as one thing. The process of continuous or consistent action. And when you engage in that process, that's a win. Do you follow me there? Does that make sense for you? Can you see that? And so once you really get that, it's like, okay, so what are some wins? Maybe you took some action in the early part of the year that did not get the results that you wanted. I'm just thinking of a client actually in my Mastermind program who I would guess this is around early part of this year. January, February, March for him. And he was working on dating and relationships. And at that stage he just had very low self esteem for his whole life. I'm not dateable, I'm not enough. His family had reinforced that no one's going to want to date you. His brothers teased him all the time. And now here he is trying to create love in his life. And sure enough, there's this 400 pound gorilla on his back that's like, no one's ever going to want to be with you. And so he's doing a ton of inner work in the first part of this 20, 22, and working on his self esteem and his confidence in why he is of value. And then he did ask some women out and they said no. And he felt humiliated and embarrassed. And see, I knew it. And you might say, man, there's not much winning going on in that quarter for this guy. And I don't see it that way at all. Having the privilege of being in this process with people over years and watching them change and watching what really occurs and I'm just like, and so I can have A much more relaxed, like, yep, keep going, stay in it. You know, and they're like, it's never going to happen. I'm like, you cannot imagine how many clients have said that. And then I've seen the results and what's changed in their lives. So those actions he took were those wins? I would suggest that they are because those actions strengthened him. The inner work, the failed attempts, the learning, the growth. And by quarter two, he was starting to feel better about himself as a man, as a human, his worth. And so when he did start to reach out, his energy was very different. Right, because when your self esteem is really low, your confidence is in the gutter and you ask someone out, it's a freaking miracle if they say yes. Right? Because you're kind of energetically and emotionally and non verbally communicating, hey, I don't think much of myself, but do you want to date this guy? I mean, I'm sorry. And so it's a mixed message. It's incongruent. It's not powerful. In his case, not his powerful masculine is not coming through. It's all muted. And he's afraid of getting rejected, so he's holding his energy back. So then it's less clear signals and all of it. I made every single one of those mistakes, by the way. And I see it as a process. There's no way out but through, he's got to go through it. But as he grows, boom. Quarter two, he started to own himself more and he started to get different responses and then there's new challenges, right? Like, okay, I'm starting to date her and now I'm flipping into this being this pleasing guy and okay, I gotta, how do I be more assertive here? And what happens? And then he had this situation that happened at the end of quarter two where he was kind of like two different ways women had said yes to going on a date with him. And then he felt all anxious because he's like, oh, I'm like dating multiple women. I'm kind of like being deceitful and I'm a bad guy. I was like, okay, let's explore that. Is that really. Are you telling them that you're, hey, we're in an exclusive relationship. Are you afraid to have a conversation about what they might be expecting? First of all, it's like a first or a second date. I don't even know if you need to get into that on date number one. So are we exclusive or what? You know, it's like, whoa, buddy, let's just get some Coffee and talk, right? So it's just all his own stuff was coming up. And again, every step of this way, I know it so well because I relate to it. I had this guilt about dating all over the place and fear, right? So it's a great combo. Great one, two punch. In any case, that's quarter two, right? And it progresses. And then in the. And now he's in a relationship, end of the year, he's in a relationship with an amazing woman that he chose. And so if we were to look back 11 months ago, when he's getting rejected, asking this woman out at the gym and feeling embarrassed and thinking, oh, my God, I should never do that again. Like, what if he did never do that again? So the win. Where is the win there? Is it only now that he. Oh, he got the. You know, it's the victory moment, right? What's that? There's a great quote about that. It's like people are rewarded in public for what they've been practicing and developing in private for 20 years, or the overnight success that you see was developing for 20 years in the shadows. These ideas that it just happens. It's like, no, the person has just been training and practicing and growing and developing, and then, boom, then they have that breakthrough moment. So what are some of your wins? Let's let it expand throughout the entire year. Now. It could be the first quarter, it could be the second quarter. I was kind of going through the quarters there with you with this client. So you might start to reflect on the different quarters of your year. And you also don't have to go linear like that, where you imagine one quarter or the next just kind of open up to the whole year and maybe things pop up. Oh, I did that in the summer. Oh, I appreciated that. Or, oh, that was a sweet moment. And let it expand not just to things that you did. Like, we've been talking a lot about action, but also just sweet moments from the year, victories, things you're grateful for that maybe you, quote, did or didn't do. You know, just like, maybe you appreciate a certain moment with a friend and yeah, you know, maybe you did something to create that friendship or sustain it. But also just what you're really feeling is just gratitude. And in fact, the book in 100 wins, one of the later chapters I just have, it's a chapter called Wins and Gratitude and How We Can Expand. And we all know gratitude is good and can help us feel a lot more fulfilled and happy in our lives and really expanding your awareness to include wins of Things that you did, but also just to notice what's going well and to appreciate something. Your life. That, too, is a win. So what do you appreciate from this year? What are you grateful for from this year? What are the wins from this year? What are the things that you want to celebrate as you reflect on these? Like breathing more fully and sitting up. If you're sitting, sit up more fully upright. If you're standing, stand upright. If you're already on your feet, then put your arms up above your head in the victory pose. Like, thank you. Yes. Like, bring more energy into this. Because if this is just purely intellectual and you're like, yep, I guess I did that. Whatever. I'm gonna get a sandwich. Like, you're not. There's not much juice there. But if you're like, yeah, wow, that was amazing. And I see this all the time. In fact, some of the people in my group know this is coming when someone shares, like, a big win, you know? Cause, look, there's little wins along the way. There's the win of failure. Like, I took the action. I didn't get the result I wanted. We'll celebrate that. But then sometimes someone will come on in one of my group calls, and they'll share, like, so, yeah, you know, got that new job I've been talking about and negotiated, you know, 20% increase of the salary that I was getting before, and, you know, blah, blah, blah. Or, oh, yeah, that's the person I've been dating. Yeah, we're gonna get married in six months. And they'll say it in this kind of offhand way. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So when did you have the big celebration? And they're like, what? They didn't. They did not. There was not a moment in their life when they got this major breakthrough that they've been working through. You know, maybe they. The case of the relationship example. This guy had been doing his inner work, you know, long before he met me. Right. But, you know, intensively, for a year and a half in my group programs and major breakthroughs and years of social anxiety. And then he's mentioning it, like, he's telling me his freaking shopping list. And I'm like, no. You know, like this. The juice of life comes from acknowledging the victory. Not just if you have the victory, but your physiology and your body is so bound and muted that you're not going to feel the juice that we all want to feel, the fulfillment that we all want to feel. And so I'll say, all right. Let's all stand up and you know, we're on a zoom call. Like, I put music on and we're like, sometimes it's a techno song, sometimes I put on, like We Are the Champions by Queen. Like, we are the champions. And you just get laugh, get celebrate, get big, get loud. Why? Because this is your freaking life. And we're spending it downplaying the drama and the ups and downs and the victories. And then the only juice you can feel is by watching a freaking stupid, made up Marvel character punch the bad guy in the face and say, okay, I can feel victory now. Or when a team kicks a ball into a net or throws it through a hoop and they're like, okay, now I can feel victory. You know, no disparagement to the. If you're a big Marvel fan or sports fan, but I'm just saying you got to claim your life and the epicness of your life and the way that you do that is by celebrating those victories. So that's what we're going to end with today. In fact, that is going to be your action step. Time for action, action, action. Your action step is going to be to celebrate some of those victories that you came up with here. And maybe there's more. Maybe more will just keep coming to you. I invite you to just keep reflecting on this. Maybe if you. Have you just been doing this in your mind? Take some time to write them out, type them or write them out. Just one after another after another after another. See if you can get 20 victories. See if you can get 50 wins from this year. And if you're like, that number is astronomical. No, your bar is probably astronomically high. You're like, well, I didn't solve world hunger this year. I didn't accumulate a billion dollars, you know. Well, I guess this year's got no wins in it, right? No, lower the bar. Did you exercise for a couple of months with regularity? Yeah, but not the whole year as these. Forget that, just put it down as a win. Hey, from March to July, I was crushing it at the gym. Why is that a victory? Well, one, in itself, it's that you did that. And two, that's a rhythm. That's a pattern that your body knows that you can access again in the future. What are small little wins? Anything that you can acknowledge that. So get up to that 50. So whatever your list is, then take some time to actually celebrate. That means putting on a song, getting big in your body. Like, just imagine if you don't know, really, like, I don't know how to do this. Just imagine, like if you do, like sports, what would you do? If you were at the championship game and there's this epic moment right at the end of the game where your team scored right? You'd just be out of your mind jumping up and down. That's what you want to access. Even if it feels strange to you, do it in private. No one else has to know. No one else has to be around. You know, if you do it in your house when no one's around. If you live in an apartment, you're afraid of your neighbors hearing you, well, that could be good embarrassment inoculation practice. But also just do it in your car. Just don't sell yourself short and not give yourself that opportunity because of the fear of what they might think of you. Like, maybe that would be good for them to hear someone being freaking alive and celebrating their victories. So that is your action step that's gonna take us to the end of this year. Thank you for being with me. Thank you for sharing this last year, however many episodes you've been with me for. And if you're new to the show, welcome. We got a lot more planned for 2023. We're not stopping. Confidence training continues and until we speak again, may you have a fantastic new year. Know that you are a beautiful, amazing, awesome creation and celebrate in who you are. I'll talk to you in 2023. 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 over 20 overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to SocialConfidenceCenter.com.