Confidently Being A Beginner

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 talk about how to confidently be a beginner and why this is absolutely essential to develop and why we're so uncomfortable in many ways, being a beginner and why we tend to avoid it. And ultimately to help you be able to dive into more things, grow and expand, learn and really get out of what is known by Carol Dweck and others as a fixed mindset, where you see yourself as static, as unchanging as this is how it is. This is who I am. What? Whether that's because of my upbringing or my genetics or other, some sort of predetermined something or other that prevents me from being this evolving, changing, growing organism that I really am, which is called a growth mindset. And one of the blocks to stepping into a growth mindset is discomfort with being a beginner. So we're going to dive into all that in today's episode. I can't wait to go deeper with you today. If you're enjoying the show, by all means, please go to itunes or Spotify or Stitcher or wherever else you're finding the show. And if you're benefiting from it, please give a positive review that will help people who are curious about the show. Look at some of the reviews and see, oh, maybe this can help me. Because that's my mission is Operation Mass Liberation is to find anyone out there who was in the place that I was struggling with shyness, social anxiety, low confidence, self doubt, fear. And then feeling alone in that, hiding that feeling like there's something wrong with them for that, oh, my God, people can't know. That's how I live for years. And so that's my mission, is to find those people and then help them realize that there's nothing wrong with you, just like the journey that we're on here now. So want to support me in that mission and other people who are just like you and me who want to grow, then, please, you can do your part by writing that review and giving it a good solid five stars. Maybe four if you're a loser. Five. No. Anyway, okay, so let's talk about being a beginner. We generally don't like being a beginner. Most people don't like feeling like a beginner. And there's a major problem with this because that is a necessary step in any sort of learning or growth. And it's especially important when it comes to building your confidence. Because one of my hallmark rally cries is that confidence is a skill. You can learn it. Confidence is a muscle. You can build it. So if that's true, and I believe that if you're listening to the show and you've been around long enough in my world, you are getting a sense of that and maybe even seeing evidence of that by taking some action, steps and other things from the show or from one of my books or something. If that's the case, then any skill, we need to be able to move into it and start practicing it, even as a beginner in the beginning stages. And so we can take some specific examples. You want to be able to approach someone you're attracted to. That's a skill. You want to become a more skillful conversationalist or better at talking to people, that's a skill. You want to become a better listener or more empathic, that's a skill. You want to know how to flirt, that's a skill. You want to know how to be more of a better leader at work or manage people or be more assertive or ask for what you want. I mean, navigate difficult conversations. Every single one of these things is a skill. And so, in a way, when I say confidence is a skill, actually confidence overall is a skill, but it's really a dozen or more mini skills, small skills that if you learn that, you master that area or at least get proficient in that area, and then you can add that to your repertoire, and then you can be, well, now I can be better in a work meeting, and now I can be better in my dating life, and now I can be better in this and that and that and that, you just keep building on those skills, which is what I'm obsessed with and I've been doing for the last 16, 17 years now, and teach people all over the world how to do that. So when you build those little mini skills, you sort of. They accumulate to a growing sense of confidence in all these different areas of life. And my goal is to have, you know, I want confidence in every area of life, right? Why leave any stone unturned? But the biggest obstacle is that we don't want to go through those early stages. And we sometimes don't tell ourselves, oh, you know, it's. It's a skill I can learn. I can totally get there. I just don't want to go through the early stages. That actually is a very high level of self awareness and truth and lucidity that many of us don't have when we're trying to work through an issue. And what ends up happening is we live in our cloud of bullshit stories. And so we say, like, I just don't like that stuff. I'm not just good at that. I'm not the kind of person who can do that. I'm awful at that. You know, one thing I like to do is at my live events, I haven't done it in the last couple, but I think I'll bust it out at the next one is I have one of those things that people call them a hoverboard. It doesn't really hover. It's ambitious advertising, for sure, but it's like one of those Segways, you know, those things that. It's like a platform that you stand on that's got wheels and a handle, and if you lean forward, the whole machine moves forward, and if you lean back, the whole thing moves back. So it's powered by a motor, but the motor, the direction is determined by the way you use your body and the way you lean your body. It's pretty cool. Anyway, they have these things called hoverboards, which are like a Segway, but much smaller, and there's no handle. So you just stand on a little platform. There's a couple wheels underneath, and you can lean forward and move and lean back and move and rotate around. It's pretty cool and pretty fun. And so I would bring it to the live event and we'd have. We'd come back after a break or an outing or something, and we have all the chairs moved to the side of the room. So people are going to just kind of stand in the room and we're going to circle up in a minute. But before we officially start, and people are kind of filtering back in, I'll just place the hoverboard, like, in the middle of the room, and then I'll stand back and watch like a mad scientist, like, what's going to happen. And sure enough, someone walks towards the hoverboard. Now, these things are not super popular, and Widespread. So most people have not ridden one. And what happens is someone. So that means by definition, they're what? That's right. A beginner. So they're a beginner and they get on this little hoverboard thing. And if you've ever ridden one of these things, one of the first experiences that almost everyone has is they get on it and then they go and try to translate that sound effect into what it visually might look like. Their feet are on it and they start doing this overcorrecting thing where they feel like they're going to fall. So then they kind of throw their pelvis forward, and then that puts them more off balance, and then they throw their butt back and they kind of do this weird excessive hula hoopy pelvic thrust thing with their arms flailing around because they're trying to balance themselves. And their whole nervous system is like spazzing out, trying to figure out how to stay upright on this thing, right? And maybe it looks like someone's trying to stay upright on a log, on a river or something, and inevitably they'll have to take a step. You don't usually fall off that thing hard. You just kind of take a step down. And then usually someone will come and stand near them and they'll put their hand on that person's shoulder or something, a little extra stability and balance, and then their body starts to figure it out. And then all of a sudden, within. I mean, what I love about this hoverboard is the learning curve's pretty short. So usually within 30 seconds or a minute, they're already balanced and then starting to slowly move around the room, and everyone's like, yay. And then someone else wants to get on it. Right? Now that second person has watched the first person and is like, I'm gonna be better than that. And then they walk over to it and they get on there, and sure enough, they do the same weird pelvic thrusty hula hoop thing, right? Because it's not just you can't intellectually know what to do. Your body, your legs, your muscles, your whole everything has to kind of just figure it out by doing it. And so we'll have, you know, we'll give a handful of people attempts or tries to play around with it. And then we are going to officially start the session. And so we put the thing away. And what I like to say to reinforce the learning is say, you know, some people are just born meant to ride a hoverboard, and some people aren't. And, you know, People chuckle at that because it's so preposterous, right? So absurd. And yet that is the exact same thing that we do. I'm just not meant to have conversations, I guess. I guess I'm just not meant to like casually walk up and start a conversation with someone attracted to. It's not my genes, it's total bullshit. It's. You just don't want to be a beginner. You don't want to go through that wonky phase where you're pelvic thrusting, trying to balance yourself. What I love about the hoverboard is the whole thing is condensed down into a one minute learning curve. Whereas something like conversation mastery or dating mastery or these other things, you know, those things take weeks or months to really start to. I mean weeks to learn small sub skills and then months to really get better at it and maybe sometimes even years to really master something. So that process of trying to get our balance and feeling shaky, feeling like we're gonna fall, feeling out of control is uncomfortable. And that's the thing that we're avoiding. One of the things, there's actually two and the second thing is much more what we're actually avoiding. But this first one, this shaky, I don't know what I'm doing because it's uncertain, right? Of course you don't know. That's why you're a beginner and that's uncomfortable. That's the first thing. That's the first reason that we kind of avoid being a beginner. And that's one of the major problems, because we then come up with a story though, to avoid that discomfort. And we say, you know, I just don't even like hoverboard stuff like that. I don't know, I don't even care. I don't even want to do it. You know. A simple example of this just was, I was laughing at myself the other day seeing this. We have a couple of puzzles for my kids and there's like, you know, they were younger, so like these jumbo 24 piece puzzles of like couple dinosaurs or something. But then, I don't know, a couple months ago my wife and older son who's five and a half, got a hundred piece also dinosaur puzzle. I guess all your puzzles have to be dinosaurs, but it's got like, you know, a cartoony T Rex and brontosaurus and other, your standard, your standard favorites, T. Rex, brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, you know, you don't have your parasaurolophuses and parasuchuses and other such Trying to impress you with my dino knowledge. I used to know a lot when Zain was four, he was like obsessed. And I knew my dino vocabulary probably expanded to a hundred different kinds of dinosaurs. And after the last year of not using it, it's like faded, drizzled. I wish I could pull out more styracosaurus. I'm trying to use ones you don't know. I have to think about it. I'll come back with a list in the next episode. In any case, this puzzle had some dinos on it. And it was a hundred piece puzzle. And here's the thing, I don't like puzzles. Yeah. Is that true? I don't know. That's what I always told myself. I just don't like them. I would get agitated if anyone tried to have me do it. I just don't like puzzles. And then of course, you know, my kid's like, come on, dad, let's do a puzzle. And I'm not gonna be like, shut up, I don't like puzzles. Right. I'm just like, oh, okay, let's just figure it out. So we pour all the puzzles out and it's 100 pieces. And I'm like, ugh, I'm so overwhelmed. Right? And then I said, well, let's just figure it out. Because he's trying to learn. He doesn't know how to do a puzzle. I don't know how to do a puzzle. Guess what? We're both beginners. And it had been a long time since I tried a puzzle. I'd done like the 24 jumbo piece with them, but that's kind of not even really a puzzle. It's so simple. But so we're sitting there, I'm noticing this like, oh, I don't like puzzle feeling. And I'm like, wait a minute, what's actually happening? And it'd been years since I tried, so I was, I think, a lot more self aware. And I just paid attention. I was like, wait a minute, I just don't know what I'm doing right now. I'm a total beginner at this. But instead of it feeling bad, it felt interesting. And so I was like. And I even said that to him. I was like, this is really interesting. I don't even know what you do. I don't even know how you get started. And I was like, well, let's figure it out. I was like, well, he's like, well, what do you think? And I was like, well, we probably should get all the puzzle pieces, like separated and all Face up. That seems like a good step one. He's like, okay, so he put them all face up. And then like, well, we can find ones that are edge pieces that are gonna go. Cause you can tell by the shape if it's gonna be at the top, the side, the left or the right side or the bottom. So we can start finding edge pieces. So we start doing that. And also I was like, and we can kinda like, look at this box. It looks like there's a sun in the upper left corner. So we can kinda start to get all the pieces look like they have parts of the sun over here. And so he starts to find sun pieces. And then we go on to find the stuff that's gonna make up the red T Rex. We kinda find all those things that look like they'll fit there. And then as you go, you start to work on it. Once the getting started seemed to be the hardest part. And then once you have kind of a solid chunk going, it gets easier. And I didn't know this, but it was incredibly satisfying. You're not even that far in, maybe like a tenth of the way in, but you got a solid foundation now. And you find the right piece and you stick it in and it f. And it's like, yeah, it's like a hundred piece puzzle after the first like 10 to 15, which was hard. Then like the next 85 pieces is like 85 little victories. I fucking love puzzles. I want to try like a 200 piece puzzle. Maybe I will. Maybe we'll find that. Not maybe I will. Right? So all of a sudden now I'm curious and I like them. And I think that's a reflection of my willingness to be a beginner and be able to stay in something and really discover it. Whereas when I was younger, I hated. I didn't like being a beginner, so I would avoid stuff. And especially when it came to being a beginner in something around social confidence. Because here's the thing about social confidence. And that brings me to the second thing that we're avoiding about being a beginner. There's the discomfort of not knowing and that uncertainty, right? And as my uncertainty tolerance has grown in life, I can just handle the uncertainty of not knowing what I'm doing at something and then just stay in it. And that's inherently or can be a little bit uncomfortable. It's not inherently uncomfortable actually, but it's often for most of us can be uncomfortable unless we've trained ourselves to be more tolerant and flexible and relaxed into uncertainty. I'd Say, that makes up only about 20% of the discomfort or 25% of the discomfort of being a beginner. And the other 75%, the other lion's share. The majority of the discomfort, I believe, comes from judgments about being a beginner. Fear, a shame about being a beginner, fear about people seeing that we're a beginner. That's the issue. That's like the main problem. So something like a puzzle, you know, I don't know, maybe that could induce a lot of shame in people. But sometimes people are like, yeah, I'm just not really good at puzzles. Whatever. I'm not that interested in them. But when it comes to something like talking to people, social confidence, starting conversations, speaking up in meetings, being quote, smart at work or looking like we know what we're talking about, or not even at work, knowing what we're talking about in life, having perspectives and opinions that we can back up with evidence and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of social and confidence stuff. When we're a beginner in one of those areas, it very easily triggers a sense of embarrassment, failure, and shame. And I think this comes directly back to our upbringing and some of the unfortunate frustration that you might have gotten from a parent or a teacher or a coach or something around not being good at something. And this is really unfortunate. This is something I'm very intentional and watch myself on, and I'm very mindful when one of my kids is doing something new or learning something, to be very aware of that kind of default impatience that can be in us. That might be about the activity. It might just be about general agitation in us that we want to take out on something or whatever. But I just hated that when I was a kid, when someone gets so upset with me for not being good at something or being a beginner at something. And so I'm very intentional about when they're learning something to create a wide space and really a trust that, well, they're going to learn it over time. They need a lot of immersion in it. And I don't even know what the amount of time is. Any mental idea of how long something's supposed to take to learn or whatever is just fabricated. The reality is it takes them, whatever time it takes them to learn it at whatever rate they do. So most of us, though, grew up with direct or indirect impatience, agitation, something that created a sense of shame. And so we feel bad, emotionally bad, rotten, inferior, worthless when we're being a beginner at something, and then always with shame. There's fear there's fear of being found out, fear of being seen, fear of being known that you're this wretched, not good enough person. And so then we have a lot of fear. And so we want to hide our beginner status. We don't want people to know about it. So we want to do it in private. We don't want it to be public. We don't want it to be seen. And this is a major problem because how are you going to build, say, conversation confidence without interacting with people? I guess you could do a lot of study in books and on videos and podcasts and stuff online, which is a lot of people that come in my world have done for a long time. They're like, I'm going to figure this shit out in my house by myself. And then they do that for a while, you know, six months, a year, two years, five years, whatever. And they're like, man, that didn't work. And they realize, I gotta take what I'm learning here and then go out and practice. And guess what? No matter how much you've read and studied and rehearsed or whatever, when you go practice, whatever, the thing is in real life that you want to get more confidence in, you're gonna be a beginner. You cannot bypass, you cannot leapfrog the beginner stage of anything. And so the key here is to liberate yourself from that shame. There is no shame. There's nothing wrong with being a beginner. And when you notice that arising, you want to take some time to go towards it instead of running away from it and say, wow, what is happening here? So one of the best ways to do it is to practice the activity, be a beginner, and then afterwards, sometime later that day or the next day or something, take some time to review and reflect on why do I. What's the shame here? What's the story? What's the message I got? And unravel that shit. Break those chains so that you no longer believe whatever story was passed down to you, probably unconsciously from a parent. They probably loved you and didn't want to communicate that they were angry at you for not learning something fast enough. But that's just. That was the level of consciousness and the love capacity that they had at that time in their life. I don't know your exact situation, maybe they did want to communicate that they didn't like you for something. But generally, in retrospect, parents, you know, want to have communicated love and acceptance to their children, generally. I know there's. There's exceptions to that. So, and regardless who gives a shit what they wanted to communicate, the key now is you as an adult, want to be the creator of your own reality and your own beliefs. And it doesn't matter if something got in there when you were young and rattled around in your mind and controlled your feelings and behavior for 30, 40, or 50 years, now is the time where you can choose differently. And awareness is the key to see, ah, shame around being a beginner. And that could be a great thing to reflect on, which we'll get to in our action step in just a second, but let's bring it back to you. Where is something that you might not be very good at, you might be a beginner at, that you'd like to step into, you'd like to just. It's your hoverboard that you would just want to get on and move around in. What is that for you? What comes to your mind right now? Maybe you're already doing it and you're already on the path, but we can look at how you can use what you're learning in this episode to make it more. More easeful, more interesting, more fascinating, more curious, because here's the thing. When you drop that shame, that's 75% of the discomfort right there, right? And then you have 25% of discomfort left, and that's already good enough. And then you can just sort of look to maybe tolerate that kind of shaky, ungrounded feeling of learning something new. But there's something even more possible here where you actually learn to relish that moment of shakiness, that moment of ungroundedness that. I mean, it's kind of like learning to relish the drop on the bungee jump or the free fall in the skydive, right? And you see people that do this. There's the beginner who does it like, once or twice, which is me. I've gone skydiving twice. And, you know, it's like this. You fall out of a plane, you're strapped to someone's back, you freak out, and then, ah, phew, I made it. Yeah. Whoa. That was crazy. That was awesome, right? But then there's someone who has done it a lot or has gone through jump school and has learned how to jump out themselves and whatever. This is terrifying. I don't want to do that, jumping out of a plane again and again and again. In any case, that person relishes the free fall. They know how to work with those sensations of total out of control or total drop. And like your life in your own Hands, right? And they learn how to thrive within that. And so how can we do that? How can you do that? To really embrace the wobbly? And one thing that really helps me do that is stepping into the mystery and the fascination and the interest. Like, whoa, I get to learn how to do this thing, and I get to learn how to play this. And, whoa, this is how social interactions work. And just like, stepping into the fascination of what I'm learning and the awareness of just, what are we doing here? All the different games that we play and all the things we can learn. And sometimes I'll just sit back and marvel at my body and how it can just do stuff automatically without me even thinking about it. Like, how is it that I can move my arm? I just. I'll do that with my kids. Sometimes I'll be like, okay, move your. You know, lift your hand up like this, and then wiggle your fingers like that. And then they'll do it, and I'll be like, how did you do that? And they'll kind of look at me and look at their hand, and look at me and look at their hand be like, I just did it. I know, I know you just did it. You just did it, but how did you do it? And then they'll be like, whatever, dad, and they'll run off. I just blew your mind. You can't handle the truth. Come back here. Let's do a puzzle. In any case, you can tap into this fascination, marvel, wonder, enjoyment, interest, curiosity. These are all things that can emerge in the beginner process and do so when you drop the shame and all the stories and judgment around it, and also maybe drop some of the fighting of the uncertainty. Okay, great. Now let's talk about how to turn this into action. Time for action. Action, action. Your action step for today is to take a couple minutes, five minutes, sometime now, if you want, later, later today or tomorrow, and consciously reflect on what did I learn about being a beginner when I was young? What messages did I receive? Think about your parents. Think about your mom, your dad, whoever raised you. Also think about teachers and coaches, because those are key authority figures that we are learning something new under their guidance and the way that their attitudes towards us and learning are going to also send messages that are impactful at that age. What did I learn about being a beginner? Not just what they told me verbally, but the energy, the attitude, the emotion that was conveyed during those learning experiences. And just become really curious about what some of those messages are, because that's going to be the awareness that's going to help you. If there's any unhelpful, limited or toxic messages embedded in there, you can see them and let them go and then go. Enjoy. Enjoy being a beginner. 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 social confidencecenter.com. Sam.