Courage vs. Comfort

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. Welcome to today's episode of the show. I'm your host, Dr. Aziz. And today we're going to be talking about a choice. A choice that you can make literally today and not even just once today, I'd say dozens of times per day that determines the course of the rest of your life. That sounds dramatic, but actually it's a very significant choice. And it's a choice of courage versus comfort. Courage versus comfort. I'm gonna break that whole thing down in this episode. Before I do, couple quick things. One, if you are not watching this, you could be watching me. You could see my face talking to you. So maybe you're used to listening to the show on itunes or Spotify or wherever else you're getting it from, but we also are now doing a YouTube version of said show where you can actually watch the episodes, me talking to you as I record them, and it gives another level of depth. So go to YouTube and check out Shrink for the Shy Guy. That's the name of the channel. Shrink for the shy guy on YouTube. Also, if you've been benefiting from this show, this is maybe not your first episode and you're enjoying the amazing free content, then please go give it a review on wherever you might listen to it, itunes or Spotify, so that others can find it as well. Because that's ultimately what I'm doing here. And what the point of all this is, is to help reach people, people who are struggling, people who are stuck. You know, many, many, many years ago, you might know this origin story, but I was in the depths of a lot of social anxiety and niceness and also, to boot, chronic pain and a good old hefty dose of self loathing and pretty discouraged or hopeless about my future. And the worst part about it was that's what I thought. Not just what my life was currently, but what it could be. And the reason it had to stay as it was basically, was because there Was something wrong with me? There was something deficient with me. There's something just. I don't know, but not quite all there with me. And I know there are millions of people that hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of humans that believe that right now. And maybe you believe that too, or believe, duh, past tense. And listen to this show has inspired you and given you some tools and a sense that this is possible. Or maybe you're still on that journey and. But regardless, let's. Let's help our brothers and sisters out, man. Because at some point when I really started to get that liberation was possible, I decided to dedicate my, my life to doing this. So I'm, you know, I'm about to turn 40 and I'll be doing this until I'm 400. No. But I don't know till I'm done. Maybe 90, you know, knock on wood. Maybe a little, little more, a little less. But who knows? I'm here now. And if you want to be someone's hero, then link them up with something from this show and maybe it'll really inspire and help them. And maybe it's this episode because maybe you got a friend who's a coward. I'm kidding. But it's about courage versus comfort, right? So let's talk about that. Now. This is the choice you're making. Do you choose courage or do you choose comfort? Now, it might not seem like comfort might be an obvious choice, right? Like what do you do when you're choosing comfort? Well, there's the obvious stuff. That's the cookie, the chips, the burger. The burger. The. That's what my. My little son, six year old, he doesn't say burger. He says burg. Burg burger. It's almost like he's got a New Jersey accent or something, but he's not. He's from Oregon. Anyway, that's also the, the dopamine, the flicking on the Internet and doing whatever, the porn, the avoidance. It's also avoidance of challenging things. It's avoidance of the physical workout or the mental workout to do your to do list or whatever it is, right? So we all kind of know what choosing comfort is like. It's the path of least resistance. It's the easy path. It's the avoidance path. You might be familiar. And in fact, that's a useful thing to reflect on right now. How much have you been choosing the comfort path? Shame. Shame on you. That's not the point of this, of any of this confidence growth. You cannot shame your way to more confidence. You cannot Beat yourself to self love and self esteem. It's ridiculous. So the key thing, though, is to look at what have I been choosing now is the opposite of choosing comfort. What is the opposite of choosing comfort? You might say, well, it's choosing discomfort. Yeah. I mean, kind of in a purely semantic way you could say that, but you could get yourself some discomfort by just taking a hammer and smashing it against your hand bones. That's discomfort right there. But it's kind of idiotic, right? Like, why would you do that? So the idea, though, is that the opposite of comfort in this case might be courage. What? Well, why is that? And another way, another thing I'll give another potential opposite as well. Just helping you think outside the box here. Nothing I'm saying is absolute and I'll fight somebody on like, no, the opposite is like, we're just exploring here. We're just trying to open up your sense of possibility. Because when I lived in that cage and I was super stuck, there was no sense of possibility. There were no multiple perspectives and ways to look at something. This is how it is, and I'm effed up. That's how it was back. Then. Now this is how it is, and I'm effing awesome. So, you know, the same is true for you. By the way. A whole perspective shift can occur inside of you without anything external changing yet. And then, of course, as you have that perspective shift, then things outside you start to change. I see this all the time. People that coach with me in my Mastermind program where, you know, they're single, they have a hard time dating, maybe they don't like their job, maybe they feel like they're not getting enough respect and they're family or other social relationships, they're too nice. And even before they've gone out, you know, putting their name out there or going on a bunch of dates or trying to make any of that stuff happen, we just start working on their core confidence. What's your relationship with you? How do you see yourself? How do you talk to yourself? What do you believe about yourself? And they start to address that. And then all of a sudden, the external world around them starts to change. Because confidence is an inside job. So when you make a different choice towards. From comfort, which you could be choosing, I'm gonna invite is courage. So what is courage? Well, courage is. Has. Requires a couple components, right? It is to persist or move forward or take the action in the face of fear. So you have to have a couple things going on there for to experience courage. You have to Experience fear and then you have to make a choice to pursue the thing that's meaningful to you, even though there's fear. And I think that's the real lesson there of courage is you are uncomfortable because fear is uncomfortable, but you're choosing to move towards and not just anything. Right? Because that's just the silly discomfort like I talked about earlier, like smashing your hand with a hammer. No, this is discomfort in the direction of something meaningful, in the something of service of something greater. That was one of my mottos for a long time. One was do what scares you until fear has no power to stop you. And then as I started, that was my own motto. And then as I started to step into leadership and helping other people and doing things that were uncomfortable, not just for myself, but for others, then I realized, do what scares you in the service of something greater. And that something greater could be, you know, your own life, for your family, for your career, for your relationships, for your future partner you have met yet. Right? So just think about that. In any given moment, you can be choosing courage or you could be choosing comfort. You might say, aziz, I don't feel very courageous right now. Ah, people, we confuse the feeling of power, of faith, confidence with courage and say, well, I want to walk over towards those people and feel like it's going to go really well. Ah, that's a mixture of confidence and faith right there. That's not courage. Now courage might unlock confidence and faith. So if you, let's say you want to have more ease and comfort, approaching people you don't know and starting conversations or asking someone out, right? You're very, very far from feeling at ease right now. Trust me, I know what that's like. And so what is going to create that? Well, you know, we're all looking for the hack, we're all looking for the what's the two minute pick up line YouTube video that's going to help me with this. The truth is, the reality is what's going to help you with this is the muscle of courage that you build for weeks or months to create an extraordinary not just social life, but life. So it's you choosing courage daily again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. And then you get rewarded with confidence and faith. Now you could be doing things, I teach people how to do this, to build these things. And if you haven't already got it, by the way, go to my website at drzeze.com,-r-a z I z.com and get my five steps to unleash youh Inner Confidence. Free mini course videos and an ebook that'll teach you that the principles I guide clients through to unlock these things. So I'm not saying there's nothing you can do, but if you're not choosing courage, nothing else you do is going to matter. It's all going to be theoretical. It's all going to be like, oh, I have the greatest mindset that I read or the affirmations that I tell myself, and they all just evaporate into nothing. When you're actually faced with the situation in your life, isn't it true? Have you seen this in your life? So we need to do something different. We need to start choosing courage daily, not choosing comfort. So what does that look like? Well, it looks like becoming aware of the moments in which you are steering towards the comfort side of things. And so let's give a few simple examples, right? Let's say you wake up in the morning, do you hit snooze or do you get up? That might seem like an insignificant moment, but you're choosing comfort or a certain kind of courage, right? The courage to face the day. How about maybe do you have any sort of morning practices? It might take courage to not engage in something. So if you don't have any morning practices and you flip over, hit snooze three times, and then you finally are forced to get up because you're like, I'm going to be late to work, then you grab your phone and you start dinking around on some site that's check in something that either makes you more stressed or releases dopamine. And you can start to question like, is this comfort or is this courage? And now it might not seem that courageous to not grab your phone and use a bunch of stuff on it in the morning, but it does take a certain kind of courage. What is the courage? Well, it's a courage to go into the fear or the discomfort, being with yourself, of being with your feelings. Because most of us are uncomfortable with our own self and our own feelings for any length of time. And so just to be with yourself for a minute might be uncomfortable and not reaching for that distraction. Now you could go further with this. Maybe you could have a practice you do each morning that makes you a little uncomfortable, but it strengthens you because you're leaning in. It takes courage to do it. And you don't have to reinvent the wheel here. What about meditation or physical strength? Those are the Two things that I do in the morning, I do meditation with some Wim Hof breathing and then a physical strength training workout. Nothing crazy. I meditate for about 30 minutes. And then I do about 30 minutes of strength training, sometimes as low as 20. And what does it do? You're just priming yourself when I say go. And the reason I'm giving these simple examples, because you might hear this and say, like, okay, I gotta do the scariest, hardest, most brutally uncomfortable thing. And that scares me because that's how I'm gonna build the cur. Courage. Courage isn't like that. Courage is, think about it. Much more like a muscle. And if you want to strengthen any muscle or you want to get better at running or whatever, are you going to say, like, all right, I'm going to get out there and I'm going to just fucking run till my face bleeds, right? No, I don't even know how you do that. What, are you getting stung by wasps as you run? But in any case, that's not the most intelligent way to build that muscle, right? It's going to be run consistently and slowly lean into your edge. Same thing with physical training, same thing with your courage muscle. You do it consistently and you lean into your edge. And that's why I'm framing it as a choice that you can make many, many times per day. Another way to look at this besides just looking at those daily choices. And I started with the morning routine, but this could be done when you get to work, right? You know, do you open up your browser and just do the comfortable stuff that you know is not that productive and sets you up for a terrible day because it just jacks your mind and put you in reactive mode, like sitting down at your desk and being like, all right, what emails should I look at today, right? Versus you come into work, you're like, I know what I'm gonna be focused on for my first work block. I got 90 minutes of uninterrupted time to focus on my top priority task. And then I'll check email, maybe, better yet, I'll do it, you know, after I've really focused and created something or accomplished something, right? So there's a hundred and one examples. I'm just giving you a few of them. And of course, you could look at it socially as well. Here I am, I'm in that meeting right now. Do I choose the comfort of not making eye contact, not speaking up, staying small, being unavoidable or being avoidable? I should say being unavoidable. Might be courage. You will not avoid me. Here I am, right? So that's the opposite side is, do you choose courage in that meeting? And I don't know what it would look like for you and your life and your circumstances, moment to moment, your work life, your social life, your dating life, your family life, life, your health, whatever it is. But you will know when you start to look. Where is the opportunity for courage? Might be a great question to write down somewhere and have yourself see it visible. Where is my opportunity for courage? Today or right now? Now, here's another fun way to think about your courage and how to tap it every day and how to choose it more regularly. I was hiking around a little trail we have around our property here in the woods, and I was doing it with my two boys in the morning. Usually try to get about 30 to 40 minutes outside before they go to school with them each morning. And there's this little incline. It's not that steep part of the trail. And we were jogging at parts of it. And we got down to the bottom right before this incline, and my son Armand put his hand on my chest, and he said, I can't feel your heartbeat. Because he was feeling his heartbeat. He's like, my heart's beating so fast, Daddy. So I put my hand on his, and I could feel it beating really fast. And he put his hand on my chest. He's like, I don't feel your heart. And I said, well, we're not running that fast to make my heart beat. And he said, oh, well, can you make it beat fast? I was like, yeah, I could run up this hill. And he's like, okay, do it. So I sprinted up the hill as fast as I could, and I get to the top, I'm huffing and puffing. My heart's beating out of my chest, right? So he catches up, and he's like, well, that was really fast. And he puts his hand on my chest and. And he's like, I could feel your heartbeat. And I said, yeah, when you feel your heart beat fast, that's how you know you're alive. It just came to me in the moment. It just felt true. And he said, well, you're. You're. You're alive, even if your heart's beating slower. And I said, yeah, that's technically true, but if your heart beat. If your heart doesn't beat fast once per day, then maybe you're not fully alive. And he kind of gave me, like, a confused look and then continued on the path. But afterwards I was like, Whoa. I like that. That's true in my experience. And I'm going to invite you. It's just another playful way to think about this and hold this stuff. This stuff, meaning this confidence, growth, practice. Because we gotta think creatively. How do we keep ourselves motivated to do the uncomfortable stuff? And so I said, you know what? To be more alive every day, I'm getting my heart beating fast. So what does that look like? Well, it could be a physical thing. I'm not saying it always has to be a social thing, so maybe. But, you know, there's a way to work out or jog, where you're kind of just like. But if you sprint, boom, your heart's beating fast. If you lift something really heavy, you're trying to max on something, you're like, whoa. Your heart starts to pound, right? So you have the physical side of it. But even then, you notice how you got your body kicked into gear and you're actually really using it and just going through the motions in this comfort zone. Gray bubble of meh, Right? So that's a way to get your heart beating faster. Take a cold shower. Your heart will beat fast, often right before you even turn on the water with anticipation. And then, boom, that water hits you. Your heart will start beating fast. I promise you. What else can you do? Well, there's a client I was working with. He's in my mastermind program, and he's about four months in and making some really good progress. And he said, you know, just the last two weeks, I felt really kind of flat. Like just not as much life energy, not as excited, just kind of meh. He's like. I realized for the first three months of the program, I was really leaning in and practicing and doing stuff that scared me and starting to grow faster. And then the last two weeks, I've started to just pull back, kind of going to some of my old patterns. I said, aha. And he said, so. And this is without me even prompting him or anything. He just announced it to the group. He said, so it was like Tuesday with the group call. And he said, okay. So since Sunday, it had been three days. Each day I've just done something outside of my comfort zone. Embarrassment inoculation, do something strange in public just to. Just to push that edge again. And the thing he done that morning, on a Tuesday morning, he lives in. I think he's in New York. Yeah, he's in New York. So crowded subway, right? And he's in the subway. They got these bars across the. Near the ceiling, which you can hold on to. So in case you're wobbling around on the, as it starts and stops and he grabs a hold of those bars and just starts doing pull ups in the subway, you know, nothing crazy, but if you're breaking the social, the cultural field and you do something outside of it, as, even if it's as simple as pull ups on a bar, on a bar on a subway, or push ups on a sidewalk or dancing on a sidewalk, have you ever done any of that stuff? Which I definitely encourage people to do. In my mastermind, at my events, my live and virtual events, we have people doing this stuff because it shows something to you. It shows you that you can in a playful way and non aggressive, you know, it doesn't harm or bother anybody. But you see, you'll see how much you freak out, how uncomfortable it is, how much your heart will beat fast before you do something silly that doesn't even matter. And the purpose of all those is to free yourself. Because if you can do that kind of stuff, then you can walk over and say hi to somebody or you can ask somebody for their number, or you can say no to a request from a colleague. It's all the same thing. So what are you gonna do? In fact, that is a great question, isn't it? For your action step. Time for action. Action, action. So let's talk about your action step for today. Your action step is gonna be to do something today that makes your heart beat fast. That's a little scary or uncomfortable. That takes courage. So basically what I'm saying is exercise your courage muscle today and try to pick something that makes your heart beat faster. Now I gave some examples about the morning time. Waking up, not hitting snooze and just getting up right away. That's a great little exercise of courage because it's right there in the morning, starts to prime you for the whole day. But I mean, if that makes your heart beat fast, I don't know, you either got some like heart problem or your day is really freaking exciting that when you wake up and get out of bed, your heart just starts thumpity thumping real excited. Like in which case, what do you got going on? Because I want some of that, I want some of that juice. So that's your reaction step for today. Thank you so much for being with me. I'd love to hear about you and your journey and your experience. So if you ever want to reach out to me, go to drz.com,-r-a z I z.com There's a under the about tab, there's a Contact Me. You can send me a message through there. I'd love to hear from you and hear about your growth and just really support you on your journey in any way that I can. Until we speak again, may I have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you are 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 socialconfidencecenter.com SAM.