EFT, Anxiety, & Deep Self-Love with Melissa Renzi

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 second, 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 actually have a decent length interview that I didn't split up into two episodes. So, so we're gonna dive almost immediately right into that interview. It's a great conversation with Melissa Renzi who has a very interesting history and experience of using eft, also known as tapping, to really change and transform her relationship with herself from one of being anxious and self critical to way more confident and also self loving. Which as you know, if you listen to any history of the archives of this show is an ongoing theme. TV teaching people about how can we be really self compassionate, how we can use self compassion as a source of endless confidence and instead of making us soft or ineffective, it actually is a tool, a secret for incredible success that many of us didn't know. I certainly didn't know this for many years. So without further ado, we're dive right into that interview, get ready to take some notes and if of course you want to go deeper, she shares her website in there about how to find out more about tapping and other things and so enjoy. Stay tuned and look forward to seeing you inside of the interview. My guest expert today is Melissa Renzi and she is a master's level social worker and a trauma informed yoga teacher, which is a really interesting title. We're going to talk more about that. She's in Chicago and she works with people in a wide variety of ways through psychotherapy, yoga as well with families, children and really looking at this idea of how do we help transform this deep seated anxiety in us and cultivate a renewed sense of self love. And that's something that really stood out in my interactions with Melissa that I really wanted to go deeper on is you know, we all feel that anxiety a lot of the time and there's often a lack of love in the way that we treat ourselves. And anyone who's listened to any of these episodes know I talk about that a lot. So I really wanted to bring someone in who has studied this a lot, works with people and just another insight, another window into how we can use this. And she goes around the world, teaches this at retreats and other places. So I think we're all in for a treat. Thank you so much for joining us today, Melissa.

Thank you, Aziz, for having me.

Let's start with kind of the big, the big why something that, you know, maybe everyone's got a theory about it or explanation, but what's up with all the anxiety? Why are we such nervous creatures? Anxious, afraid, worried that something's going to happen, worried about rejection, hurting. Like, what do you think creates that sense of pretty pervasive anxiety in so many of us?

Yes, so that is the big question, I guess. And for me this has been kind of a lifelong journey of learning exactly what that is. My own anxiety began in early childhood and what I've really discovered through my personal journey and of course also my work with clients and my work in my retreats is that so many of us out there are really struggling with our own sense of worth, our own sense of self worth and oftentimes feeling unworthy of love, of success, whatever it might be. And we oftentimes get, from my perspective, we oftentimes get stuck, stuck in this place of either grasping for something and trying to go after that thing that we desire or avoiding something else and really resisting the thing or the experience that we don't want to experience. And so for me, this is a very common human experience. While anxiety is the body's natural stress response, many of us, there's of course varying levels of anxiety for each of us. And you know, we could of course get into clinical disorders and such, but all human beings encounter anxiety and it is a normal phenomenon in our human experience. And I think it's really important to look at how we can actually work with anxiety in some way to be able to manage it in our lives.

Sure, yeah. And one, I mean you kind of link the two anxiety and self love. So is that sort of, is that in your view the maybe the primary way to work with anxiety or be with anxiety.

With self love and yeah, acceptance as well. So again, it goes back to this idea like we are continuously, we have this kind of natural response to avoid what's difficult and avoid the challenges and avoid the difficult feelings that we encounter on a day to day basis. And so, you know, we want anxiety to go away. Right. We don't want to feel sadness, we don't want to Feel anger. We don't want to feel lonely or whatever it might be. And so we want to shed that immediately and get rid of it. And so the question is really, is that the answer? And does that actually get us the intended result that we're hoping for?

Yes. We just need more powerful, cool ninja mental tools that we haven't discovered yet. They're in the next book. And then when we get those tools, we'll be able to instantly eradicate all negative feelings.

Like that. Exactly. Yes. I wish, I wish it were so true.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in fact, in my. I mean, that's. That, that's. I'm joking, but that, that has been my psychology for a good chunk of my life was I'm gonna, you know, find the right mental tools and solve all these feeling problems. And, you know, it doesn't really work. And then you run into this challenge of, okay, there is a feeling like sadness or anxiety. What do we do? So you brought up two really important topics, acceptance and self love. And maybe they're kind of very similar in a lot of ways. So let's make it practical. So I'm anxious. Let's just say someone wakes up and I'm feeling, you know, what's interesting is sometimes I just feel like pain in my heart, like an ache in my heart. And I'm like, is this anxiety? Am I sad? And it sometimes feels like it's free floating and I don't even. And I'll just tune into it for 20 minutes and feel it. And I'm not any closer to some intellectual understanding of what the source is because my mind is trying to figure out the source so I can get rid of it. And let's apply these ideas of acceptance and self love, like what would you do in that situation? What would you guide a client to do? Or what would you do yourself when you experience that sort of thing.

Yeah. So this is actually very fresh for me today because just this past weekend, it was the anniversary of the passing of my mom. My mom passed away 10 years ago and on August 5th. And I did a lot of things over the weekend to honor her and to do things that were healthy for, you know, for myself and felt helped me to kind of connect to her. There's a lot of, a lot of baggage there, a lot of past pain with my relationship with her while she was alive. And then of course, the loss of her was very traumatic as well. And I thought that I was kind of, you know, doing pretty well with things. And then last night I was in this. In this funk. And I had been running around all weekend and running around on Monday and. And last night I was in this funk and I just felt really, really sad. And I couldn't, at the time I thought it was like something else. I couldn't exactly identify where it was coming from. And then I kind of fell into tears and I cried. I had kind of gone back to this place in my mind of when I first learned of her passing. And I let out all of this emotion, but I also felt pretty anxious with that as well. And I was feeling so many different emotions. And I think sometimes, you know, so we have all these different past pains and we have all of these, these different thoughts and these different emotions that might be tied to anxiety based on past experience and past stories. And I feel like it doesn't always matter so much. I mean, it does matter where it's coming from, don't get me wrong. But I really believe that it matters what we do in that moment to release it, because it might be a mix, you know, of all these different emotions and, you know, all of these past stories that we tend to carry with us even when we think we're not carrying them. And so one of the things that I learned some years ago when I was living in Ecuador is an emotional release technique called tapping. And I know you're familiar with tapping and what's sometimes called emotional freedom technique. And it's a tool that I have been using and sharing with others ever since I learned it because I found it's been really powerful in letting go and also finding some acceptance if it makes sense. If we can do two of those things at the same time. Sure. So I'm not sure if you want me to go into this right now walking through the technique of tapping.

Sure. I mean, yeah, absolutely. That being the primary tool. Absolutely. To help us get to a place of more acceptance and more self love. Definitely. Let's dive in.

Okay. So again, this kind of came to me when I was going through some healing and letting go of some things when I was living in Ecuador some years ago. And I'm happy to share that story with you. But the way that I practice tapping is pretty standard to the way that it's taught by others. I do have some other variations that I'm not going to necessarily get into each of those today. I'd like to go through some of the basic points to keep it simple for the moment. But the first step, and I honestly, I don't always follow the steps, but I think it is A useful step to just kind of come into our own awareness and feel, you know, really feel what's occurring in our body. So not just like what's up in our head space but what's actually happening inside the body and allowing the wisdom of the body to start to just inform where is it? Where am I feeling this? You know, so am I feeling this anxiety or this, this self doubt or the sadness in my heart? Am I feeling it in my throat? Am I feeling it in my belly, my head, where is it? And just finding that awareness. And then the second is to rate your anxiety on a scale of 1 to 10. And so you know, you might be, or maybe it's something else again, you don't. This can be used for any kind of stuck emotion. And I'm sorry, I guess I'll back up for just a second because I'd like to give a little bit more of the background on tapping. So I explained that it's called emotional freedom technique by many. And tapping is based on the principles of using Chinese acupressure points. So for any of your listeners who are not familiar with acupressure points, there's this idea and theory in Chinese medicine that we have meridians or energy pathways running through the body and that our emotions get stuck there. And by tapping those different acupressure points it helps us to release some of that stuck emotion. Now I know that some of your listeners also might be very, very science based and maybe a little bit skeptical of like this idea of energy and meridians. And that's totally fine if this is nothing more than like a tool for focusing your attention elsewhere or distraction, some kind of tactile stimulation like this can be very useful in just releasing emotion. And the second part of tapping is, and what we're going to set up in just a moment is actually what's called a setup phrase or maybe an affirmation. And it comes from neuro linguistic programming where we build this phrase that allows us to acknowledge the current emotion or the current experience while finding acceptance and self love in that moment. So going back to, you know, finding that awareness, rating the anxiety, then we come to this place where we create this setup phrase and the basic one that I use and it does not have to be precise. The only thing is that there needs to be two certain components. And the first part of it would be even though I feel, and you know, you can fill in the blank, even though I feel anxious right now, even though I feel humiliated right now, whatever it might be, you name the Emotion, I deeply and fully accept myself. Now again, how you set those two things up? You can say, you can elaborate on the sentence, although don't make it too long here in the beginning, keep it somewhat simple of even though I feel horribly frustrated or horribly angry right now, I fully accept myself. Maybe I love myself, something along those lines. And so then using that phrase, we go through tapping these different acupressure points of the body. And I'll explain those as we go through. And if anybody's interested in a video, there's a video I go through on my website that they can access for further information. But we begin at the, what we would call the karate chop point. So using your dominant hand, you can take two or three fingers. So either, you know, your ring and middle finger, maybe adding your index finger there and the karate chop point. Then for me, I'm right handed, would be on my left hand, just on the outside on the outer edge of the hand, kind of by the pinky. And you tap there a few times, some people say six or seven times. I tend to tap a little bit longer in each place to really feel my experience. And then as I'm tapping, I'm going to say, even though I feel anxious right now, I deeply and fully accept myself. And then you take those same fingers up to the inside of the eyebrow. Even though I feel anxious right now, I deeply and fully accept myself. And then to the outside of the eyebrow, kind of by the temple is the next point. Even though I feel anxious right now, I deeply and fully accept myself. And then under the eye, on the cheekbone. Even though I feel anxious right now, I deeply and fully accept myself. And then the upper lip, keep tapping. So just kind of rhythmically find your tapping. Even though I feel anxious right now I deeply and fully accept myself. And then the chin. So kind of just the center of the chin is the next point. Even though I feel anxious right now, I deeply and fully accept myself. And then the collarbone. So tapping the collarbone, repeat. Even though I feel anxious right now, I deeply and fully accept myself. Now the next point is kind of on the side of the ribcage. So if you lift up your arm, it's the point on the side of the ribcage, it's just below your scapula, just below the shoulder blade there. And you would tap on both sides. I tend to skip this one sometimes because I sometimes feel like a monkey when I do it. Although that could be good. It could make you laugh in the moment when you're feeling anxious, I suppose but you would go then just to the points on the rib cage. And then the last point is just tapping the crown of the head a few times. So even though I feel anxious right now, I deeply and fully accept myself. And then you repeat through. So returning to the karate chop point. And what I do is I'll go through a couple of times in this process, and sometimes I'll stay in one place for a period of time. So. So for me, I find my collarbone to be a place that's very releasing. I, historically, in my life, have struggled with really finding my own voice, listening to my own voice, and communicating my needs really clearly. So a lot of my tension tends to get stuck in the throat and also in the heart, probably due to a lot of the grief that I've carried in my life. So sometimes I'll just tap at the collarbone and repeat the same phrase. So that's the basic one. And there's. There's an entire way of going through retelling your story through the use of tapping. But I wanted to share one other setup phrase like this. So that's. That's the basic one. But I am also. I'm someone. I don't know if any of your listeners can identify with this, but. But I struggle with decision making at times, and my partner tells me that if I were to have a gravestone on it would be etched. Part of me feels like because I inevitably. Whether it's making a decision or whether I'm trying to understand two sides of a story, I tend to see all sides of different things. But. So this is in the same situation. Part of you might feel, you know, part of you might feel one thing, but then you might also have rational side or something that feels something else. So you could also use a similar kind of phrase of saying, you know, even though part of me feels like, I don't know, like a loser right now, there's a stronger part of me that knows that I'm not a loser, or there's a stronger part of me that knows that I'm a worthy person or whatever it might be, and I'm willing to choose to accept myself. So that's just another way to look at it. I tell people, you don't have to believe it to say it. So I think that's an important saying to. Just to think about. Because. Because a lot of times we try to repeat these phrases and we don't actually feel it in that moment.

Yeah. So just really getting into the practice of it and not trying to force something.

Yes. Exactly. And just letting it kind of come with time and continuing with the tapping, continuing with the phrase. You can say it aloud. That's really useful. You can say it to yourself. And then after a few rounds, you know, pausing and rating your anxiety again to see if it's lifted, if it's still there, you can go through and say, even though I still feel this anxiety right now, I choose to accept myself or I fully accept myself.

So I actually have a question about that because that's something I always wondered with the tapping is it seems like by rating it with a number, I'm setting up my expectation that I. So it's sort of like I'll accept this so it goes away. Is sort of the trap that I notice it falls into. Is that something you've experienced or noticed with clients? And how do you, how do you sort of do that and rate it at the same time?

Yeah. So this is, I mean this is something, when I'm personally tapping, I don't always rate anxiety. I think that some, for some people it might be useful just to kind of see this is where I'm at right now. And maybe it's something shifted. Not necessarily that it goes away because it might still be there, but it's, you know, I think a lot of times we do want to measure things and maybe it's not always the best way to do it in this circumstance. I think that, you know, again, for myself, I don't necessarily rate it. I kind of just go with again my awareness and like, oh, I feel this heaviness has lifted from, you know, from my chest. And again it's. I understand what you're saying and that we don't want to set up an expectation that it's just going to go away, but we do hopefully want to find a greater sense of ease and again, acceptance and more self love and not give this thing that we're feeling more power than it deserves.

Yeah. So let's talk more about. So again, I mean, tapping an eft, there's just so much that people can learn. So we'll say it again at the end of the interview. But what's your website?

Oh, my website is. It's my name. So it's Melissa. That's M E L I S S A and my middle name Noelle. N O E L. And my Last name is Re. N as in Nancy, Z as in Zebra I dot com. So melissanoellerenzi.com sure.

And we'll have a link for that too, below this episode at Shrink for the Shy guy. And so to find out a lot more of the nuts and bolts of tapping, you can check out Melissa's site. Even just the YouTube search, you'll find a lot on there for free. So I don't. There's so much good stuff that I want to dig into here. I don't want to take up too much, much time, more with the logistics of tapping. So if you're listening and you got a taste of this and you're really intrigued, go check out some of these resources that Melissa has or you can find elsewhere. Because what I really want to get into is like, okay, so we're doing this as a technique and we're doing this to create more acceptance and love for ourselves in spite of what we're feeling. And I think that's the core of it, right? And that's the kind of the quantum leap for all of us is we have this hatred of ourselves, this deep rejection of ourselves if we're feeling a certain way or of that discomfort of the emotion. And I'd love to hear more about your. Let's just open up this discussion. I don't have a clear specific end target, but let's just talk about self love. What's your experience been with that? What have you found has been kind of some of the shifts in your journey? What have you seen that's helped you in that?

Yeah, well, a lot. But I mean, so my journey with self love really began a long, long time ago. I feel like I've been working on this for at least 20 years of my life, so since I was in my teens maybe. And for me it is just that first of all, it is a journey. And I think you started getting at this a little bit earlier. Just like we wish that there was this magical cure or something out there. I really believe strongly that there isn't just this thing that you're going to get rid of anxiety forever. It's going to be there in some shape or form. And actually if we looked at it from existential philosophy, anxiety is actually there to like keep us going and to motivate us in some way. Right. And so the same thing goes with like this journey of finding or developing a greater love for ourselves. And for me this actually kind of connects to my initial experience with tapping. When I was in Ecuador again, I was so my mom, my parents divorced when I was a small child and my mom also struggled with a lot of mental health issues. And so she could be a very loving and wonderful, free spirited mother. And also our relationship was Very volatile at times. And she. She passed away in 2007 from what I characterized for a long time as an accidental prescription drug overdose. And so I had this, like, even though I could see in our relationship, and just like after she passed, I could see intellectually and rationally, with my rational mind, that her death was not my fault. There were a lot of different things deep within my psyche that led me to feel like, you know, I could have done something or I was responsible for carrying her suffering in some way. And a lot of that ties to, you know, even to this day, I feel like sometimes there those things creep up and I have to be really mindful to let them go. And I went to this workshop about five years ago or so with a man by the name of Mark England. At the time, he was calling what he was doing emotional enlightenment. I think he might be under a different name now, but he was doing this workshop, and he asked for someone who had raw emotion that day to be a volunteer. And I volunteered. And my issue that I was having in that moment was a challenge with commitment in romantic relationships. That's what I thought we were going to talk about. I thought that's what we were going to do with tapping. And so, you know, I'm not going to go through, obviously, the details of every single thing with that. But he walked me through tapping. So just with him right in front of me, we tapped actually for about two hours as I told my story, and he helped me to retell my story. And it was really through changing my language of how. Of my mom's life, just telling that story of my mom's life and how I interfaced with her life or not, that really helped me to release a lot of the pain in my past. And I actually just pulled up an old journal entry today as I was looking through things. And so we ended up going through this thing that started with commitment issues and really came back to the pain and suffering of my mothers that I was carrying. And I'm looking here now, and some of my old stories that I journaled about and some of my new stories, and, you know, even just with commitment, I had said, I'm afraid to commit in a relationship because someone has to get hurt. And the news story was, it's possible to be in a healthier, more committed relationship in which it works. And those are just, like, my weird words. You can certainly, like, rephrase that. But this is kind of where I was that day. And this tied in actually, like, the way that these two things tied in Was because my mom had a lot of needs. And so anytime I was in a relationship where my significant other also required more of me than I was willing to give, that same sort of thing got triggered.

Sure.

But then, you know, even below that, the feelings of like, I'm not good enough or I don't deserve this too also got triggered. And so part of my new stories that I created that day were about, you know, giving myself permission to relieve myself of suffering and recognizing that while my mother's death could be considered an accident by some, if it wasn't intentional, that she still caused her death. So she might have caused her death by, you know, a whole range of things, you know, and that's kind of a tricky one to get into, but by these two things with tapping and retelling my story, it was really after that time that I realized, like, what, what I was carrying and how I was harming myself and how I was blaming myself and how I was making myself, you know, I can't really, I guess, make yourself responsible for others, but, you know, assigning that response, we can sure try.

We can listen to that voice in our heads that, that tells us that it is our fault and responsibility.

Exactly. Wow.

Well, I really appreciate you just being so open and vulnerable with me. It's just that takes a lot of self love, really, to be able to do that.

Right.

To be able to talk so openly. And it's also so profoundly helpful to me and to others to hear someone just talk authentically and directly about your experience. And there's so much, I don't know, minimizing and hiding and. Well, that was that and that's done. There you go. That we do because not only do we want the feelings to go away at second best, we'll take. I'll pretend like they've gone away to everyone else so I can look like I'm awesome and, you know, perfect. And so I just appreciate your authenticity. And it sounds like a big piece of self love is letting go and forgiving and not taking on something that's not yours.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, that's a big part of it is recognizing what's mine. And that can be hard to really discern, especially for those of us out there that are very empathetic. But yes, really owning, you know, what's mine and allowing someone else to just have. Have their thing too. And I think is really important to that. The journey of self love. And the also just what you mentioned though, about vulnerability, the more time goes on, the more time that goes on Exploration. Excuse me. I feel like there's such a sense of empowerment with vulnerability when we can really allow our true selves and our true stories to show and share that with others. I really find for myself that that's been a powerful tool and a way of living really to, you know, to. To share with others and, you know, to just to put my raw self out there sometimes. And that's helped me to manage my anxiety or helped me to find greater ease and peace in my own life.

Sure. Yeah. Well, it's so interesting. You know, anxiety is such a large term. It covers so much, but I feel like. And it can be coming from so many different things. And one really interesting thing I found is just so much of our fear and anxiety is just about emotion and having emotion and other people seeing that we have emotion and that we can neutralize so much of that with this tapping. Like, even though I'm feeling this, I accept myself, or what you're talking about is neutralizing it by no longer hiding it. And I absolutely have seen a very similar sort of parallel in my journey to more and more self love. Is that it? It included starting to. To be more real and sharing more vulnerably and is empowering. And it can go from really scary and sort of almost unbearably uncomfortable to, oh, this is what I need to do here to. To free myself, to let this go. Is just to share it.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Aziz. I mean, that's. That's. That's it right there. Is just. Is sharing it and being real, I think. And I find, you know, there are times when, you know, if I am dealing with a difficult emotion or I'm dealing, you know, with feeling anxious at times when I share it. Like, I'll share something at the end of my yoga classes sometimes about my own journey and like, how I. I felt anxious that day or whatever it was or maybe even teaching the class and people didn't realize it, but. And, you know, inevitably I always have somebody at the end of class that comes up and is like, oh, my God. Thank you so much for sharing that, because I've been going through this, my. My own thing, and, you know, I appreciate just knowing that you're human too and that, like, that I'm not alone.

Yeah. And. Yeah. What a strange kind of illusion slash delusion we can go into. And we're suffering, which kind of, whether we consciously say it or not, there's. It is often surrounded in this. Like, I'm. I'm the only one who experiences this. I'M so much different than everyone. Everyone else has got it together and doesn't feel, you know, X, Y or Z. And that's, that's another key thing that's healed when we have the courage to share and others do, is that, you know, that's exactly that. It's an illusion that people, everyone's got emotions and feelings and things that come up for them that are uncomfortable or challenging. And so, yeah, the capacity to be with it, I think is a really interesting theme that's emerging right now in our conversation. Because sometimes people hear self love and they're like, oh yeah, that means you say I love myself to yourself and that's one way. But what we're talking about is a much more. It's kind of like a. It's a way of showing that love by being with yourself in a certain way or by allowing something or by sharing something. It's really that love in action.

Yes, absolutely. It's about being present with whatever is, you know, whatever is arising in a moment. It's about being present with that. So even if it, you know, we like to label things as positive or negative, you know, and even I find it's challenging sometimes in my own language to get away from that. But like, even when we have these darker parts of ourselves or you know, these aspects of ourselves that we'd like other people to not see, what's oftentimes called the shadow and we'd like to conceal, you know, even those parts, those things like can we be present and loving even when those aspects of ourselves arise? Because we all have them, you know, it's very, it's part of being human.

Yes, that's a whole, that's a whole other topic in conversation is the shadow and the rejection of the shadow and the denial of our shadow and then all the wacky, wacky symptoms that can emerge when we do that. So in short, absolutely. That more, I don't know, self focused, immature, irrational part of us, the capacity to really be with it and allow it and love it as well is profoundly healing. And so much of our self rejection is just rejection of that is rejection of the shadow in us. So there's so much good stuff here. I think there's just a depth of wisdom that you have and I really appreciate you sharing that wisdom with us. You know, also through your, your own experience. It just makes it so much more impactful and viscerally real. So thank you for, for doing that and being with us. And you mentioned it earlier, but let's have. You will have a link to it. But can you say the website one more time so people can find you and find out more about what you do?

Sure. My website is Melissa M E L I S S A Noel N O E L and then Renzi R E n z I melissanoellrenzi.com and you can visit me there to learn some other anxiety release techniques, as well as check out the upcoming retreats that I have. So I would just add that many of your listeners might be introverts, and I do lead an annual introvert retreat for both men and women. So you'll see on my website that there's a retreat coming up for just women, but this one's open to all, and it's specifically for introverts and highly sensitive people. So we kind of set the stage for the start that you can really be yourself and you can take time to yourself when you need it with no judgment, no questions asked. And it's just a really comfortable environment to interact with other people and connect when you want to and just feel free to be yourself.

Well, that's great. And where is that retreat held?

It's going to be in Peru. So we just. Actually, my partner and I led an introvert retreat to Mexico in collaboration with Introvert Springs founder Michaela Chung back in April. And so this next one we're really excited to do in Peru, which is going to include Machu Picchu.

Wow, that sounds awesome. All right, well, lots of cool opportunities there. Sounds a great adventure and obviously very healing. And thank you so much for being with us today, Melissa. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you so much, Aziz. It's wonderful being here.

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.

And you pronounce it Renzi, Is that right?

Correct.

Okay.

And you use Aziz Aziz?

Yeah.

Should I call. I mean, do you. I mean, it seems like you typically go by Both Aziz and Dr. Aziz. So for this show, I mean, I can call you Dr. Aziz.

You know, I prefer for the show if you. Every time you referred to me, you said the great Dr. Aziz. And refer to me in the third person, too, if you could.

Okay.

No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

I actually figured you were kidding, but then I was like, I did. I heard a pause, and I was like, well, if I start laughing.

No, no, Aziz is fine.