A short spoken excerpt from Dr. Aziz’s YouTube video "Drop The Performance" exploring how much of daily life is lived as a social performance. He argues that unconscious scripted behaviors limit connection and increase fear, and he challenges listeners to try acting without performance.
How much of your day is a performance? Maybe not when you're alone, but when you're talking to people, when you're at work, when you're socializing, when you're dating, when you're texting, whatever it is, how much of it is a thoughtful performance, Like a carefully orchestrated and constructed script, in a sense. I'm gonna say this, I'm gonna do that. Now, a lot of these scripts are unconscious. You're kind of just doing it because that's what you're supposed to do. But just watch yourself. In a conversation, you say the things you're supposed to say. You don't say the things you're not supposed to say. You don't ask the things you're really curious about because that would be inappropriate or edgy or I don't know them well enough. I don't reveal the things I really want to reveal because that will make me look bad or people might judge me. And so you're living your life in this very narrow band. And guess what? One, it makes your life a lot more boring. And you lose out on a lot of connection, a lot of relationships, because people are not attracted to kind of boring in the middle, hiding. And also, you feel a lot of fear because that's like, if I step out of that, I'm going to die. So let's shed all that. What would you do today if you weren't performing?
