How To Accept Everything With The Barefoot Doctor

Coming to you from the center for Social Confidence in Portland, Oregon, welcome to Shrink for the shy guy helping men everywhere go from social anxiety to social domination with your host, Dr. Aziz.

Welcome to today's show. I'm excited to be with you today.

And excited to share something with you that is pretty, pretty incredible. And it's the interview that I have with my guest expert that I think is going to in some ways really change your life. And I don't mean that to be dramatic.

I think it's just that when you.

Really apply what he shares, as I've been doing, man, it's powerful and it's different. It's completely different than probably anything you've ever heard before. And that's why I wanted to get him on the show. So we'll introduce him in a minute. If you are digging the show, please join the community@facebook.com shrinkforthyguy and you can keep posted about what's going on with the show there. And you can also join in, go to shrinkforthshyguy.com shrinkforthshyguy.com and you can leave me an audio message, you can send me a text message, you can leave a question there and I can answer it in an upcoming show. And, and I love to hear from you and hear what you want to hear more about, what you're liking, what you're not liking. And we can keep making this the best time for you and to help you get maximum value out of it. So I don't want to take too much time here because I want to jump into this interview with my guest expert, Stephen Russell. And as I said before, prepare to have your mind blown. And in fact, if you can actually get a sheet of paper or something to take some notes on and if you can listen to this episode, this interview without doing anything else and really just be able to go along with the exercises he suggests and do it, man. It's powerful stuff. And if you're super mainstream and some of it might be a little out of left field for you, and that's okay. Just stick with it, have an open mind be because it is truly life changing. So without further ado, let's jump into my guest expert interview for today's show.

Expert interview.

Welcome to today's guest interview with a confidence expert. Today I'm super excited to have Steven Russell, also known as the Barefoot doctor. And I first came across him through another teacher online and listened to some audios that he had about self acceptance and dealing with fear. And they were Powerful. And I thought, I want to hear more of what he has to say and what he has to share. And I looked up some of his materials and they're phenomenal. He began practicing martial arts at the age of 11 and he's dedicated his life to exploring, interpreting, practicing and teaching the methods and philosophy of ancient Taoism. He's a master of the Taoist arts, including Tai Chi, several that I'm probably not going to pronounce well, including Jing Yi Pa Kua, White Crane. And he's a doctor of Chinese medicine. He's also been an avid student of philosophy, belief systems, spirituality and human potential. He studied psychotherapy with RD Lang, who's a very famous psychotherapist, shamanism with Native Americans in South America. He also has worked in London and run one of the busiest acupuncture healing practices there for almost 20 years. And he traded a number of acclaimed celebrities, including Madonna and Naomi Campbell, Pink Floyd, etc. And he's also the author of 16 books, including the Handbook for the Urban Warrior, Liberation and so many more. He also makes music, sound healing. He's been an author for a column of the UK national newspaper the observer. Did that for five years, radio, TV shows, and now he goes around and teaches all kinds of really fascinating workshops, retreats, sharing his music, his writing, and so many ways to shift your life through the teachings of Daoism and beyond. So I think be prepared to open up your mind and just learn some really valuable stuff from Stephen. So thanks so much for joining us.

My pleasure. I was just going to think, wow, he sounds interesting. I want to hear what this guy has to say.

It's the beauty of a good intro. Yeah, absolutely. You've done quite a bit and I'm excited to get into it and hear how we can take all the wisdom you've gained and guide it towards the focus of this show. How to break free from our fears and self doubts and self criticism and how to be more ourselves in the world, more confident, more free.

Yeah, yeah.

So I'm looking forward to jumping into it. To start with, someone listening might be saying Daoism. Eh? What is that? You know, we know it's got the martial arts involved and maybe a philosophy, but to the average person who might not studied it, what is Daoism?

Well, Taoism. Let me just say before we start that I am sitting in a hotel lobby in Andalusia in Spain because the weather was really ferocious today and all the wi fi went down. It's the only place I could get a line so anyone listening, if you're hearing the sound of hotel lobby going on behind you, that's what's going on behind you. So behind me, anyway, Taoism was the original life system or philosophy of China, dating back probably even before the last ice age, as the legends go. They say that 12,000 years ago it was already getting lost. All the bits and pieces were getting lost. Conventional theory is that it started about five or six thousand years ago because that's when a book was compiled called the Tao Te Ching, meaning the Book of the Virtuous Way or the Book of the True Way, compiled by a guy called Lao Tzu, which means the Eternal Child Master. Now I'll explain why that's relevant in a minute. In fact, he wasn't the guy who wrote those. There are 81 poems that kind of give you a brief insight into the philosophy, but very pithy and brilliant stuff. But he didn't actually write that. He was a librarian who compiled what was left before it all disappeared and put it into this little book, which actually is the only book that's outsold the Bible. Amazingly, that's because there's so many Chinese people. The. Means the Eternal Child Master is because one of the fundamental tenets of Taoism is to learn to access your true nature. And your true nature is that which was there before you started getting culturalized by kindergarten, school, and having to conform in any way at all to society around you. Obviously it's not to suggest that we become unbridled infants in our adulthood, but that we always retain that innocent childlike glee just for being alive in the moment, regardless of how difficult or wonderful life is in the moment. And then they then went on to somehow provide a very fail safe, practical pragmatic system or protocol by which you could attain to that state and maintain it, come what may. You stop me if I'm rambling on. At any moment you want to just cut in, I won't mind. The basis of which, and this is what kind of differentiates it from most other so called spiritual or metaphysical systems around, is that it uses the body as the locus in which you experience everything, rather than the conceptual mind. In that depending on how you position your consciousness within your skin will dictate the experience you have in the moment. And so the training is very much about how you center yourself where you center yourself inside yourself, how to breathe, how to relax, how to expand your posture to gain optimal space within, and to keep your mood cheerful at all times, even through the most difficult passages. It then also postulates A theory that. Well, an explanation of how reality works for us. And it's based on a principle called. Everyone's heard of it, Yin and Yang, which is the cyclical dance of the contractive force with the expansive force. Hence you get your seven years of famine and your seven years of plenty, or your seven minutes of joy and your seven minutes of deflation. And these cycles are occurring in our own lives, individually and in the collective, constantly. So the world is going to be going through cycles of war and peace, economic abundance and then recession, times when the consciousness is expanding and enlightenment spread, and then times when ignorance spreads and the understanding of Yin and Yang stops you from getting either overly filled with hubris when things are going well, or overly dispirited when things are going badly. Then comes the actual. So it's not just philosophical, though, it's not just an intellectual understanding. The idea of saying before about how you position yourself within actually actually gives you the facility for being able to maintain this transcendent stable state. That gives you the facility for saying, yeah, it's okay. It doesn't matter. It's a little difficult now. It will turn to its opposite. And the point of that is that the greatest gift we have and the one that we overlook all the time, is being alive. Existence itself. You don't get a bigger gift than that. We forget that. So we start seeking the gift in lesser things. Status, prestige, wealth, even, you know, relationships, love, anything you care to mention in the external world, thinking we're going to find that nirvana out in the world. In fact, we'll find moments of joy and bliss like that. But of course, because of the yin and Yang, we'll find the opposite as well. So, for example, say, a very classic example, if you wanted a Bugatti and you managed to have the million dollars to buy the car, wow, I've done it. Fantastic. You'll get your moment of intense joy and triumph of whatever else once you get the car, but then you'll realize you can't actually drive it down certain streets in case somebody keys the side of it or whatever. You know, there's always the other side to everything. Sure, yeah. So what this teaches you is to maintain this transcendent position so that you actually don't care which way it goes. You're just utterly delighted to be here. And I say this from experience, because being 60 years old, you know, I've been around the houses a bit, and I've had three very, very close brushes with death in the last 15 years at various points, and truly this stuff works because I didn't have any fear whatsoever. Going, even through physical pain didn't have any dent on my delight in being alive. Bizarrely, sitting in a hospital with them jabbing stuff in me, doing tests and everything, you know, like, you go, oh, you don't have that happen. Even in the throes of the most weird experiences, there's this sense of delight, this glee, like, wow, I'm alive. This is amazing. I'm alive. And to attain to that as your central axis of your being is a remarkable gift. It's an amazing place to be.

Yeah. And I'm going to jump in for a second here because I feel like there's just so many good things in what you're saying, and I could just kind of trance out and listen to them. But I want to jump in to see if we can help really dive into some of the things you're saying because they're so awesome. 1. There's two things I want to go deeper in. One is this idea of where you focus in your body and using your body, because the main question is, okay, how do we start to do that? How do we get to that place of being okay with the ups and downs, the yin and the yang? How do we be okay with being in the hospital? Or a lesser example, you know, you get a no, you get a rejection, you get a setback in life, you lose money, whatever. How do we use our body? Maybe we'll start with there, But I'm really curious about some of the ways we can do that.

We're going to pause right here for just one moment, take a quick break, and. And then jump back into our interview with confidence expert Stephen Russell.

Have you ever been stuck in limbo? You know, that awkward situation where there are several groups of people talking around you and you aren't part of any of them? You want to jump in, but you're not sure how to do it or what to say, so you slink into the corner, grab a drink at the bar, and pretend to look busy on your cell phone. Tired of this less than optimal strategy? Get yourself a copy of the confidence code today and discover how to dominate in any group situation. Casually join into existing groups, and even enjoy being the center of attention. Go to YourConfidenceCode.com now to get started.

I was anticipating you asking that, sir. And I try and make the explanation as simple as possible. If you consider that all the sense organs face forwards and therefore we become accustomed to perceiving life as going on in front of us, and when you consider the, how compelling life is, you know, the play of light, color, sound, smells, sensations and so on, the comings and goings of people and all the rest of it, it makes sense that that would then draw us instinctually forwards inside the body to kind of get a closer look, just to be drawn closer to it. And this happens at a very, very early age. It's sort of roughly between 2 and 3 years old. But there's no fixed rule about that being forwards in front of the body, you acquire the qualities that exist in the front of the body. And these are very simplistically put that the front of the body relative to the back of the body is quite a noisy place. Firstly, physically, you have your peristalsis motion, digestive noises, you have the heartbeat, you have the noise of the breathing, but more crucially the emotional noise in the solar plexus. Specifically because, and I'll explain why, I won't go for too many tangents here. The solar plexus is the area of the body, according to this system, which supplies the energy for processing and assimilating information, whether that be food or ideas or just information in general. It doesn't mean that that's where the ideas are processed, it's just where the energy for doing that is provided. Obviously, it's the brain that does all the process processing and mostly the subconscious aspects of the brain. Now the subconscious mind, according to this system, is privy to all the information that ever was, is, or will be throughout time and space. No limits. Hence right now you sitting in Portland, Oregon, me sitting in Spain. Both of us at a subconscious level, are calculating air pressure changes over Sydney, Australia, for example, or the fluctuation in the gravitational pull of say, Saturn or Jupiter. As far fetched as this may sound, please understand I'm not suggesting that anything I say is meant to be taken as absolute truth. I'm just providing a view and reporting from the system. I practice. So just a thing of entertaining the ideas really. But if you just. If you could imagine that the subconscious mind was processing all the information that ever was, and then you consider that us as individuated beings, as individuals, we only exist, as do all forms, whether nature or human, made by virtue of the fact that we resist the continuum of atoms. If we weren't to resist, we just wouldn't be here, we'd just be atoms. And therefore, because our intrinsic nature is to resist each and every nanosecond as the flow, this endless flow, excuse me, infinite information is incoming. We're going no, wait a minute. Okay. No, wait a minute. Okay. No, wait a minute. Okay. That's why generally people, when you get given a whole new pile of work, people look at, ah, no, I've got to do all that work rather than, oh, good, I can do all that. Well, that's going to be fun. We generally tend to default to that resisting mode and, and therefore the solar plexus, which is what's providing the energy for assimilating all this stuff in a state of constant conflict. Because it's going, no. Yes, okay. No, yes, okay, yes, okay. All the time. This conflict is. There's nothing wrong with it. It's part of being a human. It's what makes us feel alive. We become habituated to that and it triggers a release of cortisol, the stress hormone from the adrenals. Each blast of Cortisol lasts about 10 to 15 seconds. And cortisol is addictive like crack cocaine. Even though it's endogenously produced, it is addictive and we get really habituated to it quickly. So people accentuate the conflict sensation, the stress in the solar plexus without realizing it. To keep pumping cortisol into the system. It doesn't feel pleasant at all. But that's no reason to not be addicted to something as we know. And the way we tend to do that is we hold the breath, which is in that, the diaphragm in the solar plexus area. And that causes a greater squeezing of the adrenal glands. So we're constantly in this kind of overstressed state. This, the noise, I'd call that. The noise of. That spreads up into the chest and that makes it difficult to be our natural, loving, beautiful selves as we were when we were a baby, one year old, two year old and whatever that innocent, excuse me, that innocent effusive radiating of that of the pure essence of the soul that a child will just naturally default to. That becomes more and more difficult the more stress there is in the. In the chest area. Likewise more and more difficult to receive the natural radiation of joy from everyone around us. So we become slightly alienated and disassociated in that way that encourages this sense of not really being our true selves right from the start. This then spreads up into the throat area, which makes it more and more difficult to communicate authentically from the soul. We're always editing the output. And I'm not suggesting any of this is wrong. This seems to be what's required to live in society. I'm just talking about. I'M going to get to in a moment, talking about how we can adjust that to, you know, give it more authenticity, more joyfulness, as opposed to less. And then the prefrontal cortex, the sort of the forebrain, what that does is it receives the impressions from the sense organs and creates a complex of descriptions about reality. We're helped to do this by our parents and siblings and teachers and the media and everyone else and so on. And we assume that the way we're describing, what we're perceiving is actually reality, when in fact it isn't. It's just a description of reality. Then we, in the same part of the brain, we evaluate how well or badly we think we're doing in relation to that complex of descriptions we're mistaking for reality. And of course, this evaluation is entirely subjective and mostly spurious. And from that, that in itself then generates more stress in the. In the belly. And I call all of that the drama of being ourselves. This is the drama of being whoever we are, whoever we think we are. Then combined with that, the fact that you watch a child, three years old, four years old, it's quite clear that we construct the personality quite actively. We look at. We see what works, what kind of verbal signals get the best responses, and so on and so forth. Which ones will get us appropriate, and we avoid those, and we accentuate the ones that work. And from that, and watching TV and watching everybody else around, we develop a personality. It's the same as your signature. You know, we will sign a signature without thinking about it. But I remember, eight years old, designing my signature and gradually developing it until it settled into the natural, spontaneous scroll it is today. We think, oh, yeah, that's just my signature. This is just my personality. This is who I am. But in fact, every move was constructed along the way. And we mistake this construct, this concocted self, for who we really are. It's not. It's just the drama of who we are. So when you walk into best friend's place, you're on the way, you find myself rehearsing my story. Or either. So when he says, hey, man, how are you doing? I would go, oh, wow, you didn't believe it. The traffic so bad out there and so busy and everything's so difficult, or, wow, it's great, everything. So it's the story we present now that's all fine and well and good.

Well, let me actually jump in for just one second because that was. That was a really eloquent description that I think of so many different Things. And just to see if I really understand it and give a quick recap, you're saying that there's. And for people that don't know, the solar plexus is sort of down kind of at the base of your ribs, top of your stomach, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It's like right in the center of your body. And some people listening might. You might not have developed the body awareness yet, but if you really start to pay attention during the day, like what Stephen is talking about, you'll notice that it'll feel like I feel that area a lot. And I feel exactly what you're describing, Stephen, where it will get tense and there'll be. And that tension feels exactly what you're saying. It's like a resistance to what's happening or what could happen. Oh, I don't like this. I don't want that. Oh, I hope they say, yes, I hope I don't get late, whatever it is. And then from that squeezing, and you can really feel it, it's a literal squeezing in your body right there. Then it kind of goes up and we get tighter in our chest, which makes a lot of sense how we then limit our ability to feel love, express love, receive love, just that warm feeling in our hearts. And then there's squeezing in the throat, which can inhibit what we say and how free our voice can sound, how spontaneous we can speak. And then I love how you're saying that our mind, our prefrontal cortex, is then based upon those sensations, trying to. Is making descriptions of what's happening. And then there's this evaluating part that's saying about us, well, you're not doing that right. Well, that didn't look very good. And I know a lot of people listening really can relate to that observing part. And then you combine all that with this tendency to kind of choose our personality unconsciously as we grow older to make sure it's likable. So I just wanted to recap what I was understanding, and I'm really curious to hear you continue about how we can break free of this or kind of work with this natural human dilemma.

I realized, as you were saying, there was one tiny link I missed out there, because when you get the contracting of the throat that subtly pulls the skull forwards. The head's very heavy, obviously, and it just pulls it just slightly more forwards than it needs to be. And that inclines the energy of the brain to go into the forebrain, and hence why you'll get that predominance of the. Of the internal dialogue all the Time, So. So you've got all of that. So the first place to start with anyway would be to check the breathing. And most people will find that if when they check the breathing, they'll notice that they're holding the breath or inhibiting it a little bit. So the first thing is to learn how to get in the habit of not holding your breath. This is mechanical. I mean, it's. What's fascinating about the breathing is that it's an autonomic function. And yet it's the only one that we can intervene with actively and cognitively then, to slow the breathing down. Because as you slow the breathing down, you slow the pace of your thinking down. It happens spontaneously and instantaneously. Next, if you concentrate on the tone of the breathing, like making it silent and smooth and feel like silk being reeled from a cocoon, you'll find that the tone of the thoughts become similar. The mind becomes softer, more silken in its quality. As soon as that happens, the actual thought content starts to shift of itself. It becomes less jagged and more harmonious. Anyway, so the first thing is then the breathing. Mechanically getting in the habit of feeling the belly rise and somehow swell as the in breath occurs. And then drop and flatten as the exhale, as the exhalation occurs. This is the opposite of how we generally breathe, which is we fill out the chest as we breathe in. And then we empty it as we breathe out. This is the idea of getting the lungs to work fully by feeling the belly swell as you breathe in and then flattening it to push the air out. This is all mechanical, though. This is all relatively superficial, but it's the place to start. Once you've got the breathing settled, the next thing to attend to is what I call the up and down equation. Because we're so used to thinking and thinking and thinking. It draws the energy of the body upwards into the brain. Now, the brain actually functions much better, you know, as energy is heat. So with all that heat in the brain, it overheats the thoughts. We function better in the mind when we allow the heat to drop, allow that energy to drop down so that the mind becomes cooler, the chest becomes cooler, and you let the energy settle in the belly. In the lower abdominal area, in fact, which is where it needs to be. Because that's a sort of the kidney and sexual reproductive area, which is where the energy of the body is actually generated. So the next thing, after getting the breathing to regulate itself, is to somehow drop the weight, if you like, of the head and the chest down into the belly and the legs. So you kind of get that this all takes practice and time, but it does happen. It just probably, if you allow yourself 90 days or something of this kind of regular attention to what's going on, you'll see a massive change over that time. So you concentrate every time you can remember on letting all the heat and the noise and the static in the upper part of the body sink down and settle in the lower abdominal region, Filling up the pelvic bowl, if you like, the place of the pelvis and going into the legs. You gradually start getting the sense of being quite rooted and solid in the lower part, but quite light and free in the upper part. You know, you look at any martial artist and you'll see that in them, they're very grounded. The bottom part of them is really solid, the upper part quite light and free. Again, this is actually relatively still quite superficial. What happens next? And this is the big one. Oh, no, I'm going to. Just before I get there, looking at the muscles as well. This is really important, the muscles and the sinews, the connective tissue of the body, to relax. Because relaxing is obviously key to everything. When you say to most people, hey, chill out, you know, relax, they don't really know what to do with that. So they'll think of, yeah, go on the beach and drink a pina colada and get, you know, get a massage, watch TV on the couch or whatever. But actually, relaxation means softening all the muscles. Just being aware of where you're getting ridgy at the back of the neck, around the eyes, the jaw, the belly, the groin, the forearms, the legs, wherever, and just telling the muscles, come on, let go. Soften, soften, soften. And just letting it all soften. If you look at any great dancers or boxers or martial artists, you'll see that their bodies are actually really relaxed in the midst of activity. And that's what we're aiming for. Relaxation doesn't mean collapsing, it just means relaxing. It just means softening while in action. So that's the next. These are would be the superficial factors to bear in mind. The breathing, the dropping the weight down so that the head's not all full of heat and softening the muscles. Now we come to the big one. This is where it gets really exciting for me anyway. In fact, I say this is the most powerful thing I've ever learned. It's not sensational or huge or spectacular, but it is really, really powerful once you get the hang of it. So all of that stuff we've Just been talking about all the noise of being who we are. All that drama occurs in the front of the body. In other words, if you were wearing a T shirt, it's everywhere forwards of your side seams, also the brain. Same thing in the head. It's like everywhere forwards of the side seams of the head, as it were. That what a martial artist learns to do is to instead of being in the front, they learn to sit in the back all the time. That's like everywhere rear of the side scenes. The reason being, when you're in the front, you acquire the properties of the front. You become relatively vulnerable, weak and noisy like the frontiers compared to the back. But when you're in the back, you acquire the properties of the back, which is relatively much more protected, much stiller and silent. There's not really much going on in the back, so it's a solid place compared to the front. So when you sit at your back, you become silent inside, you become still and you become secure feeling. You feel safe in yourself rather than vulnerable. Likewise, with the mind pulled back into the rear part of the brain, rather than being in the forebrain, all that noise of the internal dialogue subsides. It doesn't stop because it can't. That's what it does up there. It thinks all the time, but you're not engaged in the thinking. It's like you click the X and turn that window off, so it's just not disturbing you anymore. When you learn to sit in your back, aside from the fact that you're feeling the stillness and the strength of being in the back, you can then take command of the drama that's going on in the front, rather than it take command of you, which is what happens otherwise. Like when you're in the front, that's all you've got. You got the front of you, the noise of it all. When you're in the back, you've got the back and you've got the front. But rather than it be out of control, you're controlling it so you can control how much noise is going on, and so on and so forth. When you're in the back, you are occupying the place of what you might call the witness bearer or the background presence, like the dao, which I haven't really explained yet about what Taoism is. I will in a sec. Could be considered to be the background presence of manifest reality. The consciousness that exists at the subatomic level and within the human body that is available to us in the back part of us, that is that, that watches when we're going through the birth canal, when we start our first day at kindergarten, when we get married, when we get divorced, when we get facing death, when people we love die, when we make loads of money. Whatever it is that that happens in our life, all these big moments that, you know, there's that thing that's watching the whole time, it's just observing. And it is totally impartial to whether things on the outside are going well or badly. It's even impartial to the way you're evaluating your position in the game. It doesn't care. It's just delighted to be alive because it is the background presence, being alive in your body, if you like. And that, in a nutshell, is the answer to how you manage to maintain this inner stability, come what may. It sounds beautiful. In practice, what happens is you start introducing the idea to yourself. At first it feels really weird because we're not in the west trained to think in this way. We're not trained to use our consciousness like this or even to kind of know that we have options of how we can use our consciousness. So at first it feels a bit odd, but once we start getting just glimpses of it, it feels very relaxing straight away. Then we forget, constantly forget to do it. So it's really a matter of reminding ourselves again and again and again. Come into the back, come into the back. And even just moments in there throughout the day, what happens is we start naturally defaulting to that as our position. And when that happens and the being in the drama mode, being in the front becomes the exception, that's when you've cracked it. And that does take a while. Anything from three months to three years, who knows? I don't know. You can't really gauge these things generally about three months if you apply yourself to it, which just means keeping on remembering. So every time you get into a crisis in life and you think, I've got to find out this guy, I'm going to do that, I've got to change it. I better email, I better do this, I better do that. Rather than doing all of that, you just drop back, drop all of that noise, and the answer of what to do will come to you quite naturally. And you'll do it without any effort, with no problem at all. I need to mention one other thing. Once that happens, you are then able to discern what your real intention is in any one moment, which, once you strip away all the details, becomes something like that. Life will unfold from this point on with utmost Elegance with beauty, with seamlessness and abundance and joy, not just for me, but for everybody in my ambit. And with that kind of natural intention held somehow firmly in mind from the back of you, that's exactly what you'll get. And all the details of how to get there will present themselves spontaneously and naturally. And then you follow that. And that's like being a child. That's what I meant by being a child. In the midst of this, all this stuff we call the world, this is.

Really, really good stuff. And as you're describing it, I am kind of going through the process that you're talking about, and I hope everyone listening is able to do that as well and sort of softening the muscles in my body.

That brings us to the end of the time we have today for this interview. Stay tuned for next week where we'll finish up more of that interview with him. We're going to get into some powerful stuff about how to use this, what you're learning to approach life, to deal with the ups and downs of life, deal with the rejections, the setbacks, the failures, and to not be so scared of them, to be able to jump into life with the enthusiasm, energy that you had when you were just a little kid. So that's gonna be pretty exciting stuff. Stay tuned for that. We can't end today, though, without your action stuff.

Time for.

Your action step for today is to apply what you learned in the interview about focusing your attention on the back.

Half of your body.

What a profound, powerful insight that is. So bring that into your life as much as you can during the day when you remember, bring yourself back to.

The back half of your body however.

You want to do it. What he suggested your own methods, but make a practice of it. Commit to yourself to do it for those 90 days and see what happens. Let's do this experiment together, you and me, and keep each other posted on it. I'll check in in future episodes how it's going for you, but I think if you really apply this and get out of your mind and into the back half of your body, I mean, man, life can be different. So let's all do that together. It's a joint action step. And let's jump into the rest of his interview next week. We're going to go into that and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Thanks so much for listening and joining in and sharing your thoughts and comments@drinkforthshyguy.com and I just really honor and respect you for taking this time to focus on yourself and your growth and just.

Really respect what you're doing.

It's something that most people won't do. So thanks so much for listening and until we speak again, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know that that you're awesome.

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 social confidencecenter.com.