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

Hey, Dr. Aziz here. Welcome to the fifth video in the Five Steps to Unleash youh Inner Confidence video training program series. This one is the one that ties it all together. This one is about self compassion. That's a powerful. Maybe you've never even heard that term before, or maybe you make sense to you, but you don't quite know what that actually looks like. Or maybe some part of you hears that and you're like, oh God, this. What is this kind of foo foo hippie stuff? But stick with me, this stuff is not foo foo hippie stuff. This is actually stuff that's being more and more validated in empirical psychology research. In fact, actually did my clinical dissertation when I was in graduate school on self compassion. Because this is one of the most powerful factors that can change your life from one of suffering and self criticism and anxiety and social anxiety and shyness to one of feeling more secure, confident, loving and capable in your life. And here's why. Because self compassion is basically an attitude towards your own self. That is one that is supportive, encouraging, and above all, kind. Because so many of us live in a place of being the opposite of that, don't we? Being critical, harsh, impatient with yourself. In fact, just pay attention. Over the next rest of the course of today or tomorrow or this week, how do you treat yourself? You know, you're noticing, you're going to go give a talk in a meeting, you have to present something and you're nervous ahead of time and you're worried about it. And some part of you said, oh God, why are you nervous with this? Again, you should be over this by now. So there's like this impatience and frustration with ourselves. Or maybe you see a woman and you want to talk to her and there's a moment, but you don't. You get hung up, you're scared, you're nervous, whatever. Something gets in the way. And then afterwards your mind says, ah, God, what's wrong with you? You're pathetic. If you can't talk to her, you can't talk to anyone. You're always going to have this problem. You're never going to get any better. And we have this like anger and frustration towards ourselves. And above all, we don't have any empathy for ourselves. We don't have any sense of like, oh, you were scared. I'm sorry, man, that sucks when you're scared. That's tough. We don't treat ourselves like we treat a good friend. We're kind of jerks to ourselves. And what that is is lack of self compassion. And when there's a lack of self compassion and research shows this, there's more anxiety, there's more depression, and get this, there's more fear of trying new things. There's more fear of taking risks. Well, why? Because if you are hating yourself or always on your own case, then if you're going to take a risk and it doesn't work out, not only do you have to deal with the disappointment of it not working out, you got to deal with that voice in your head that's going to beat you up mercilessly for days or weeks or however long it goes on for. And so you have to get control of this process and you have to adopt an attitude of self compassion for yourself. And what that means is that means committing to, to being on your own side, being your own best friend, being with yourself no matter what happens, even if someone else is upset with you, Even if, when, I should say not if, when you experience a setback, a failure or a rejection. Because all three of those things are inevitable, especially if you're putting yourself out there in life. And when we get rejected, when we try for that job and we don't get a callback, you know, when we ask for a raise and we get told no, and we ask that woman out and she says no, the last thing we need is more criticism and beating up in our head, right? Think about that. If a friend just didn't get their dream job, you know, they wanted to get a promotion, they didn't get it, and they come back into the office and they're like, do they need you to go over to them and say, well, geez, Tom, you are like in Dumb and Dumber. Have you seen Dumb and Dumber? The old one with Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels? And Jeff Daniels come home and he's had a tough day and he gets fired. And Jim Carrey listens to them all and he says, you are one pathetic loser. I mean, that's kind of what, you know, if you did that to your friend, would you guys be friends that long? It's not a very healthy friendship. And that's how we treat ourselves. We're critical of ourselves. We're sometimes downright abusive towards ourselves in our own minds. And so you have to get control of that process and treat yourself with compassion. That means committing to, treating yourself with kindness when you fail, when you have setbacks. And that means talking to yourself in a different way. This is something that many of us don't do. We don't consciously talk to ourselves. We just Let the bad tapes keep running. Taking control of the process means you actively, consciously talk to yourself in a more compassionate tone. Hey Aziz, I'm sorry you didn't get that job. That sucks. That's disappointing. What am I doing there? I'm offering myself empathy, some compassion, some kindness. Oh man, you were scared to try that thing. I know. It's okay, dude, I know, I know you. I know you're working on this. I know you're frustrated, but you're okay. You're doing alright. I love you. And that's the part that some guys are like, oh, that sounds so cheesy. But what is it better to like beat the crap out of yourself in your own mind? And trust me, you're going to do one or the other. If you don't take control of the process, you're going to start doing the other one more and more and more. So you have to actively take control of this process to treat yourself with more self compassion. And if you really want to get this on a deep level, then there's a couple of different ways to do that. One is to check out my book the Solution to Social Anxiety, which has a whole chapter like 45 pages dedicated to self acceptance, accepting all of yourself. And there's a how to on self compassion and we go way more in depth into some of the research about self compassion and how you can use it to change the way that you relate to yourself. The second option is if you my video program Confidence Unleashed. There's an entire one hour session of the eight sessions that's dedicated to self compassion and guiding you through exercises and processes to help you build up that level of self compassion in yourself. And you also can check out, there's a couple books I'd recommend. One is a book called Radical Acceptance by Tara Brock. Radical Acceptance, Tara Brock. Another one is called Self Compassion written by Kristin Neff and she's like the top researcher on this in the country right now. And just a lot of really interesting, brilliant ideas that help you realize like, hey, this isn't some fringe weird psychology thing. This is practical day to day life mastery. And the more I can love and accept myself and have compassion for myself, the better I'm going to feel and the better I'm going to do. And all your objections about self compassion, like it's going to make me soft, I'm going easy on myself. Totally false. The research shows that if you're really hard on yourself, you actually take longer to recover. You don't bounce back faster, you're less resilient. And that idea of letting yourself off the hook is actually if you do treat yourself with compassion, you end up changing your behavior a lot more quickly. So there's a whole bunch of interesting stuff. Check out those books, check out my resources, check out the books I mentioned. And above all see if you can commit right now at the end of this video to being on your own side no matter what. In fact, what if you just said that out loud right now? I then say your name. I commit to being on my own side no matter what. I refuse to attack myself. I'm not going to stand for it anymore. I aziz commit to being on my own side no matter what and seeing what that does for you in your life. So thanks for watching this. I'm going to send you more follow up videos and trainings and things that you can do to continue to rapidly accelerate your your growth towards more confidence, more self acceptance and more success in your life. So thanks for listening until we talk again. Know that you're awesome.