Goodbye Shrink for the Shy Guy, Hello Authentic Confidence

Do you feel like you belong? And that might be a broad question. And maybe there's certain places you do. Do you feel like you belong with certain friends when you spend time with them? Maybe a family member, maybe a partner, maybe at work. And do you often feel like you don't belong? Maybe not just in situations where it's very vague, right? They're going to a new environment. Are they going to like me? I don't know. Right. That could be— you could question that. I don't know if I'm going to belong or not. But so many people I talk to and work with almost feel a background sense of unsure if they belong, even in a lot of settings that their rational mind tells them, no, I probably do. They might feel that way even with someone they're friends with or a group of friends. Or at work, people they've known for a long time, they've been part of a team. You might even interact with people or speak up or share, tell stories, or, but, but underneath there's this feeling that I don't belong. And it might be all the time chronic. It might be intermittent. And that's what we're gonna get into in this episode and to illuminate what's going on with that feeling. And where belonging comes from, because it's actually different than what most people think. So I'm glad to be with you today. I'm Dr. Aziz, in case you didn't know. And do you belong right now? Do you belong as you listen to this? That's why I'm by myself, so sure. Okay. But what does that even mean to belong? Right? Well, maybe there's an interpretation going on in our minds, but there's also a feeling in our body. And the feeling is one of, ah, like, relax, relief, letting go, letting our guard down, not, not in threat, not in danger, like, safe, okay. And then when, when that feeling occurs, something fascinating happens. We become playful or funny or curious, like your natural self emerges, whatever that version of you that's coming out right now comes out of you when you feel that sense of safety and belonging. And the story that goes on in our minds when we are belonging is we rarely say to ourselves, I belong here, right? It's just a thing that we interpret in the environment, and we get it really quickly. And but basically, the interpretation that's happening, even if it's not totally verbal, is people here accept me. They approve of me, they like me. And then therefore I belong. And if they don't like me, they don't seem to like me, then I don't belong. And then I don't get to feel that sense of relaxed safety and I got to be on guard. And so this is what we want to look at today, because what I described, you might be nodding your head and saying like, yep, that's how it works, dude. As you know, you fit in or you don't and you can be yourself or you can't. And you might have found— tell me if this is your experience, because it sure wasn't mine— that the amount of places that you can be yourself can be quite small. Like I would say when I was really struggling with a lot of challenge in my confidence and just being my authentic self, feeling good about who I was, maybe like a close friend or two, I could be that way with maybe to a degree with my brother too. And period. That's it. So at work, no. In a public setting interacting with people, no. Dating, What dating, right? No. And so it can start to accumulate the sense of like, okay, well, that formula works out okay. If I get accepted, then I can feel like I belong and feel safe and be myself. But what if that paints you into a corner? What if all you got then is like this little tiny slice of life and then the rest of your day, your week, your life is in this state of non-belonging threat. And ultimately I can't be myself. It's not okay to be me. And as you might expect or experience, that sucks. That sucks to not have that basic permission. And again, I'm putting words to things that a lot of people experience, but don't like actively talk about to themselves in their head. They just know the feeling of it. But if you really hear what I'm saying and it resonates, it's important to hear this. It's part of liberating ourselves and changing it. And it's also kind of messed up. It's kind of disturbing when you first hear it, which is, wait a minute, wait a minute, if I only feel like I belong with a few different people, then everywhere else I go, I don't belong. And therefore, I can't be myself. And so when I go interact with this new person, or this boss, or this colleagues, or this date, or wherever, and I can't be myself, then I'm letting that person determine who I'm allowed to be. So in essence, I'm letting you determine who I can or can't be. Yeah. How does that feel? When I hear that, I'm like, bleh, bleh. It's like eating an oyster. No offense to my friends who love oysters, but they're disgusting. Disgusting. Ew. Anyway, maybe oysters aside, take whatever food you find aversion or disgust to and apply it to that, to the fact that I can't be myself. And so part of it feels like, yeah, but I don't know if I have control over that, man. That's just kind of how it feels. Yes. Yes. That's how it feels. Because we have set up a series of conditions on our belonging. And underneath that, you set up a series of conditions on your worth. So let me explain. If I go interact with you, and I, if I, that sense of safety in my body is only available if you approve of me. Well, now, You can't really be yourself that easily when you're— someone's got a gun to your head, right? And that's not literal. I'm talking about that in your nervous system. We've got this learning, this conclusion in our body, in our emotional centers of our brain, which is that disapproval is dangerous. And so if you, whoever you are, close friend or all the way to a stranger, if you disapprove of me, then that's really dangerous and I'm not safe. And then everything that I'm talking about in this episode and probably in this whole show for years cascades from that. That one nonverbal conclusion that we're walking around with is disapproval equals danger. And so if it's, it's, if it's dangerous, if you don't approve of me or not, then there is no way that I'm gonna be myself. And this is to make this example kind of absurd, but for some reason I'm thinking of a yacht. Maybe it's like a James Bond movie, right? 'Cause this is the kind of scene where this would happen in a movie. And there you are, you know, the villain will kind of have a gun, you know, a gun with a sniper, not sniper, what's it called? Silencer. He's got a silencer on his gun. He's wearing a tuxedo. He's on his yacht. And there James Bond is, or you, let's say, or James Bond or Mrs. Bond, whoever you want to be. And you know, you're there with your date for the evening. You were just wearing a tuxedo or a dress and you're at some gala and now this bad villain dude has got you on his boat and you're sitting there. Can you see the scene? Doesn't this feel like just like a James Bond movie? And you're sitting there in your fancy attire on this yacht and he's got his arm over the back of his chair with the gun just kind of lazily hanging out there. And then he points it up at you and he says, So tell me how you two met. Now, if you're in— of course, James Bond is like cool as a cucumber, but you put me in there and I'm not telling a funny, relaxed story about how I met my wife, right? I'm like, ah, please don't kill me. Oh my God. Even if on the outside I'm trying to tell a story because I don't want to get killed, right? Isn't that kind of extreme? Can you see how in that situation, even if you're trying and pretending and efforting, you're not going to truly be yourself because in order to do that, it requires something different in your nervous system. So let's imagine that same scene again, but imagine that there's no hired guns or muscle around this guy. It's just him. And he's kind of a puny little figure, right? He's not that physically imposing. So you think you could take him pretty easily, especially two of you, you and your partner, you got this guy's a piece of cake. And instead of holding a gun, he's holding a rubber chicken. And he says, "So tell me how you two met." How do you feel now? Do you feel threatened by this guy? And we can make it more absurd, but that's pretty absurd enough, right? So probably not. Probably not. And then you're going to have a lot more freedom to tell the story and probably just want to get off the boat because this dude's a weirdo, right? So what does that have to do with you? And this next person you're going to talk to today or this next meeting at work? Well, as long as you have encoded in our living that disapproval equals danger, then everyone is a Bond villain on a boat with a gun. And we're living in our lives in a perpetual state of being hostage. Is it okay to be me? Am I okay? Are we cool? Because if you approve, then I'll be me. You don't approve? Okay, well, who do you want me to be? I'll put it away. Hell yeah, yeah, I'll perform I'll hide. I'll leave things out. I'll edit myself. I'll adapt myself. I'll mold myself. I'll not say the thing that I really think. I won't ask for what I really want. I won't say no to you because that'll upset you. I'll be who you want me to be so you don't shoot me with your silencer gun. And that's a, that's a pretty miserable way to go through life. And we experience though, not— these are kind of visual metaphors, but the way you experience it is you walk over to that meeting or you walk into that group and you feel this creepy crawly thing inside. It's like, I don't belong, I don't belong here. And of course, if you tell yourself that story, actually conscious, like, oh, I don't fit in, I'm the odd one, I'm the weird one. And of course, then we're looking for evidence of this, right? It becomes what's called emotional reasoning in CBT, where we're looking for that to confirm that feeling inside of non-belonging. And sure enough, you see two people talking at the party, and then you walk over to jump in and they're kind of engrossed in their conversation. They don't immediately stop it to say, "Oh, you, what's your name? Come join our conversation." Some people might do that. Some people might just keep chatting and you got to assert yourself or insert yourself or wait for a minute or go talk to someone else and come back or whatever. There's 1,000 different things we could do socially in that situation. But if we instantly interpret it as, "Yeah, here's another place I don't belong. See, then no one even wants me here." No one cares about me. I talk to clients all the time, and they could be literally sharing about themselves with a person who just asked them a question like, so tell me about you, or where do you work? What's going on in your life? How was your weekend? And as they're sharing, they're telling them about their weekend, and inside there's a commentary going on in their head that's like, they don't really care about you. No one really wants to hear what you have to say. And they buy it, and then they shut down, and then they maybe overperform, or they tell the story, or they leave a bunch of stuff out, or whatever. And it's all reaction to this feeling inside. And the feeling of non-belonging is coming from, I only belong, I'm only allowed to be me if you approve of me. And I call this the approval trap, which is something that I'm teaching and writing a lot more about these days. And if you want to learn about how you are in this trap, the ways that you override yourself. I actually created this recently. It's on my website. You can check it out. It's a short 2-minute diagnostic you can take that allows you to determine the underlying approval pattern that you run when you're not sure if someone's gonna like you or not, disapprove of you or not. And it turns out that across the thousands of people I've worked with, there's only 4 patterns that I've seen again and again and again. You could find which one is your dominant type and of course how to shift it as well. So if you go to draziz.com, it's www.draziz.com. It's right there on the homepage. You can take the 2-minute diagnostic. I'd love for you to take it actually and give me feedback on what you're learning from it. And we have some cool customized training and videos that come afterwards based upon your type. And it will really help you learn how to navigate these situations and to ultimately stop overriding yourself. But this is the trap of needing approval to be myself, to be okay. And it might, as I illuminate it, one, it might be kind of surprising, liberating, maybe alarming. But then immediately there's usually a thought like, yeah, okay, but how do I fix it? How do I get— okay, I don't do that anymore. And yes, there, of course, right, we want to change it. But oftentimes, when people want to instantly change it, they want to basically say, well, how do I become the kind of person who's always approved of? And there's an underlying avoidance still going on of the disapproval that could come my way. I have to— it's still dangerous. And so the short version of the how, you know, put into a single idea, is you have to train yourself to see that disapproval Disapproval is not danger. It's just uncomfortable. And that is the essence of everything that I'm teaching in this podcast, that all my books are about. And of course, when I work with someone and do ongoing training or my Mastermind or other programs, it is their containers, their environments to help train that exact learning. And you can't just read that, like, disapproval is not dangerous, and it's okay, and it's safe to be me. I mean, you can read that. I can just tell you that right there. Disapproval is not dangerous. You are allowed to be you. It's safe to be you in the world. In fact, you being you, you optimizing not for avoiding disapproval, but for being fully yourself in the world will actually increase your odds at being liked, being charming, being magnetic, having the best opportunities, the best relationships, and the best results in your life. I can tell you that with an absolute fact. I've seen that again and again in my own life. And then with all the clients that I've worked with who take that training and really make the shift. And even still, me telling you that, you hearing that, there might be a temporary like, yeah, all right, cool. I feel a little boost of motivation. Feels good, Dr. Aziz, thanks. But does it last? Or even as you hear it, some part of you is like, man, I don't know about all that. Easy. Good for you to say. You don't know me. You don't know me, son. Right? Well, regardless whether your dismissing critic, you know, shoots it down right away or you temporarily feel good, it's not, it doesn't stick because that's at the conscious level of your mind. We have to go under the hood and we have to train this in ourselves. So here's what I want you to do as you take this forward this week. Look for where do I feel like I belong? Where do I feel like I don't belong? And when you're in the situations where you feel like you don't belong, I want you to look around and say, whose disapproval am I afraid of right now? And that right there, this is the beginning of this process. It's not just some affirmation you say in the mirror, because when you start to catch that, then you can start to change that. So pay attention this week, see what you notice. And until we speak again, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.