Confidence Kick-Start (2 of 4) - How To Increase Your Self Esteem

Welcome to your second Kickstarter video. This one is all about who you think you are. Has anyone ever asked you that phrase? Or maybe you even said it to yourself? Who do you think you are? You know, it's usually meant as some sort of put down or insult or a way to keep you small, but I mean it in a very literal way. Who do you think that you are? Because who you think you are has a powerful effect on determining so many things in your life. Another way of saying who do you think you are is what do you believe to be true about yourself? And what we believe to be true about ourselves forms what's called our self concept. A concept is just another word for idea. Our idea about ourselves is made up of our beliefs about ourselves. And what you believe about yourself has a powerful effect on every everything in your life. How you operate, how you move, how you look at people, how you interact with people, whether you choose to go interact with someone or not, whether you smile at someone or not, whether you ask someone out or not, how you respond, how you feel in your life, what actions you choose to take, what you choose to move towards. All of that starts with what you believe about yourself. Because if you believe that you're not capable of something or that's not going to work out, then you won't really do it. You won't really try. What I found consistently with social anxiety and shyness is that we have very negative self concepts, we have very low opinions of ourselves and it slips out when I'm talking to guys. And a lot of negative self statements, yeah, I was going to do that, but I'm unattractive, she wouldn't like me, I'm weird. I have this problem in my, you know, insert body part of your choice. I have ugly hair, I don't have enough hair, I have ugly eyes, my nose is misshapen, my face is weird. I, I'm overweight, my figure is weird, I'm too slumped. There's all these reasons in our physical appearance. We have all kinds of stuff like I'm not smart enough, I haven't, I don't have enough experience, I'm too awkward, I'm too weird, I'm creepy, I'm annoying, I don't have anything to offer, I'm needy. Whatever these things are, they slip out and the adjective might shift and you might have different ones for yourself. But there's one thing that remains consistent and that is the statement I am. You notice how I am as before, all of those, and those are self statements. Those are reflections of what you believe about yourself. So whenever you say I am blank, that is who you think you are. And my guess is who you think you are has got a lot of negative stuff in it. In fact, what I've seen is when I'm starting to work with guys and they want to start dating or enter into relationships, they have this attitude, well, I fucking hate myself. I'm no good, I dislike myself, I don't have much to offer, do you want to go out with me? And that comes across in their attitude, their demeanor, and guess what? Doesn't quite work. We need to have a fundamental attitude shift about how we want to treat ourselves in order to gain confidence, in order to succeed in life, in order to overcome social anxiety, you have to commit to a fundamental attitude shift to say, you know what? I want to treat myself better. I want to start liking myself, I want to start accepting myself, I want to start loving myself. I want to start letting go of, of this negative BS that's in my head that tells me that I'm not good enough. I understand these are just belief systems, these are just ideas, and I can shed them and I can start to see myself more accurately. And when you do that, when you have that fundamental attitude shift, that's when everything will start to shift for you. The major obstacle to this is what I talked about in the first video, is our need to remain consistent with our identity. And we absorbed our negative self concept growing up. You absorbed it from your parents. Every time your parent was upset with you, or if you had worse, you had a situation where your mom or dad was chronically upset, maybe not necessarily you, but just with life. They were overwhelmed, they couldn't handle things. They're not necessarily a bad person, but they fell short in some ways and they were really critical of you or you had a dad that always demanded you succeeded. I know my dad, awesome guy, supported in many ways. One thing he would do, though, is he would drive me to do more, especially like in sports and other things. And a lot of guys have this experience. Do more. Put yourself out there. Come on. And I learned that my best wasn't good enough. That no matter what I do, it's still I should do more. It's not good enough. And guess what part of my self concept was, it's not enough. I'm not doing good enough. So we absorb these things from our families, from peers. You go into school and how you're treated, and especially in middle school, if you're excluded from groups and people tease you and they make fun of you because you're weight or something that gets locked in. I'm unattractive because I'm fat. I'm unlovable because people then respond to me positively. That stuff gets locked in and we accumulate that over time. Now you don't need to go back and dismantle every single negative thing that happened to you or even analyze it all. What you need to do is start to realize that I absorbed a negative self concept from my world around me and that it's not necessarily true and that I can shift it. That's all you need to do right now to get started. And so one thing that I want you to do to help start to break this is to actually do a little assignment. I know this feels like school and I maybe shouldn't have used the word assignment, but it's going to be an essay which even feels more like get your blue book and write out your essay. Use an erasable pen. But the key here is if you write something out, it starts to convince our mind more thoroughly than just thinking about it. So here's what I like you to do. I like you to get some paper or a journal or, or open up a file on your computer to type in and you're going to answer these two questions. Just write a few sentences, a paragraph about each one. If you want to write more, that's fine. But the two questions are or the things about is you're going to write one, why I need to love myself unconditionally, starting right now. Another way of saying that is why it is essential for me to start loving myself right now. And that means before you get the money, before you get the girlfriend, before you're awesome in your life and all the ways you think you should be, why it's essential that I start loving myself right now. That's question number one. Write a little essay about that. Question two is what will happen in my life if I don't? What will happen in my life if I don't? There's often a consistent negative result from continually hating and disliking ourselves. So write about what that will be. What will that look like next year, in five years? What will your life be like if you continue to rail on yourself and have really negative beliefs about yourself that you hold tightly? So these are the ways to convince yourself that it's important to let this go. That's going to be a first of all part to get the willingness to make the shifts that I'm going to suggest later in this video. So if you like, you can pause the video now and do that and keep watching, or you can do it right after the video. I would encourage pausing and doing it right now because if you're anything like me and most of us in school, my assignment, yeah, I'll do that later. Right. So go ahead and pause the video now and do it and then come back. You can be here and you can get moving ahead with the program because you'll get a lot more out of the second part of this video if you've done this and we're just talking a few sentences. You don't need to write an opus here. Welcome back. So hopefully you wrote that or you're planning on writing it. You just waited a minute and said, he'll come back, he's not going anywhere. And that's fine. Just go ahead and make sure you at least think about this. Take the time to write out that little essay. So we're going to cover two techniques now that you can start using today to start shifting your negative self concept. But if you, if you're resistant to that or you're like, ah, no, I don't want to shift this. This is how I am, and it's true. And if I'm saying anything else then, then it's wrong, then make sure you do that essay because it's going to start helping you shift and realize it's essential that you do this. So the first of the techniques is drawn from what's called cognitive therapy, which came out in the last maybe 40 years. It originally started with a guy who was working, a psychologist, psychiatrist, who was working with depressed people. And he said, you know, depressed people say really depressive things to themselves all the time. I wonder if that has something to do with their depression. Revolutionary, right? But this field of thought evolved from that which is what we believe and what we think has a powerful effect on how we feel. And so they've developed a lot of techniques. And when I work with guys one on one, and in fact in confidence unleashed, I include a lot of ideas drawn from cognitive therapy to help you break stuff because it's very powerful at helping shift limiting beliefs. I'm going to share one technique for you for now for free, and that is called the double column technique. So what you're going to do is you're going to take a sheet of paper and you're going to draw a line down the middle of it. And on the left side you're going to write out each of the negative self criticisms that you Say to yourself, you know, pick a situation. You know, it's something you typically say to yourself. Or if you were to imagine, let's say I was going to, you know, talk to someone in class or after I gave a presentation at work, or, you know, before or after an event when you have a lot of negative thoughts about it, that sounded awkward. I messed that up. People think I'm weird. God, I'm such a loser. I'm never going to get this. So what you're going to do is you're going to write that stuff out on the left, give a little space between each one. Then on the right, you're going to write out a more compassionate, more realistic, more encouraging, supportive response. You know, you don't have to blow smoke here. You don't have to say, no, that went amazingly. You're awesome. Maybe you can say, yeah, that was really tough. That was awkward. Or man, that was really difficult for me. I hope next time I can learn how to handle that. But you're having a more supportive, encouraging self talk way you were relating to yourself. Then the, you know, usually we're just left with the left column, right? We're just left with all this garbage. And then we say, God, I feel so depressed and miserable and anxious the next time before I'm going to do it. No wonder, because this stuff is shaping how we see ourselves. So an essential step to breaking and changing the beliefs that you have about yourself is to do this double column. So write out more compassionate responses. The second technique that is essential in helping you shift your self concept and how you relate to yourself. What's called mirror work. Now this is where it gets a little on the woo woo side. And some people feel like, no, there's no way I'm going to do that. That's too weird. But it's fascinating that we choose not to do this. So what mirror work is, is basically, it's not too complex. You look at yourself in the mirror, take several minutes and say positive things to yourself. You say, I love you, I really love you, and use your name. Hey, Aziz, I really love you. You're an awesome guy. You're a wonderful person. You're doing really well. I love you. And you can even identify. I think it's really powerful to do this after you get out of the shower or something and just like look at the area, you know, every time we look in a mirror. Even as guys, you know, women are especially affected by the media, but even as guys, you know, with our exposure to like all this imagery of how a body is supposed to look. And we don't see that many real bodies. We just see all these, like, models and, you know, actors who have personal trainers and they're dedicated to looking buff. And we look in the mirror and we're like, I got love handles, and my pecs aren't very defined, and my shoulders are slumped. Well, I'm off to work. That's what we do in our heads. So this is taking control of that process. So you look at yourself, you say, even though I have love handles, I love myself. You're looking in the mirror. I love my love handles. I love my shoulders. I love my face. I love my body. I love you, Aziz. I love you. And just it's all about expressing love to yourself. Now, what's fascinating is when I share this with guys, especially as men, a lot of us. Myself, when I first heard this, I was like, yeah, I don't know about that. But then I started to get really curious. Why do I not know about that? Why do I not want to do that? Why does that make me uncomfortable? And one of the things is like, oh, that just sounds stupid. That sounds cheesy. That sounds lame. That sounds like Stuart Smalley from Saturday night live. That sounds weird. I don't want to do any of that. But the fascinating thing is we choose not to do that, but we continue to speak very negatively to ourselves and our minds. It's almost like a refusal to open up to loving ourselves. And here's the thing. If we don't open up to loving ourselves, there's no way we're going to get the confidence that we want. We might be able to act a little more confident, to push through some of our fears, but we're always going to have this unsettled, uncomfortable feeling, even when you get the money, even when you get the girlfriend. Trust me, I've been there. And you'll learn a lot more about that in the stories I share on confidence unleashed. But I've been there, where you get the girlfriend, you get the hot girl, and you're still nervous, you're still self conscious. Because I hadn't learned some fundamental things yet. In fact, that's what I dedicate an entire session. And confidence unleashed to is what I believe the key factor of all social confidence and all confidence in general is self compassion, being able to love yourself no matter what. And I actually wrote my dissertation in graduate school and my doctoral training in clinical psychology on self compassion, because I said this underlies every person that I work with, no matter what they're coming in for. They have a fundamental deficit in self compassion. And that's what led to so much of my social anxiety, was a fundamental deficit in self compassion, being able to love myself. So not only is that important and look at the research, at what that shows about how that affects our health and our well being in the world, but what are practical skills and strategies that we can use to actually increase it. And that's when I came to the conclusion that self compassion is a skill and anyone can learn it. And I go in depth for about an hour and 20 minutes in confidence Unleashed, all about self compassion, all about how to master that skill. So this is an area where you're really struggling in. I encourage you to use the techniques that I shared here. But also realize this is just the scratching the surface, this is just the tip of the iceberg. And if you do this stuff and a couple days later, a week later, you're still like, oh God, I'm really stuck in my negative self perception. It's not working. Get confidence unleashed. Look, it's the price of, as I said before in a video, it's the price of like going out to dinner like four times. How often do you go to dinner? You know, skip going out to lunch five times, skip getting coffee 10 times and just get this program. Make that shift in your life. So if you need that self compassion, if you need that self love, I strongly encourage that you get that program Confidence Unleashed. And I look forward to talking to you in the next video, which is all about how you see others and the way that we perceive others and how we think others are perceiving us is huge when it comes to feeling social anxiety. In fact, that's the social element of social anxiety. So you're going to learn some very fascinating things about why we perceive that others are perceiving us negatively and, and how to shift that so you can start to feel more comfortable around others. So thanks for listening and I look forward to talking to you in the next video in Kickstart. Your confidence.