Changing The Way You Think (Part 2)

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.

Hello.

Welcome to another episode of Shrink for the Shy Guy. Today is going to be part two.

In changing the way you think. And as you probably. You might already know this even before.

You listen to any of the other.

Podcasts or anything I put out there, you might already have a sense that if you could just change the way you think about something that you'd feel entirely different about it. That if you didn't think that those people were judging you, that you would feel better. That if you didn't think that you couldn't do something and you weren't good enough, that maybe you could just do it fine and everything would go smoothly. So you might already have an inkling that the way you're thinking is strongly contributing to your difficulty and, and social fear and inhibition and not being able to take action in the way that you want. And you might also have the experience of, yeah, but I don't know how to change the way I think. That's just how it is. That's just how I think. It just happens to me. And that's what we're going to be getting into more in this episode, in the interview with Brad, and in future episodes is that's the first step is acknowledging that the way I think and believe strongly affects how I feel and what I do. Next step is how do I develop the skill set to be able to radically change the way I think in my psychology so I can take more effective action in the world? And that is something that you learn over time. It's a practice, it's a discipline. So to that end, I want to share some information that can help you in that practice. And this comes from the field of cognitive therapy, which was developed way back when, 50s, 60s. I should know that from my graduate training. But there's a fellow named Aaron Beck who is heralded as one of the founders, although the concepts that this is based on have been around for thousands of years, and the Greeks were talking about this sort of thing. But the idea is that the way we think influences how we feel and what we do. And the reason that Beck kind of moved the field forward is that in his work with people, he found that there were patterns of thought that were particularly debilitating. Patterns have thought that when people engaged in this, they tended to be depressed or anxious. And he came up with a list, and he called them cognitive distortions. That's a way of, you know, if you think about a distortion of an image or if you look at a fun house mirror or you look at someone through a glass of water, the image is distorted. So you're perceiving reality, sort of, but not clearly, not directly. And so there's a whole list. He came up with 10. Some people expand it to 15. Sometimes you find lists as long as 20. But I picked the top three to share with you today that are the most strongly related to social fear, shyness, social anxiety, inhibition, self doubt, and all that sort of thing. So these three are strongly contributing to your anxiety when you're feeling nervous around others. And the first is mind reading. Mind reading. So when you're around someone and you have that sense, you have that idea, you have that feeling deep down in your core that you know what they're thinking about you, you know what they're thinking about you, and you know it's negative. Usually comes in the form of they think I'm a loser, they think I'm ridiculous, they think I don't know what I'm talking about, they think I'm boring. And we have that absolute certainty that that's what's happening. In fact, we can be so certain about this that. Have you ever had a mind reading experience and then someone tries to talk you out of it? What happens? Well, if you're anything like me, I've noticed, I will resist it. I'd be like, no, no, stop trying to tell me otherwise. I know what they were thinking. They think I'm a loser. So as I said in the last episode, you have to start being willing to question that, Question your thinking. And the reality is we honestly don't know what someone is thinking about us. You might be right. Sometimes they might be thinking you're a loser. And then you got to work on a different skill, which is rejection tolerance or being strong enough in your own core, in your own self esteem that you can handle that. But oftentimes we literally don't know. We imagine and we do this thing that psychologists call projecting, which means you have the thought in your own mind. Man, I sound boring. I'm kind of a loser. I'm not that interesting in my life. You believe that about yourself and then when you're talking to someone, you project that into them and you think it's coming from them. So that's what mind reading usually is, is a lot of projection. The second distortion that is incredibly common, especially in social anxiety, is fortune telling. Fortune telling is when you know with absolute certainty how something's going to turn out. And you usually predict it negatively. I mean it's. I guess someone could fortune tell in the positive direction. Usually that's not problematic. That might actually give them hope and inspiration. I suppose it's problematic if they're fortune telling like, you know, the end is near. I heard it on AM radio. And so now I'm going to sell all my possessions and I'm going to get rid of my health care and I'm going to quit my job and the Lord will provide for me and my family. You know, maybe there's some danger there of repercussions, but for the most part fortune telling goes in the negative direction. Right? It's like that, I could try that, but it's going to go terribly. If I put myself out there, I'm gonna get rejected. If I go to that party alone, it's gonna be terrible and I'm not gonna have a good time and I'm not gonna meet anyone there. And you are absolutely certain that that is what's gonna happen? The worst part about this is a. I mean, I think we can agree on the fact that we literally cannot know what's gonna happen in the future. We can have a pretty good guess, but we don't know. And here's the thing about fortune telling is in our need to be right and be consistent with ourselves, we will make it happen in a lot of instances. And then we can be like, see, I told you I'd have a bad time with that party. Or I knew those people wouldn't like me. So you got to become really skeptical of that fortune telling. And I found that sometimes just having these labels, these words can be really helpful. So when you're doing it, you can say, oh, that's mind reading again, or oh, okay, I'm fortune telling now. It might still feel, you might still anxious. Feel anxious, like, oh, it's going to happen. But you can really start to chip away at it and say, okay, I'm anxious, but I am fortune telling. I really can't know what's going to happen. The third top distortion that really contributes to a lot of pain and suffering around shyness is all or nothing thinking. So all or nothing thinking is when you are. You perceive something as an absolute, as completely this or completely that. So that means you have a conversation with someone and it's, I don't know, a 10 minute conversation and it goes, you know, talk about several different things. And then at the end of the conversation perhaps you say Something and they give you kind of a strange look. Or maybe you ask them if they want to get some coffee sometimes and they don't want to. Or there's some piece of the conversation that doesn't go how you want it to go. And then you leave. And you say two things often, man, that was a total failure. That whole. I mean, what an embarrassing, awful conversation that was. And I am a total loser. So in those instances, you are doing all. It's complete, all or nothing thinking. Sometimes it's called binary thinking or black and white thinking. It's just, this is how it is. I am a total loser. That conversation was entirely bad. And it totally discounts the reality that the conversation was many things. It was a flowing, moving experience that you are many things, that you can't be locked into this complete, one singular thing. But our mind wants to do that. Our mind wants to put things in little clear boxes. Like, that was success. That was a failure. And so you got to start really questioning that. And a great thing to do there is say, hey, it's not black and it's not white. It's gray. There's shades of gray here. Let me find what the deeper truth is. And we're going to get more into future episodes when we have more time about how to. Once you've identified the distortions, how to work with them. In fact, in an upcoming episode, we're going to go deeper into the whole principle of cognitive therapy and how to work with it. But in the spirit of learning to change how you think, I wanted to offer this to you today to start to label those distortions when you notice them. And that can have a powerful effect on how you feel. Now we're going to get into that second part of the interview with Brad, and you're going to learn even more about how to shift your focus and change your perception of your experience so that you feel more confident, feel less anxious. So we're going to get into that in just one moment after this.

Hey, what's up? Whatever. Hey, you hear about Ted?

Nah, man.

What? Yeah, Ted's gone, man.

He's gone. Gone where?

No one knows. Some people say Ted's left the country. Some people say he left with a girl.

What?

With a girl? Ted Macy.

Fucking Ted.

Macy, Te.

Ted left with a girl. But Ted don't talk to girls, man. Ted just stayed in his room and he just played Xbox all the time. I know, man, but check it. He went to this place called the center of Confidence or something. He saw some confidence doctor or Some shit, man.

A what?

A confidence doctor, man. I don't know. But anyway, he got real deep into it and like three months later he was out talking to all kinds of people. No way, man. Yeah. And then he starts dating this girl, she's visiting from Iceland and they hit it off and next thing I heard is they went back to her homeland.

Visit her, her family or some shit.

Wow.

Ted Macy, man. Fucking Ted Macy.

If Ted Macy can do it, anyone can. Go to SocialConfidenceCenter.com to discover how to overcome your shyness, maximize your confidence, and start living your life fully.

Expert interview.

And what's an example of how someone might take control of that focus? Let's say they're in a social situation and they're say just have introduced themselves or just started a conversation with someone and then all of a sudden they're focused on the other person and perhaps interpreting the other person as being disapproving or judging them.

Absolutely. So let me ask you think for a moment, how would somebody change what they were focusing on in the moment? How would they change that? Well, how is it that earlier today you were focusing on one thing and then another? So maybe at lunchtime, as you think about lunchtime for a moment, and you sat down and you were thinking about one thing and then you bit into your food and you had all these sensations and you were thinking about something else. Okay, so what did I just do? I just illustrated the two most powerful ways to affect your focus. And the first one is questions. Because the questions we ask are a question is basically a request to the brain to pay attention, to focus the attention in a certain way. So if you ask yourself the question of how can I really enjoy this party today? What's the first thing that I can do that's actually going to make this party, even if it's not a great party, maybe I can enjoy it more than the last party. What would I do? That question, if I'm standing outside of a door, for example, going to a party, asking myself that question is really different than allowing my brain to run a practice question, which is probably like, how many people are going to be here today? And are there going to be so many people? Am I going to freak out? Are there going to be so many people here, I'm going to freak out today?

Get out of my head, Brad.

So just those two questions, that's an example. So questions, the first, and then directing it conversationally continues the same way. Right? I ask the questions and then I start talking to details and so affecting my own focus would be. I'd answer that question. The first question, the first question of, all right, well, how am I going to maybe enjoy this the best today? And I'd say, well, you know, if I. If I stay present in conversations and maybe like the first couple of people I see, maybe I can really be curious. I can be really curious. And how well that worked the last time. What was something that really helped me in the last part? Now, actually, I noticed myself that when I'm doing it internally, as opposed to affecting somebody else's focus, it's almost all questions.

Okay, that's good to know.

Yep. So I would recommend people's effective question first and foremost. So we've got questions, we've got the inner voice, we've got what people picture. What are they paying attention? Are they picturing the last party? And this, of course, ties together. Because if you ask yourself a question, say, all right, now, what was the best thing that happened at the last party? Then that's what you're picturing as you step in. Whereas if you had asked yourself the previous question of where there are going to be so many people to hear that I'm freaking out, then you're almost certainly picturing some pastime when you were freaking out. So you can see how these processes relate to each other. And so the third one, and I want to jump to here, is the one that particularly comes up a lot around shyness and social anxiety. That's the interpretation of physical sensations. So internally, how do we communicate with our emotions? Well, we're. We're making pictures, we're talking to ourselves, and then we're experiencing our body and we're labeling that. So it's not just that. If somebody says to you, well, somebody says to me, I feel anxious. I'll say, well, how do you know? What does that mean? Let's suppose I don't speak English and I'm not quite sure what that word is. What do you mean? They'll say, well, this anxious feeling in my stomach, I say, oh, okay. Well, how do you know? What does that mean? Can you describe it to me without using the word anxious? So I'm driving them down to the actual sensations, and they'll say, well, you know, I've. And then actually, most people stumble there for a moment because they've stopped paying attention to the sensations and they've started paying attention to the label. And this is like the transition as a kid from saying, hey, wow, look outside, there's this tall thing, and it's got all these parts of it sticking out and then there's all these really colorful things on it. Some of them are orange and some of them are red. And the dad says, oh yeah, that's a tree and those are the leaves. And then from there on the kid says, oh look, there's leaves out there. And there's much less engagement and, and actual ability to shift the experience of it when you're at the label level. So I push people to actually start telling me what's happening in their body and what are they, then we can move to the interpretation of it. And so I don't know if we have time for a quick story about that. So this is actually a pretty well known story been told by a number of different people. And I actually went back and took some look at it to confirm the, the basic facts of it, and they're absolutely true. Even though people tell some of the details that they can't know a little bit differently. But it's a story about two well known musicians, one of them Bruce Springsteen. Almost everybody's heard of the Boss. Fabulous. You've heard of Bruce Springsteen, right?

Bruce who? No, I used to. My dad had just a handful of CDs when I was a kid. And one of them, I don't even know the cd, but I remember the song was Born in the USA and I would just like tromp around the house as a little kid singing that at the top, the top of my lungs. So I know at least one Bruce Springsteen song.

Absolutely. Well, given that you're claiming to have been a kid at the time that the Born in the USA CD came out, then you may not have heard of another older folk singer by the name of Carly Simon. No, Carly Simon was a really well known folk singer in the 60s and early 70s, along with James Taylor and the great singer. But one of the reasons I tell this story is that it turns out that for a number of years Carly Simon didn't tour because she was having what she was calling panic attacks. She was having a form of stage fright that was so intense that she didn't tour. And this was kind of a big issue. It was kind of well known at the time. And so a journalist went to interview her from some magazine and he said, so Carly, tell me about what's happening. And she says, well, look, I wish I could do the concerts. I hate canceling this. I keep thinking I'm going to be able to do it. But what happens is every time I. About 30 minutes before the show, I start getting this fluttery feeling in my gut, and I start thinking, oh, no, not this time. And I think I can hold it together. But in about 15 minutes, my heart starts to race. And then right after that, my palms start to sweat and I'm just. No, I'm falling into a complete panic, and I just can't go on. Wow, that's really terrible. And so, as the story goes, a number of years later, actually in 1984, I believe, the Born in the USA tour of Bruce Springsteen. I happened to be at the Coliseum in la. I saw the hundred thousand people. You probably know that Springsteen is famous for having these huge, fabulous concerts, and he's just crazy on stage. He can be engaging all the way to the people out in the trees, you know, in the cheap seats out on the other side of these big venues. And so this same journalist was sent to interview Springsteen and said, bruce, you know, you're the Boss. How is it that you're just so amazing on stage? And Springsteen says to him, well, you know what? I'd love to take credit for it, but it's just the passion. I just born with this passion. I just got this incredible passion, and it just overtakes me every time there's a. There's concerts. Why I love doing concerts so much. I says, well, tell me more about that. And Springsteen says, well, you know, it's. Every time happens the same way. About 30 minutes before the show, I start getting this kind of fluttery feeling in my gut, and I start thinking, oh, yeah. And then about 15 minutes later, my heart starts to race. And then right after that, my palms start to sweet, and I'm just overcome with the passion and. And the excitement. And I rush the stage and that's the concert and the two stories, the descriptions of what Carly Simon was experiencing as panic attacks and what Springsteen was experiencing as passion and excitement. The description of the sensations was almost down to the word, but the experiences were completely different. So the interpretation of sensations drives the brain. And so you see how these processes now start to feed each other, because how Simon was interpreting her sensations drove her focus, what she was paying attention to. It also drove her inner dialogue, what she was saying to herself and what she was picturing in terms of what had happened in the past. Whereas for Springsteen, those same physical sensations didn't have anything to do with anxiety. They were passion, and they lead his focus in a completely different way. And that's why I say that people do social anxiety or do passion. They do excitement. Springsteen felt like it happened to him. I would argue from A brain map that he had trained himself and created a neural network that connected these physical sensations with these memories, with this inner voice, with the pictures, and all together they created this experience that for him was excitement.

I mean, there's so much good stuff in what you shared that people listening can actually use on their own. Starting with asking yourself a better question before or even during an experience, something that guides your focus as a result of the question towards something that's going to help you be more engaged, whether it's curiosity or how to have the same experience at this party as you did at a good experience party. Also, that's a great tip you shared about shifting the speed of the inner voice.

And I think a lot of people don't realize that we actually do have influence.

And I think that's one of the main takeaways from what you've shared today is that we have more influence than we could even realize on a lot of processes in our body and our.

Emotions and even in how we interpret those feelings.

And I want to ask you one last question about that, and then we'll wrap up with just a few questions about how people can learn more about some of the stuff that you're sharing. But the last question, just to really tie this together, is, so using that example or that story of the boss, someone is feeling that nervousness, that crawling feeling in their skin about starting a conversation with a woman or doing something that really makes them feel shy and.

Anxious, how might they reinterpret or relabel their sensations? How could they see it?

That's a great question. And I'll tell you one of the funniest, simplest techniques that I've taught people, and they have had fabulous results with. And it again has. The reason it works is because of the way it taps into a different neural network. It taps into different associations for people. And that's to say, so what if I stepped away from my labels of this and I just said to myself, huh? Like you said, I'm having sensations. So rather than referring to them as anything in particular, you first start by saying, look, I'm having sensations. In fact, right now, I'm having lots of sensations. And then here's a kind of. It's a little bit of a playful trick. And I say, well, what do you call somebody who's having lots and lots and lots of sensations? Well, I call them sensational. And as soon as you do that, if you say to yourself, you can get yourself to laugh in that moment, you say, hey, I'm feeling really Sensational right now, then that lights up different parts of the brain, lights up different experience, different emotions, and then that experience feels different. And then get yourself to laugh for a moment and get that feeling of being sensational. And then you step into that conversation with a new focus. Focus on the laughter, the playfulness, and then the last thing. Of course, one of the best ways to change any of this in a social situation is to be able to take that focus and put it on another person. And when you're focusing on the other person and purely on being curious and fascinated by them, then the playfulness and the feeling of reinterpreting the sensations, they all work together to create a very different experience.

And as an added benefit, if you want to start a conversation, say, with a person you find attractive and you're struggling to find out exactly how to do that, you can just approach them with that question. What do you call someone who has a lot of sensations and then you're in no need to be anxious then?

Absolutely.

I think there's just been so much good stuff that you've shared, Brad and I want to ask one general question, then one more specifically about what you're doing and how people can follow some of your work. But in general, if someone has never heard of NLP or just vaguely come across it and they're curious to learn more, and just as an average person, not necessarily a therapist or someone, do you have a resource, a book or something that you'd recommend, someone could start with?

Absolutely. One of the best things to do, I believe. In November 2013, Tony Robbins re released his fabulous book Awaken the Giant within, and it's now available, I think, in a new approach. Maybe he was making it available in different format. I know that Robbins was making sure that people had availability to that. And that's one of the most accessible books about the practical application. If you want to actually learn about some of the basics of nlp, Robbins is actually a great candidate for that one too. His very first book, Unlimited Power, is a great description of a lot of those tools. But Awaken the Giant within is a way to actually get the application, to get the useful strategies right from the beginning.

That's great.

That's great. I have so many positive things to say about Tony Robbins. So I think that's a great resource for someone to get started with and very easily accessible, approachable. Just maybe for a moment you could share. I know you have a new book coming out and you could share a little bit about that and also what you do in Your company lifetime optimization and some of the brain coaching and other things you do just in case someone would like to follow your work.

Absolutely. My upcoming book forthcoming book is yous Entrepreneurial 17 Brain Tips for Business Success. It's coming from my work on the brains of entrepreneurs. Looking at the way that, that entrepreneurs brains actually have now been wired to be different, that they do entrepreneurship in the same way we're talking about doing social anxiety, that they're doing that experience and they've built habits and beliefs that have measurably affected their brains. And anybody can do that. That's one of my beliefs coming out of practical neuroscience, that the things that you focus on and the way you do some of these processes actually change your brain. And so in my book, it's all about practical pieces of it teaching people entrepreneurs or people who would like to be more entrepreneurial. And Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, argues that everybody needs to be an entrepreneur in the new society. Even people inside corporations have to be able to to be entrepreneurial in their own work. And that's the approach I take to this about giving brain tips for things like how to build work habits that actually stick from a brain perspective. How to pay attention to your language when you're influencing people or doing sales. How to know what kind of language actually sabotages sales or interferes with it. How to stop beating up on yourself and be able to take action. Teach people how in the brain that when they beat up on themselves, they actually increase the likelihood that they'll make that same mistake again. And I teach how that happens and what to do instead. So that's some of the things in that book I encourage people that can follow me as brain coach Brad on Twitter and at LifetimeOptimization, my brain health and coaching clinic. I work with people locally with neurofeedback, helping people with sleep and anxiety and attention deficit issues and then all across the country work with people as a brain coach, working with entrepreneurs in particular, teaching them, as I say, how to build or what I call grow the entrepreneurial brain.

Yeah, well, I think we have just scratched a nail of the surface of what you have to offer in that arena around entrepreneurship and working with our own internal states. And I really appreciate you sharing that Brad. And I strongly encourage anyone who is their interest piqued is to check Brad out online because he's a fantastic storyteller and perhaps it comes from his clinical hypnotherapy training. But every time I talk to Brad, I feel like I get sucked into A trance. So I imagine your book is going to be the same way. And I can't wait to read that, Brad. And thank you so much for taking the time to join us and share all these incredible tips with everyone listening.

Well, it was a lot of fun. I love talking about it. And I like to say we're always using your brain, so tonight, just use your brain for good.

Fantastic.

Thanks, Brad. That is the end of our interview with Brad. In the last few minutes that we have here today, we're going to get into the final part, the always final part of the show, which is your action step.

Time for action.

Today's action step is going to be.

Using what you just learned, because I believe if you can take something and learn it and apply it immediately, you can have tremendous results. It's called speed of implementation in business. If you can learn something and implement it immediately, then you can have a tremendous edge in the business world. But I think this applies to your social life as well and your personal life. If you can learn something, integrate it, and apply it, then you can learn more rapidly, you can grow more rapidly. So let's take something you just learned from this interview and apply it in your action step. And the first thing is to discover what questions you're asking yourself. Brad talked a lot about the questions that we ask ourselves and how it guides our focus. So what question are you asking yourself? You know, one client I worked with asked himself all the time in his head, what do other people expect of me? What's expected of me in this situation? Well, what kind of results do you think he got with that question? He felt anxious. He felt guilty. He felt trapped, obligated. So you got to identify what are the questions that I'm asking myself, especially in social situations, and then experiment with coming up with a more empowering question, a question that gives you freedom of choice and options. Things like, what do I want? How can I enjoy myself in this interaction? How can I make this a fun experience? How can I really connect with these people here? How can I be more of myself? If I was being more authentic right now, what would I do? These are just a few questions, and we're getting more in depth into this in questions in future episodes. In fact, if you want to really go into questions deeply, I would suggest checking out my book, the Solution to Social Anxiety, which you can find on Amazon.com and it has a whole section on the kinds of questions you ask yourself, how to construct more powerful questions and how that can shift your experience. But for now, pick one of the major questions you ask yourself. That's disempowering. Identify it, and then come up with a more empowering question. And then ask yourself that question regularly. It's not going to be your natural question. It's not normal to you right now. So you have to condition yourself. And that means asking yourself that question. Like a mantra. You just gently repeat it in your mind, expecting an answer. And answers will come if you listen. Thanks for listening to the show and I'll talk to you in the next episode. And until we do know that, you're.

Awesome.

Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Azeez. 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 overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com.

Sa.