Dr. Aziz recommends a three-minute nightly journal: write three small wins from your day, no matter how minor. Focusing on progress instead of how far you have to go builds pride, cuts self-doubt, and speeds you toward your goals.
Three successes.
About three minutes per night.
Preferably each night.
Hey, Dr. Aziz here from the center for Social Confidence. Today I want to share one powerful daily practice that you can do to dramatically accelerate your progress when it comes to building your confidence in any area of your life. And what that is, is to shift your focus from the gap to the progress that you're making and to do that systematically through a journal, daily, preferably each night, if you can. So what that is, is our minds have a tendency. I was just talking with a client about this earlier today. He's making tremendous progress in the area of his social confidence. He's speaking up in groups. He's going to places by himself. When he used to be terrified to go to a bar or a club or something by himself because he thought people would judge him. He is talking to women, he's texting. He's learning how to do all these things. He's making tremendous progress. And he told me earlier today, he said, you know, I'm making a little progress, but I'm still not where I want to be. I'm still not doing that much. Now. I appreciate wanting to get further ahead and wanting to accelerate quickly, because I'm that way, too. But this practice will help you feel good about your progress and really accelerate it. Because we think that if we focus on what we're not doing and where we're falling short, that somehow that's going to make us overcome it more quickly. But the reality is, when you focus on that gap, you diminish your confidence. You start to feel more and more inadequate. You start to feel like you're not good enough. Versus if you focus on the progress and guide your mind, use discipline to focus your mind on that again and again through a journal where you sit down every night and say, what are the three successes of today? What are the three things that I've done today where I made progress? And they could be little things. Don't discount the small things, because massive progress is made by little steps over time. So you find the things like, maybe you made eye contact with a person that held it longer than you normally would. Maybe you smoke up in a meeting. Maybe you had an interaction with a supervisor where you might have normally been a little more deferential or obsequious or looking for their approval, and you were just a little more direct and just said something that was a little more honest. Little things like that. You record that in your journal. Like, today I did this, this, and this. Today I did that, that, and that. And if you do that, that will radically change a how you feel you'll feel better about yourself because you'll start to when you focus on your progress, you feel proud. When you focus on the gap, you feel inadequate, you feel less than, you feel frustrated, you feel impatient, you feel like you just can't get things right. So what you got to do is you got to train your mind to focus on that progress and you feel good about yourself. So that's one benefit of it. But another benefit is that it can actually accelerate getting to your goal when you focus on that progress. Now why is that? Think about that for a moment. Why would focusing on the progress that I'm making help me get to my goal more quickly? Because when you focus on your progress, you're inspired. You start to think, hey, I can do this. Look at all this stuff I've done. Of course I can do these next steps. But if you focus just on the gap, you say, oh my God, look how far I am for where I want to be. There's no way I can really even do this. And you start to build up more self doubt, more questioning of your abilities, more discouragement. So focusing on your progress builds up that identity of self success, a belief in the ability that you can make this happen. Because look at all the stuff that you've already done. So go ahead and commit if you want to put this into practice to really transform your life and accelerate your progress. Commit to spending just three minutes a night writing out three successes from the day, three pieces of evidence of progress, no matter how small, and just keep them and read through them semi regularly and you'll be amazed at how good it feels to really hone your focus on your progress. So keep doing that and let me know how it goes. Share with me Comment on this video Send me an email, let me know about your progress and your successes and I look forward to speaking with you soon. In the future and until we speak again, may you have the courage to be who you are.
