Confidence Power Boost: You Are Anti-Fragile

When something doesn't go the way that you want it to in your life, you have a setback or a failure, or people don't like something you did, or you get a rejection or a criticism lobbied against you, how do you handle that? Do you crumple into a ball and say, I'm never going out again? Do you kind of crumple at first and then find your way back to feeling okay again? Or does it make you stronger, better, and more powerful? In today's episode of the show, you're going to learn how to make sure it's the third option every time. So you can just, like a bullet train, go towards your greater confidence in yourself and what you want in your life. Welcome to another episode of the show, the Art of extraordinary confidence. I'm Dr. Aziz, your host, and this is the show for you if you want to 10x your confidence in every area of life that matters to you. Dating, relationships, career, public speaking, finance, social life, you name it. And this episode is going to be about something that is incredibly valuable for all areas, especially for sales, if you're into sales, and especially also for dating and relationships. I mean, this is going to be life changing for you, as it was for me. And what it is is this concept called antifragile, which I learned from a fellow named Nassim Taleb, who is an amazing author. He's written a number of books. And this concept has been. I've applied it into the area of social confidence, and it's been amazing to see the results in my own life and some of the clients I've been testing it out with. And here's what it is. So you can think of three kinds of responses to a failure or a setback. And the biggest one that we face, I think, in life, especially for confidence, is a rejection. So let's say you might be in a situation right now where you want to meet someone and you maybe had a conversation with a woman and she didn't want to talk to you or you got her number and then you tried to follow up and she just stopped texting you or didn't want to go out with you. Right? That's a rejection. Maybe you had a sales conversation. The person's like, I don't want to buy. I don't know. Or maybe you had a job interview and you didn't get it right. So there's something that we get rejected on, and then how do you respond? Now, the first way, the most common way I think, is you would be called fragile. So a Rejection breaks us. Think about, like a. Think about a glass. Here. Here's a glass Mason jar. That's what I drink. This is some greens powder that I had earlier this morning. So think about this. This is not super fragile, but it's pretty fragile. It's a strong piece of glass, but still glass. So I took this and I dropped it on the ground from, like five feet up on the asphalt. It would shatter. I'm not going to do that for this video, but you get the point, right? So it would just break. So that's fragile, and that's how most of us are when it comes to handling rejection. It's like someone rejects you and you're like, oh, you shatter. Oh, God, I'm a failure. Oh, I'm never going to get this. I'm terrible. I hate myself. We shatter. That's one way of handling things. Another would be called resilience. And that's like, you bounce back, so they reject you. They say, no, I don't want to buy from. When you're like, oh, never going to sell anything again. I'm terrible. They're going to be evicted from my house. And then you're like, you know what? Okay, I can do this. I've done this before. You kind of talk yourself through it, and you're resilient. Now, there's levels of resilience, right? How long you stay broken is sort of determines your level of resilience. So if you're broken for five days, then you're kind of resilient, I guess. But it's pretty slow if it's five hours, five weeks, five minutes. So the faster you can bounce back, the more resilient you are. Now, before I read Nassim's book, I thought resilient was the way it was. And that's what I taught people to do. That's what I do myself. So you have this pain. Here's how to do optimal self coaching, which I teach in the confidence code. All about how to talk yourself through those rejections and those challenges, and then how do we bring ourselves back? And confidence unleashed is even better for how to, like, come back with, you know, power and that sort of thing. I thought that's what the best thing was, how to be resilient. And then I learned about Antifragile, and I love that concept. And as soon as I read it, I got it and I saw how it applied to confidence, and it's amazing. So here's what Antifragile is, is not only does a rejection or a Stressor or some adverse negative event not make the thing break, it actually makes it stronger. So you can see this in our body. So if you are going for a run and you're running like, I don't know, let's say you go for runs and you run seven minute miles, you time yourself and it takes you seven minutes to run a mile and you're running a couple miles. If you went out and you did some intervals and you messed with your speed and you sprinted for a while and you try to do it faster and all this stuff and you kind of shocked your system a little bit over a couple of times, you might be able to run a six and a half minute mile, right, by strengthening yourself. And you see this with our physical body versus if you sat on the couch all day and ate chips and never used your legs, then your running is going to decrease your ability to run. You're going to go slower and slower and slower. It's going to be harder and harder. So from not getting the shock to the system, we get weaker and from shocking the system a little bit, we get stronger. That is anti fragile and that makes sense for our physical body. But I was like, what if that's true for rejection too. What if instead of it like being like, oh God, that hurts, it's so bad. Now I got to recover from it. It's just like boom, it's fuel. And I was like, wow, that sounds pretty amazing. Could that really work? So I thought I'd test it out. So what I did is like, okay, the next rejection I get. And believe me, I still get a lot of rejection even though I'm married. So. So I'm not talking to women in that way anymore. I throw myself into as much rejection as possible. And the way you do that is you put yourself out there as much as possible. So I'm constantly talking to people about whether they want coaching, whether they want to work me in a program, talking to other business owners, if they want to collaborate with me and do joint venture partnerships, I'm putting out these kind of things. This is a great forum for rejection. People could type in all kinds of gnarly stuff. And I do get emails that are pretty intense, reviews on books and there's all places that someone could just kind of just reject me. And I love it because I want to expose myself to as much as possible to grow. And I was like, can I be antifragile though? Can this rejection not only like I recover from it, but I'm like, boom, I'm Stronger for it. And so I thought I'd try that out. And the very next morning there was a review on my book the Solution to social anxiety on audible.com and if you've not checked out the book, check it out. The Solution to Social Anxiety. It's a great book. It's a radically life transforming. You can get it on Amazon, you can get it on Audible. And if you have gotten it and if you read it and you liked it, leave a great review. That would be awesome. I'd really appreciate that. Anyway, I woke up the next morning and on the reviews there was one that said the top quote was one star and it said terrible and it said that was the heading. And then underneath it said, this book was so bad, I wish I bought the hard copy version so I could wipe my ass with its contents. And I loved it. It was weird. I was just like, I mean, so I could feel both things happen. I could feel a part of me that was like angry, like fuck you, right? Coming up. Kind of defensive, kind of hurt. And then I was like, wait a minute, this is fuel. How am I gonna, how am I gonna be anti fragile here? How am I gonna use this as fuel to get me stronger? And I was like, you know what? Here's how I'm gonna use this for fuel. Listen, first of all, even just saying that, just like I started saying these kind of phrases to myself, like I feed on rejection. And I started imagining that the rejection is like this black substance that someone is like spitting out at you and it goes into you, it feels like going into your chest and but instead of it being this terrible thing, it's actually like this flammable substance like oil and you can ignite it and then just you get this fire inside and maybe you can even think about in your own life. Can this rejection ignite me? And I was like, how am I going to, is this going to ignite me? And I was like, you know what? I want to put stuff even out there even more. And I went and recorded a few podcasts where I was just like on fire. Like, you know what, I'm going to this. Because to break would be like, oh, maybe I shouldn't share out in the world anymore because people might not like it. And antifragile is like, someone rejects me, I'm going to get out there and do even more. And so the same thing, let's say you're in a dating situation and you talk to a woman and she doesn't want, she's not interested in talking to you instead of going home and saying, well, that sucks, I quit. You say, I'm going to go talk to three more women right now, like today, before I go home. Before I go home tonight. Right? So you use that rejection as feedback and you have that idea of anti fragility in your mind where it's like, you know what, this is actually good for me. This is actually strengthening me. This is building me up in some way. And when you do that, when you approach any setback in that way, man, you get stronger and stronger and stronger and you accelerate faster and faster and your confidence grows more and more and good things happen. So if you also want to check out Nassim's book, it's called Antifragile and there's some subtitle, how Uncertainty is Good for you or something. But Antifragile, Nassim Taleb. So check out that book as well if you want to really go deep into that. I mean, it's a million pages and he goes all over the place and it's really good. If you want to go even deeper into this stuff, check out my program, Confidence Unleashed, because that teaches you how to do this stuff, how to be antifragile in a really powerful way, how to eliminate your fear of rejection and how to turn fear into fuel and go further with this rocket fuel in your life. That program is the one for you. So if you're interested in that, check that out. Also leave your comments below. What's been your experience with fragile, resilient, antifrigile antifragile? How can we be more of Antifragile? I'd love to hear your thoughts as well and also check out other episodes of the show to keep your growing mind growing and learning and maximizing your confidence in these areas that matter to you. So the other shows can help you do that. And until we speak again in the future, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. I'll talk to you soon.