Confidence Tip - How To Not Worry About What Others Will Think

Do you have a hard time when someone doesn't like you? Does it make you feel uncomfortable or agitated? Are you scared that someone might have negative feelings towards you? You know, for a lot of people with shyness. And I know for me, for many years, when someone didn't like me, it went beyond discomfort or feeling a little nervous. I mean, it could bring on an onslaught of just feeling terrible about myself, feeling inadequate, feeling inferior, feeling unlovable, feeling shame, worthless. All this stuff. Stuff would just start pouring out of me when someone didn't like me. And this could be someone that I'm not talking like a deep friendship where we've known each other for years. And he said, aziz, I have to give you some deep feedback, and that's that I no longer like you as a person. I'm talking about that. I'm talking about I'm at the supermarket and I chat with the cashier, and they don't give me a very good response. Or I'm driving on the street and someone, like, honks and gives me an angry gesture, or I go, start a conversation with a woman. When I eventually started doing that, start a conversation with a woman and she doesn't harshly reject me, she just says, meh, no thanks, and somehow demonstrates she doesn't want to talk to me. Something like that. As simple as that. And I would feel just terrible about myself. I would hate myself. I'd be like, ah, I'm so unlovable. What's wrong with me? I'm just, ugh. And there's this crushing feeling that sometimes it would last a couple hours and sometimes it would last a couple days. I remember I used to be scared, like, something would happen on a Thursday or Friday and be like, well, I'm feeling this all weekend. There goes the weekend. And it would. It would last like three days of just feeling so low. So if you're experiencing anything like that, then you have to watch this video, because I'm going to share something that's going to help you break free of that. And here's what it is, is that there's a term from social psychology called your reflected self. Reflected self. Like, you know, you look in a mirror and there's a reflection. Reflected self. And what that means is that when you were a little kid growing up, the way you saw, like, how you felt about yourself was the result of what was reflected back to you. So if you're running around, you're smiling, you're all happy, and your parents like, yeah, you're great. Then you're like, Huh? I guess I'm great, right? If you're running around smiling and your parents like, God, you annoy me to no end. Why did I have children? If you have that kind of response from a parent or a harsh yelling or telling you to shut up, and I'm not talking about once or twice, but a lot over a period of time, then what happens is your reflected sense of self is, I'm bad, right? There's something wrong with me because why would this parent treat me so poorly if they, you know, if I was lovable? That's what we all do. We all absorb that as kids. It's a reflected sense of self. So the first thing to reflect on is like, what was it like growing up? You know, One guy I was talking to, he told me, he said, for most of my life, I just felt like my dad was annoyed whenever I'd come talk to him. Like, he'd be exasperated that I wanted his attention in some way when I was a little kid. So what message did he get from his parent? Not only a message from your parents, but we also have a reflected sense of self that's impacted by growing up in classrooms, in school, in middle school. Huge shifts can start to develop in your social confidence with middle school and your reflected sense of self. If everyone in your middle school, or 80% of them are saying, you're weird, you're a freak, your ears are too big like you, it's really hard not to say, well, geez, I must be a freak, I must be weird, no one likes me. So that's the reflected sense of self. So the first part of this video is just to start looking at your life, like, what kind of stuff was reflected back to me? But the next thing is, so what happens is you bring that to the present day, where someone says, no, I don't want to hang out with you. And you are taking all of that energy as like, well, that just shows that I'm no good, I'm unlovable. So the reason it's so charged is because you had all these negative experiences in the past. Perhaps. But regardless of what's coming back at you, you have to learn how to counteract that, because you're going to get negative feedback. You're going to get a no. You're going to get rejections along the way, especially if you're pursuing something that matters to you, that's of value to you. So how do we counteract this? The answer to that is there's another kind of self that we have. There's the reflected self. But there's also an internal sense of self. There's how you see yourself. There's a sense of knowing who you are and what you're good at and what you value, what you bring to the table. And what's happening is when you're really stuck on how's that person responding to me and they don't like me, what you're doing is you're saying, well, what's coming back at me matters this much. That's the reality. That's truth. And what I think about myself, that matters down here, that doesn't really matter much at all. And there's an imbalance there. What you need to do is you need to shift that so that what you think and feel and know about yourself matters more than what anyone else matter thinks and feels about you. Now sometimes people say, well, I don't want to care at all what anyone thinks. I want this to be gone. I was like, well, that's appealing. I know that because I wanted that too. But think about that for a minute. If you really, truly did not care at all what anyone thought of you, then what would happen if someone that you cared about said, I love you? Or what if someone said, hey, I really respect you and I think you're amazing at this. Your art's amazing, your voice is amazing, your skills are great. I really respect and admire you. How would that get in? It wouldn't affect you if you didn't care. You'd be like nuts to you. So it's a balance, right? You just want to have it be more. You still want to be able to take in from the outside world. We're connected organisms, but you have to learn how to value your own internal sense of self more. So how do we do that? Here are three tips to start building your internal sense of self. The first thing, you gotta start listening to yourself. Start listening to yourself. I mean, we live in a world that is so externally focused. You can wake up. From the second you wake up, you got your email going. You can check it on your phone before you get out of bed. If you're doing that, by the way, it's a practice worth changing. But if you're checking your email right when you first get up, you can then be focused on the news or TV as you're getting ready. And you can be listening to the radio when you drive to work, or music. And then you get to work and be interacting with people face to face. And then there's no time to you, especially if you Have a full life with friends or maybe even a family with kids. There's no time to really pay attention inward unless you make time to listen to yourself. Because the first thing in order to get an internal sense of self is you have to go internal. So even if it's just five minutes to begin, that means five minutes of just being with yourself when it's quiet. So if you're going, you know, try to. I love to go for walks. Try to go for a walk. When? During the day. And don't bring your headphones. Don't listen to music, just be with yourself. Listen to yourself. If you're driving, flick off the music or the podcast the radio for a minute and just be with yourself. What do I want? How's it going in my life right now? What do I really, what am I passionate about? What am I struggling with? What do I feel about this thing going on in my life? What do I think about that? What are my opinions? Really paying attention to that stuff and valuing it. Notice if you have a pattern of just discounting everything about yourself, or if you turn off the radio or you walk without headphones, you'd be bombarded by self criticism and self hatred. If that's happening for you, which it was for me for a long time, then you have to learn the skills of self compassion and self expression acceptance. My book the Solution to Social Anxiety has a whole chapter, 40 pages plus, dedicated exactly to that. So if that's blocking you from really listening to yourself and being with yourself, then you have to handle that. Check out the book. That'll help you do that. The next thing though is you have to learn how to take care of yourself. How to take care of yourself. That's another thing that we don't do. We don't listen to ourselves, but we also don't take care of ourselves. And the best way to do that is start asking yourself that question on a regular basis. How do I take care of myself? What do I do right now to take care of myself? So if you have an experience where something that's being reflected back to you is negative, someone says, hey, you did a terrible job here. I don't think you're good enough. If you do get that feedback. How do I take care of myself? Getting on the bandwagon saying, yeah, Aziz, you're terrible, that's not taking care of myself. You have to be able to defend yourself. Stand by your own side, be your own best friend, be on your own side. Or as in my free ebook, five Steps to Unleash youh Inner Confidence. How to Be a Good Coach to Yourself. So you have to start asking yourself that question in this moment. How can I take care of myself? And trust me, criticizing yourself and agreeing with any negative feedback is not taking care of yourself. And if you. Even if you don't get negative feedback, you just get like an example I told you about asking a woman out and getting rejected. If that's happening, how do I take care of myself After Rejection is going to lead to a whole host of interesting things. Maybe it means I go for a walk. Maybe it means I call up a good friend. Maybe means I just go see a movie to get my mind off of things. But the key here is you have to learn how to take care of yourself. And the third and final thing which is incredibly important for building that internal sense of self is you have to be able to say no. You have to learn how to say no. Because as long as you're saying yes to everything that comes your way, I mean, there's so many layers of connection now where you can get a request from someone who's a friend of a friend of a friend on Facebook you don't even really know. And all of a sudden, if you can't say no to them, then you're taking on more and more and you're doing what you think everyone else wants. Perhaps you're being a nice guy. If you haven't seen my video on that, check that out. Perhaps you're being a nice guy. You're trying to do what everyone else wants, and you're not paying attention to what do I want? And the key factor there is being able to say no to what other people want and asking for what it is that you want, making that happen. So those are some just basic ways that you can start taking control that internal sense of self and increasing it, which naturally decreases that external sense of reflected self that's coming back to you. So go ahead and apply these things. Let me know how it goes. I love hearing from people in email and other things just to hear all these techniques and tools are benefiting you. Because my hope is that they benefit you as much as they benefited me. And I've gone from a place now where I can say no to people. I do know what I want. I can be in a conversation with someone and have a sense of, this is not what I want. And I can say, hey, you know what, let's change the subject, or, this doesn't feel like good to me. How about we try this instead and just being able to be bold and assertive in that way is just one of the many benefits. So I hope this stuff helps you. Please let me know how it's affecting you in your life until we speak again. May you have the courage to be who you are.