Confidence For Empaths

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. Today, we're going to be talking about empaths and confidence and how you can maintain high confidence, social confidence, being around people, interacting with people, and being highly empathic. And I think this is a super valuable skill or set of abilities to develop, because if you tend to be more empathic, you might say, well, jeez, it's really not painful to be around people. I'm really affected in certain ways. And so I just kind of want to reduce it. I want to minimize it. So there can be some overlap. There's definitely overlap between empaths and shyness, and then that can turn into more social anxiety or become more afraid or avoidant of others. So we're going to demystify all this and give you some very practical tools and strategies you can use in today's episode to become ultimately more confident and free around anyone, regardless of your level of empathic resonance with the people. So let's, you know, define some things you know. You know, are you an empath? Well, that term, I mean, I don't know exactly where it originated. I know the first time I heard it was from an author named Judith Orloff, and she writes a lot of books about empaths. I even have an interview with her on this show. So if you want to know some of her strategies, then just do a search@drinkforthshyguy.com for Judith. I don't think I have any other guests that were named Judith. So there you go. You'll find her. And we did an interview with her about her book, the Empath Survival Guide. So some great resources there. There's a number of criteria, and you can probably take an empath quiz online, but the short version is empathy. Right. Empathy means the ability to feel or get a sense of what someone else might be feeling. And so an empathic person is able to. You're talking to somebody and you're able to read like, oh, this person's hurting, or this person's sad or this person's angry. An empath is someone who not just can perceive it, but they can resonate. It's almost like the energy they will feel, and then they'll start to feel it too, or at least feel affected by it. So what's going on here and how does this happen? Well, emotions are. Well, everything is energy, right? That's what physicists have discovered in the last, I don't know, 70 years, right? It's like when you zoom in on particles, it's not hard objects. So here's a mic stand. You're gonna hear me hit on it. It's a solid thing, right? Well, no, actually, it is energy because it's made up of atoms. And if you zoom in on the atoms, they thought, well, atoms are going to be these hard little balls. And then over time, as scientists develop powerful enough methods to study it and observe it, it turns out that those atoms are made up of smaller things, you know, electron clouds. And it's like, well, what is the electron? What is the subatomic particle? And the more they zoom in, the more it just becomes like waves of energy. So everything is energy. And this is something that you may have heard in physics or you may have come across, but it hasn't necessarily permeated our consciousness unless you really studied it, which I did. I love Lynne McTaggart is her name. She's got a book called the Field, which has got a fascinating exploration of all this stuff. So everything is energy, including your emotions. And this idea that we only affect others by, say, physically touching them or saying something to them is pretty limited in perception. You affect others in a lot of ways. And one of the ways you affect others is the energy you emit, including your emotional energy. And they've done research on this where emotions are contagious. People can be put in rooms with other people who are displaying or intentionally generating certain emotions, and the other people will start to be affected by that simple experiment was they put someone in a waiting room with somebody, and that person was angry and frustrated and irritated, and they gave, you know, the person who's in the waiting room, they gave them some tests before and after, and the person in the waiting room is affected by that angry person. Now, you know, you might say, well, yeah, no, duh. We all know we're affected by each other, but you might not know the extent to which we're affected by each other. Right? Because, yeah, so someone's yelling at you. You might, you know. Yeah, of course I felt scared or I felt hurt or I felt angry. Right. But what about more subtle stuff? So let's say that person's not yelling at you, but they're tense inside and they're trying to hide it. They're not, you know, yelling at you and, you know, making a scene. They're just. They're irritated, they're. They're tense, they're frustrated. Something's going on with them, and you're sitting next to them, or you're talking to them about something else, about work or whatever. And then after the phone call, after you sat here after lunch with them, maybe even during, if you noticed it, you might start to feel something. And then afterwards, maybe you feel something, maybe you feel irritated, maybe you feel angry, in which case you've sort of absorbed their emotion. You could also maybe feel tense or scared. Now, you didn't absorb their emotion, but you reacted to their emotion. And all of this was unsaid. So this absolutely can happen. This is happening all the time. And the more sensitive you are to energy and emotion, the more you experience it. And so people that are more sensitive, they're, you know, that can be labeled with the term empath. And it's fascinating to see this in my kids because you might reflect on your own childhood and have a sense. I definitely was a very sensitive kid, and you might remember that or have stories about that from your family. But it's really fascinating seeing it in my children because I can observe it with so much more awareness than I had when I was young. And both of our children have different sensitivities, but especially my older son, who's seven and a half right now. But there's a way that he is. I mean, when he was young, he was just very sensitive to all kinds of things. Lights, sounds, a different stimulus. So, like, different sounds would, like, really bother him, and the blender would cause him to, like, freak out. Right. So. And it's not just those senses, like sight and sound and taste, but it's also the sense of emotion, the sense that your ability to perceive subtle energy. And so what would happen is he'd be around somebody and he would start this is before he could describe it, but he'd sort of react to people. He became a little more, like, shy or hesitant around people. And as he's gotten older, he's able to, you know, observe what other people are feeling. He'll say things like, well, that person. Was that person upset? Or other things like that. And if he's in a group of people. He will not want a lot of that attention on him, you know, which you could describe as shyness, right? He doesn't want all the attention on him. And just the other morning. So he's in this little outdoor school thing right now, and there's 12 kids in his little cohort. And, you know, they do different stuff, you know, outdoors and covered areas. And one of the things they do is draw pictures, and then they share about their picture with the other 11 kids and the teacher. And my wife was, you know, parents can be around at different times. And so she was there and then she commented, you know, she noticed. She said, hey, I noticed that you. You didn't share about your picture with the other kids. And he's like, yeah, no, I don't like. I don't like sharing. And she's like, oh, interesting. You know, tell me more. What don't you like about it? And he's like, well, I like sharing with the teacher. And so she's like, oh, you like sharing it, you know, with the teacher, but not in the group. He's like, yeah, so one on one feels good. He's like, yeah, I like sharing one on one. And then he did some online classes during some of the lockdowns, and there was like four or five kids in the class on a screen, and he liked it there. So she's like, smaller, feels good. He's like, yeah, but when there's like all those eyes looking at me, I don't like it. And I said, hey, Zaim, can you make the face of what it feels like to have all those eyes on you? And he put his hands up, almost like someone, you know, like the. Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. Like kind of palms facing outwards. Hands up. Tilted his head back, kind of scrunched up his face and rolled his eyes back in his head. And I laughed because I was like, exactly, exactly. Like, that's. I mean, the reason I had him show it is because I knew he doesn't. To articulate this stuff is hard when you're seven, right? But it's just like. And I was like, oh, I get that. Like, it. It's almost like someone who is like getting hit with a wave of hot air or cold air. It's kind of unpleasant. It's like a. You know, and he doesn't use this, but I perceive it. It's like a blast of energy. It's intense. It feels intense. And someone who's not as empathic doesn't feel all that so the reason I'm going on about this is for you to build empathy for yourself. Because most people who I work with who are empathic grew up in households that dismissed this, that ridiculed this, that rolled their eyes at this and said, oh, my God, just eat the food. Just do. Just put on the shirt. It doesn't matter if it feels rough on your skin. If that sound bothers you, just cover your ears. What's wrong with you? You know, oh, my God. Why are you scared of those kids? Just share your picture. Don't be shy, don't be weak, don't be a wimp. Come on, just do it. And if it wasn't that intense, or maybe it was more intense, you know, like, I'll give you something to cry about. That standard line from the shitty parenting playbook. But maybe it was more subtle. It was more exasperated, like, ah, come on. Ugh. You know, whatever. And you might have picked up on that too, if you're sensitive. So whatever it is, you know, here you are now as an adult, and what we need to do is we need to work with are the tendencies of our nervous system. Now, you don't have to use empath as a reason to not live the life that you want, just like you don't want to use any label as a reason for not living the life that you feel called to. So if you want to speak up in groups or put yourself out there in a big way or write a book or be able to engage in a crowd or all these things, don't say, well, I can't do that stuff because I'm an empath. That's not true. What's needed is you need specific ways to work with your nervous system so that it doesn't feel totally overwhelmed. That's all. Just think of it as some tools or some strategies. And when you have these tools and strategies, you can learn to work with yourself so that you feel more at ease. One thing that's super valuable and important and I want you to start thinking about, you might never have even thought about this. But as an empath, one thing that's gonna be very important for you is spaciousness. You need to have a sense of spaciousness that could be physical space around you. So what you might find is that if someone's all up in your grill, that you start to. Because there's more of an intense, energetic transfer there. So you're going to feel more uncomfortable, more tense. You want to get away. That's okay. Honor that. So you can start to make choices or decisions. And I'm saying you can't be near people. You can't touch people. It feels great to cuddle or sleep in a bed with somebody or whatever, but you want to notice when that doesn't feel great and acknowledge that and honor that. So if everyone's like, hey, we're all gonna pile into this car and drive out three hours to this thing, you know, we can all jam in the backseat. You might be like, I'll meet you guys there. You know, and that's just part of knowing yourself. Why? Loss of spaciousness. Loss of physical spaciousness. You know, if someone's real close to you, just take a step back. You don't need to make a big deal about it. Like, whoa, listen, buddy, I need spaciousness. You might inform the people that are closest to you, like family members. Like, hey, I feel I'll do that with my family. Sometimes there'll be like this kind of demand, or not even demand. See, that's interesting language. I turn it into demands, but it's like a cascade of different family members telling me things. So Candice is talking to me. She's telling me about something. And then one of my kids is like, daddy, I want this. And the other one's like, when are we going to play that thing? You said we're going to do that. And they're all coming to me at once. Instant loss of spaciousness. And I'll go to feeling overwhelmed. I'll turn everything into a demand. And then I'll get, like, irritated or overwhelmed. And it's like this. And the way I push them all away, get away from me. I want to run out of the room. And so what I've learned to do is, like, I'll say things like, whoa, whoa, whoa. There's a lot coming at me right now, and I'm feeling, like, a loss of spaciousness. So let's all just pause. Daddy needs to take a breath. I love you all. I want to hear what all of you are saying. And we got to go one at a time because otherwise I just can't do it. So I learned to do that and sort of claim. So this is. I use that kind of language because they're my family. I got to inform them more than you're not going to maybe say to your co worker, like, listen, Tim, I need spaciousness. I mean, you just kind of maybe navigate your life and discover how to get what you need without narrating that to everybody unless they're in a close relationship with you. But just Start thinking in terms of spaciousness. Not just physical spaciousness, but all kinds of spaciousness. If you schedule in a really full schedule and lock it in, do you feel loss of spaciousness as an empath? That can be really restricting for you. Do you have a bunch of plans that you've made? Do you have a bunch of obligations to people? I'm not saying you can't have responsibilities, but you want to start to choose a lot more. What the pace is, what the rhythm is, how many things you want to say yes to and no to. Now if you have a nice person who also is an empath, you can get into some sticky situations. I know this because that's what I did. Where you don't want to say no to people, so you say yes to everything and then you pack your schedule and now you feel a loss of spaciousness and you hate the look of your week. So we want to start to address that. Just think spaciousness. How do I get more spaciousness? For me, a beautiful practice to get spaciousness is to get outside. So I like to spend at least, at least an hour a day outside. Even on busy work days I will spend. So that means like I'll spend outside at least an hour in the morning before everyone gets up outside. And I usually do it almost all year round. Just gear up in the winter and put on the right clothes so I can do it almost every day outside. And I'll just feel, I feel the spaciousness I feel. Just think about if you are sensitive to everything, more sensitive, right. So when you get outside especially I walk around a quiet neighborhood. Even the more you study this, the more you might find if you're walking on busy streets, you feel more agitated in your nervous system. You walk on spacious streets, you feel more ah, space. And so I'll do that for an hour in the mornings and ideally at least an hour throughout the day. Maybe two 30 minute chunks, maybe one hour block. I mean generally my ideal day is I'm outdoors for probably four or four hours a day. Now I'm not able to do that on a lot of workdays. Some workdays I can. But I've organized my life actually to where most Fridays I can get all my work done Monday through Thursday and most Fridays I leave pretty open. And what do I do during those Fridays? I spend a bunch of time outside. Saturdays and Sundays, bunches of time outside like hours like at least half the day, at least six hours a day outside, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So that charges me up for the days where I gonna spend time on a computer or leading groups or recording these things. So anyone who's a fan of the show who's listened for a long time, I did a couple episodes where I actually experimented while recording, while being outside and in motion. I was like, I feel the best when I'm outside and in motion. So let me just record some episodes. And my team member who helps me with the editing and everything, she's like, dud. That quality sucked. I was like, I know there's like buses in the background. And so anyway, that was me attempting to have more spaciousness. Okay, so that's a huge thing. Now a question I often get is like, okay, but I'm interacting with people, you know, I feel sensitive. Maybe so. And so is angry. Maybe you live with an angry family member or you have an irritable partner or colleague or boss and you just feel really sensitive to that and it hurts and it bothers you and you're like, I don't know how to deal with that. So let's talk about how to deal with that one. Oh, you also might feel like not just an angry person, but maybe you talk to someone who's struggling or you feel the pain of other people and you might feel that after being with them. So you feel their grief or their guilt or other things. And sometimes it can manifest as body pain too. So you just are around people and then you feel more intense pain in your body or new pain in your body. So any of these can be symptoms of some impact of others emotion that's emanating off of them. It's invisible, but it is energy. And you're perceiving it. Your body is receiving it and reacting to it in some way. So how do we do this? Well, there's different strategies. I encourage you to test out different strategies and see what works for you. At different times in my life, I've experimented with different. These. One of them is, is to create some sort of visualization of a membrane that allows stuff to come in and other stuff to not come in. This is kind of more in the probably the visualization side of the spectrum, how to work with it. So I remember when I worked with clients face to face regularly as a therapist, and I would be working with all kinds of stuff, right? A lot of emotional, intense topics. And so what I would do is before my sessions and sometimes even during the sessions, I'd remind myself. But usually at the beginning of the day, I would sit in the chair that I worked with people in and I would look at the empty chair where the people are going to come into my office. And I would imagine this sphere, I suppose around me. And sometimes I would have it be clear with water flowing down on the outside. Sometimes I would have it be a color I often like green or blue, just this kind of sphere around me. And the sphere was like, you know, warmth and love and anything that. And it's a semi permeable membrane which means that, you know, what can come in is something that is supportive to me or nourishing or energizing and anything that I didn't need, that wouldn't serve me would stay out. So you kind of visualize this thing and set that intention. That's one approach. And I had a client that I worked with, she lived with her mom and her mom was very anxious and then irritable were the two. I mean, she wasn't always those things, but she often bounced between those two states and then sometimes was like pleasant, you know, but often she would be anxious and freaking out or she'd be irritable and kind of nitpicking at my client. And so we experimented with this of like having her create this energy bubble and I guess what I call that, an energy bubble around her. And then she remembers she was in the kitchen one time and her mom was starting picking at her and she said it felt very different and she was sort of surprised. She was like a medical doctor who's like, I don't know about all this visualization, woo woo stuff, but it really helped her. And partly when you're doing it, a little reminder as you do it is I'm not responsible. I'm not responsible for this person's feelings. It's okay for them to have their feelings. I'm responsible for my feelings. I'm not responsible for their feelings. Now this is a little bit of overlap with niceness because niceness and empath tend to often go together. So. So that's helpful as well. Another thing that can be helpful is to have some process afterwards of releasing anything that's not yours. So real simple is just to ask yourself, is this mine? And just, you know, this is sort of an intuitive question you're asking yourself. You're like, is this mine? No, it doesn't feel like it's mine. Sometimes that in itself is just enough. And then boom. Cause you start making it me. And I gotta worry what's going on with me? And oh my gosh, is this mine? No. And a little bit of ritual can be helpful with this. Couple rituals. Some of the Rituals I learned came from. I remember asking one of my mentors who would run a lot of sweat lodges, Lakota sweat lodges. And he said he would do this ritual where he imagined a hole in the earth in front of him. And he would, like, take whatever he didn't need and kind of offer it into the earth, into the hole again, Another visualization. Another thing is when I. So I work with a lot of people, I run events, you know, and this could be in person or online. You know, we might have hundreds of people there. I run group programs where we could have anywhere between on a small group, maybe 10, up to 50 people in a larger group regularly where I'm in and out. I'm meeting with them every week. I get to know people really deeply. We're working on very, sometimes emotionally heavier or, you know, like lifelong toxic shame or self hatred, some of these kind of heavier things, things. And I used to be, like, wrecked after calls. I would just be like. Especially as I started working with more groups, right, because there's more people and more energy. And I would just be like, absorbing all this and just like. And so I had to learn. I had to learn how to do this. And one of the things I would do is I would finish a call. I still do this. I used to do it really intentionally where I'd, like, do this ritual afterwards. And now I don't really need to. I just kind of do it on the side or sometimes that night. Because I run the calls in the evenings and oftentimes the next morning when I'm outside spacious walking. But what I need to do is, first of all, you need to soften and allow. Because if you're trying to, like, I don't want to feel. I don't want to feel other people's feelings. It's not mine. I got to get rid of it. I just did an episode about how to master your emotions where I guided you through a process which you've never done that before. Super valuable. So go this episode literally right before this one. So listen to it. But what you gotta do is you gotta start by just like softening and allowing whatever's there. You might say, well, this isn't mine. I don't wanna have to feel it. It's like, well, you know, whatever you're feeling is yours to deal with. I mean, you could say, hey, is this mine? If it's not, and it just disappears, great. But otherwise, just start by softening and it could be uncomfortable. There could be a lot of stuff there. But just start with like three or four minutes of just like really allowing everything that's there. And just don't fight it. Just create as much spaciousness as possible to feel it. I don't need to fix it. It's probably not even mine. And on one level, none of the emotions you experience are you. They're just things that you observe. They're experiences. They're passing visitors. Energy that moves through you. So just allow it. And then I'll ask, is this mine? Maybe I'll do a little ritual. Sometimes I like to light something like a little bit of sage and just kind of smudge down again. That's from my background, both in the sweat lodges and in hippie circles that I roll in, or used to. I'm not super deep in hippie circles. Although I am going back to burning man in 2022 and 2023. That's the plan. We already locked in tickets for those two years, so we're going. But any case, then you want to say, is this mine? And then what I find. So empath and intuition. Like, if you're empathic, you are probably also very intuitive because it's also picking up on more subtle senses. So when I tune in and say, is this mine? I'll also just start to get images or even just without even asking that question, just by feeling, I'll start to get images of certain people. And it could be someone from the group call that I just ran. Maybe you'll get an image of your mom. Maybe you'll get an image and you might have interacted with that person recently. You might not have. You don't need to know. You don't need to figure anything out. This is your intuition. Just roll with it. So then what I'll do is whenever that person comes up, I will just trust that, okay, this feeling is somehow related to them. And I'll just let again, soften and allow and let it move through. Sometimes I'll use a hoop and open Openo. Right? Maybe I've talked about that in another episode, but maybe it was a weekly confidence boost. For those of you who are on my email list, I send out a weekly confidence boost each week. It's a little video bonus training. If you're not on my email list, you should go check it out. By the way, go to draziz.com,-r-a z I z.com you get an ebook, you get all kinds of cool stuff. You get early access to events at a discounted rate. All kinds of stuff, specials on different products. And programs. So in any case, with Hope and Open O, I'm not going to go into the whole big story of it because I just want to share these techniques. But you basically focus, you just repeat these four phrases maybe as that person comes to your mind, I love you, I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you. And you just repeat those phrases, I love you, I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you. And that can be a very powerful way to release whatever needs to be released. You don't need to understand, you don't need to know what's going on. Just let it move. And soften and allow. That's a huge theme throughout all this. The more reactivity, the more I don't want to feel it, I don't want to be around it. The more it's going to cause suffering. The more reactivity you have, the more suffering you're going to have. Another thing that could be really helpful is where is your observer? And this is an interesting one. I didn't get this one at first, but I'm gonna see if I can explain in a way that you can use it right away. But basically, let's say you're feeling someone else's pain, right? And you might know the person, you might not. You might just be like, I was around those people and now I feel. So just notice where are you experiencing that sensation from? And what I found is if you're observing, sometimes what we're doing is we're like going right into the center of our chest and feeling the pain and sort of making it my pain. And then I'm, I'm like really deep in it. And if you consciously expand your awareness and I guide in the guided process from last week, you get a sense of how I help people guide their awareness or expand their awareness from an expanded place. You observe empathy and the empath from further out and you create spaciousness. And all of a sudden that feeling, you can see that it's from somewhere else and it's moving through you and it's not all inside and bound inside of you. So simply expanding your awareness, asking where am I observing this from? And play with having it be more observed from further out. That's when I use a lot. It's very effective and just shifts things so quickly for me. So again, if you want to learn how to do that, just listen to the last episode. You can apply some of that to this. I'd say it's one of my go to ones now. Another one. And this is sort of in the niceness category is just letting go of needing to fix everybody and take care of everybody. Like, yeah, you might feel it if someone's hurting, and that's okay, they can hurt. You don't have to fix it for them. You don't have to solve it for them. That's a big thing for me, especially in all the groups. And everything that I run is just like letting people be where they are. And I can care and I can be moved to help and I can wanna serve them, but like, I don't need to just feel all the pain for them. They don't even need to feel all the pain. They might just, you know, feel what they need and then they can maybe switch to a different channel. Maybe they can see the gift in the pain. Maybe they can soften and surrender. And then all of a sudden the pain doesn't feel the same amount of pain. And I don't know, that's their responsibility, not mine. So I hope this serves you and you can use this to feel more confident, relaxed again. All these techniques are just ideas. Judith Orloff has more ideas. I'm sure you can find other videos on YouTube and other places that even more ideas. But these are the things that I use and I found them to be very effective. And the key is willingness to practice and apply and just acknowledge that, yeah, I'm going to need to practice some of these things. You know, just like, let's say you have a certain way that your body moves and you're prone to like have your legs bow in or your feet go towards each other or whatever. So it's like, yeah, and if you wanted to run more, you would need to learn how to use your body a little bit differently. Or you need to do some corrective exercises with your ankles or your feet or your knees to get your hips or whatever in alignment. So you can be running, you know, longer distances without injuring yourself. It's the same kind of thing. It's just working with the nature of your body and your nervous system and saying, okay, if I want to be around people or if I want to lead these things, if I want to be around this person who's angry, I'm going to need to do a little bit of stretching or self care that's in this empath way that's going to help me do that. And I also want to acknowledge that it might seem like a little bit of a detriment or a hindrance, but actually being an empath is a superpower. You can use those empath skills to be more receptive. You're more effective at helping professions. That's why I believe I can have such an impact with what I do. Why these podcasts resonate with you. Why my books? Why people read my books and say, oh my God, this is the first book I felt like someone gets me more deeply than I've ever been gotten. That is directly the result of my ability to be an empath, where I can feel into people deeply and get them more than they've ever been gotten. So what a gift, right? And I can do that not just for clients, but also for my wife, for my kids, for my family. Like, my wife's very empathic too. So our children feel seen and known in deep and profound ways. What a gift that is for their whole lives to have a sense of being known and valued and loved for who they are. And you have those gifts too, so you can bring that to all your relationships. Fantastic. Thanks for being with me today. We are going to conclude with your action step in just a moment here. Let's dive right into it. Time for action. Action, Action. Your action step is going to be to apply to test out at least two of the strategies that I offered. You can test all of them out if you want and see which one you love, but at least test out 2. Just play around with it. There's no perfection here. You don't have to figure out exactly what's the right steps just based upon what I share. Just muck around. Test your stuff. A lot of this stuff is kind of intuitive and creative anyway. And maybe you come up with your own. Maybe you brainstorm a list of a couple things that you want to try that I didn't even mention. But you've heard them elsewhere. You just intuitively know they might be useful. Test them out. That's the key thing though, is go test something out and then start to apply it. And then test it after you've been around people or before you go be with a group or whatever and see the effect. Fantastic. Thanks for being with me today. 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. 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 overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com.