Get More Confidence: Step 4 of 5 Steps To Unleash Your Inner Confidence

Hey, Dr. Aziz here. Welcome to your fourth free video of the Five Steps training program. Five Steps to unleash your inner confidence. This one is dedicated to helping you let go of that perfectionistic, idealistic standard you have for yourself that is making you perpetually feel like you're not doing good enough. And I call this one, stop shooting all over yourself. Because that's what we're doing, right? We're shooting all over ourselves. That's a term from cognitive therapy. I think it was Becker, one of those guys who came up with it. And it's kind of funny because it obviously references something else, but that's how you feel when you. When you're shooting on yourself, right? You feel like shit. You feel down, you feel low, you don't feel worthwhile. So what is shooting on yourself? Well, that is when you have this standard, you have this image or this idea of how you should be that is pretty elevated, pretty high bar, probably pretty unattainable. And just to take an example, I used to have a pretty high bar around. I should always be confident. I should never be anxious. No one should ever see that I'm anxious. I should be able to go start a conversation with any woman anywhere in her time and get her to like me and want to sleep with me or at least make out with me instantly, no matter what's going on in her life at that time. I mean, can you get a sense of how extreme this is? I should be able to do better on that exam. I should be able to do better in that sport. I should know how to fix my car better than I do. And on and on and on. There's an old psychologist named Karen Horney who is a brilliant author, brilliant writer from the turn of the century, 1900s, who called it the tyranny of the shoulds. She found that we were just oppressed by this endless list of how we should be of this perfect self that one day we're going to get to. But how often do we live up to those shoulds? I mean, some of them maybe even never, right? And some of them maybe once in a while. And you can feel good for a moment before you fall short again. So we have to do. Is we have to start letting go of those shoulds. And that's a scary process because we think, well, if I don't obtain that perfection, then no one's going to love me. I'm not good enough. So first what you have to do is you have to identify what is your list of shoulds? What is the Stuff that you should on yourself with. So take a moment right now and think of your top shoulds. What are you telling yourself that you should be doing, should be doing all the time, should be stronger, should be more intelligent, should be better. And then you want to look at what do I tell myself I should never be, I should never be anxious, I should never be down, I should never not know what to say. I should never be nervous. And this combined is the standard that you hold yourself. And once you've identified it, I mean, that can be a very powerful experience for you if you've never done that. In fact, don't just think about it casually right now. Take 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and just write out your list of shoulds. You know, when I first did that, I had four pages of single spaced shoulds on a word processor, on a Microsoft Word or whatever, four pages of shoulds. I was like, Jesus, no wonder I don't feel that good about myself. I mean, there's always something I'm falling short in according to that part of my mind. So you have to break free from that tyranny of the shoulds. And so the first step is identifying what the tyranny actually is. Because if you don't know you're in that cage, then it just keeps beating you and you keep going through the spin cycle in the washing machine. You feel terrible about yourself. You don't know why. The second step is to when you're feeling bad about yourself, ask yourself, what extreme standard am I demanding of myself right now? And I guarantee that there's some standard that you're expecting of yourself that's really high, really unobtainable. You're expecting, you should, you know, I should have not been nervous in that meeting. I should have known what to say. I shouldn't have let those people know that I was having a tough day at work. I shouldn't have cried, I shouldn't have laughed, I shouldn't have looked nervous, I shouldn't have blushed. And so, okay, now you have that should. What is the standard that you're holding yourself to? And then the next step is to say, can I let go of that? Can I let go of this extreme position and just be a human, just be normal? Is it okay to just make mistakes? And some parties going to say, no, no, it's not okay. And that's the next step. You got to work with that party that says in order to be loved, I have to be perfect. And as long as you have that belief going, you're never going to feel good, you're never going to feel loved because you're never going to be perfect. So you have to rewrite the script to flip the script on that and realize. And this is something that I spent a long time in my life trying to do. In fact, I had a teacher, David Burns, who said to me, aziz, I see you like striving to be perfect in all these ways, and you're always beating yourself up for trying to be more perfect. And the reality is, even if you got perfection, people aren't going to love you. People don't love perfection. They're maybe impressed by it or drawn to it and want to learn from it, want to be around it. But on some level, they don't love it because they don't connect with it, because they know inside that they get nervous. They don't feel secure all the time. They don't feel amazing all the time. They make mistakes. And then here it looks like you don't. You look perfect. And on some level, not only do they feel disconnected from you, they might actually resent you for it. Oh, look at this guy. He's so perfect. I'm nothing. I'm not good enough. I'm going to have to tear him down a little bit, right? So the reality is people actually connect to you when they see that you're vulnerable, when they see that you have flaws and challenges just like them. And this is something that you can intellectually get or you can make true in your experience. How do you make it true in your experience? How do you really believe that? On a deep level, you start taking risks in your life, you start letting yourself not be perfect and letting it be seen being vulnerable. So that when you go hang out with your friend and he says, hey, man, how's it going? You don't say fantastic if you're not fantastic. You say, I'm doing okay. I mean, actually, I had a pretty tough time at work today. I had to give this presentation, and it was just a small group. It was like five or six people, nothing big. But I was so nervous ahead of time. I almost had, like, a panic. I think I had a panic attack, you know? And you reveal that to your friend, and there can be a moment of like, oh, my God. That's. That's. I can't do that. That's not right. He would judge me, right? He'd see that I'm not perfect, and then you remain stuck. But that's the risk. That's the challenge. That's the goal, to reveal more of yourself, not to everyone, all the time. Make an announcement. But just find those safe people, those friends, those opportunities to let yourself be seen as you are. And that's incredibly healing to you because you realize not only do you not lose love, but people actually feel a lot closer to you. And I've had this happen dozens of times in my life, probably hundreds of times in my life at this point. And every time I work with this on a client, there's like a phase where for several weeks they're like, I don't believe you. You're full of shit. There's no way I can do this. And then something happens and they try it and they're like, oh, my God. Not only did my friend not, you know, score me, but they actually. We had this one hour conversation and they told me about how, you know, he had to change his career because of anxiety. And it was just incredibly powerful conversation. So the question is, can you take that risk? Are you willing to take that risk? And that's going to be a powerful part of the process of stopping shooting all over yourself. So go ahead and put this into practice, and I'll talk to you in the final video of the Five Steps training program, which is, I believe, the thing that ties it all together. And then if you have this thing that I'm going to show you in the next video, it all comes together. And if you don't, it's kind of just a bunch of pieces that don't quite align to give you that quick, powerful result that you need. So stay tuned for that and I'll talk to you soon.