Dr. Aziz explains why many people feel nervous or shut down around authority figures: they unconsciously perceive themselves as needing approval (a one-down, parent–child style stance), which triggers hyper-vigilant filtering, bodily tension, and inauthentic behavior. He describes workplace consequences (missed information, poorer decisions, decreased personal fulfillment) and prescribes practices to shift it: prepare and rehearse, use in-the-moment body- and fear-focused inquiry, and a guided "peace process" audio (~20 minutes) to release the neediness. He also promotes a free ebook (Five Steps to Unleash Your Inner Confidence) and two websites (drazeez.com and notnicebook.com) for resources and audio.
Questions this video answers
July 1, 2021.
Five Steps to Unleash Your Inner Confidence (free ebook).
drazeez.com and notnicebook.com.
About 20 minutes.
Chapters
Are you uncomfortable or nervous around someone in authority? A supervisor, a boss, someone that you perceive as, you know, more advanced than you in your career, or has a higher social standing than you? Some way, shape or form, they seem like they're in authority and then you get nervous, you clam up, you can't be yourself, you're not comfortable. I've talked to people, some of them, where if they're going to meet with this prospective client or they're going to go for a sales meeting, they, they perceive those people as the authority, which is very interesting. And then they clam up and they can't be themselves. And they're like, oh, I could communicate much better. I know I can deliver better than this. But I just, in those situations I get so tense. What's going on here? We're going to share what's going on here in this video and more importantly, how to shift it. So if you're benefiting from this, make sure you click down below to subscribe and click the little bell so you can keep watching these as they come out. And if you haven't already gotten my book, Five Steps to Unleash youh Inner Confidence, it's an ebook that I give as my gift to anyone who wants to learn this. Just click down in the description below and you can also go to my website drazeez.com and for free get that ebook and it will give you in depth the five steps that I would guide any client through to radically increase your confidence in any area of life. So you're going to want to check that out. Now. Authority. Why is it frightening? Here's the short answer. You got daddy issues? No. Sure, it's going to, I'm sure on some level go back to your childhood. No. But here's the underlying mechanism of what's going on. The unspoken spoken perception of yourself. You are perceiving yourself as needing something from them. And it is a little bit like parent, child, like, I need you in order to be enough, in order to be safe, in order to be taken care of, in order to be worthy, I need you to perceive me in a certain way. And if you don't perceive me in that way, then I'm threatened. I'm not safe, I'm not okay, I'm not enough. I something's horribly wrong. And so now I must control how you see me. Now, if you experience social anxiety in a significant degree, you experience that feeling around everybody or a lot of people, not just people in authority. I experienced that and I had a lot of social anxiety around someone I thought was attractive, a woman I thought was beautiful, a man who looked like he was confident or well dressed, someone who was older, who had more experience, someone who sounded articulate and very intelligent. All those people I was inferior to and I needed them to see me in a certain way. Now for a lot of people it gets localized to the superior, a boss. And there's some sense of I need this person to see me a certain way or else I'm not safe and I'm not okay. And that sets you up to be in a very one down dangerous position. Because now you can't speak freely. You're going to over censor everything. Your mind is going to be on hyperdrive alert, filtering everything like, is that okay? Are they going to like that? Is that going to look good? Is that going to sound okay? Are they going to think I'm smart? Are they going to think I know what I'm talking about? I better not make sure they think this or that. And if you've ever been running a heavy filter, you know what I'm talking about. It slows down everything. It's like a really, it's like a RAM intensive heavy program running on your computer. Like you click the thing or on your phone, you click it. It's kind of like, when's it going to load? Come on. And that's what you're doing in your brain. You have to like steam smoke coming out of the sides of your head. It's like, do you like this? You don't like that? How about this? Oh God, I don't know. And it's very tense too. You're going to be very uncomfortable in your body. And so you're not going to be able to speak up freely. You're not going to be able to share the candid truth. And guess what? Your supervisor, your boss, so and so they needs that information from you. They need you to be able to say, hey, listen, I see it this way, I think we're doing it this way. But I wonder about this way, why? Because you might have information that he or she, the boss and other people in the meeting don't have. You might be on the front lines, you might be seeing something that's absolutely essential and by not bringing it forward, you're actually hurting everybody there because you stay safe so no one judges you. But then at the same time, maybe there's a problem down the road that's way harder to fix, way more costly and way more of a significant deal that could have been Resolved if you spoke up. So you're not going to do that, though, if you're running the filter, because what if people don't like it? What if someone disagrees with me? And when you're running all those filters, you're also going to perhaps say things that aren't you, act ways that aren't you. And so the impact on your workplace and other aside, you, Your own confidence, your own sense of feeling good. I mean, I feel like at the end of a day you might say, what makes me feel good at the end of the day? It's probably, among other things, how much you were in alignment with your true nature, how much you were being you. Did you say what you wanted to say? Did you be you how you wanted to be? You were able to show up as yourself and then from that place take action and check things off your list and have conversations with people. But if you just get through the day and you hit your to do list, but you felt like you were not even able to be you, I doubt you're gonna feel energized and good at the end of the day, and I doubt you're gonna want to wake up and do it again. So we gotta come back to that place of authenticity and courage to be able to speak up. So how do you do that? Well, you do that by seeing through this idea. I need something from this person. You don't. You don't need your boss to see you a certain way. You might say, hold on a second, he's. No, no, you don't understand. I mean, I gotta control that or else I'm gonna get fired. No, no, you don't control that. You deliver, you add value, and over time it becomes clear. And if it's not a good fit, then it's good to find that out sooner rather than later. If they don't want clear input, if they don't want your ideas, if they don't, if what you give, what your gifts are and your strengths are, are not valuable in that location or that place or that company, why would you stay there for years or decades? It's going to suck your soul. So you're going to say, you know what? I'm going to show up as me. And you'd say, but, yeah, okay, that's one of those things where I say that before, but then I get in there and I'm like, okay, then you got to do some prep work and practice ahead of time, before you're at work, before you're around that person, that intimidates you that you see as an authority. When you're alone, you're out for a walk. Set aside some time in your house or your room or your office. Close out all distractions, not listening to anything. And I want you to focus on that person that you're intimidated by, your boss or whoever it is, and just notice. Do you feel tension? Do you feel fear? Great. You're gonna be with that. You're gonna tune into that notice. Where do I feel that fear in my body? Wow, what's going on there? You're not gonna run from it. And you're gonna start to inquire, how is it that, like, what am I afraid of? What do I feel like I need to control so they see me? Okay, where do I feel that? And you're going to start to unravel it and relax it in my book. Not nice. I talk about this thing called the peace process. You can go to my site notnicebook.com and go download it for free. In there you can listen to the audio of the peace process about 20 minutes and it guides you how to do this, how to find the sensation and the grasping and the clinging and let go, let go of needing anything from anyone. So then once you've done it a few times, you don't need to listen to the audio of me guiding you through. You can just do it while you're out for a walk. I do this all the time. Sometimes. Just this morning I was out for a walk and I was like, what am I afraid of? And I'll talk more in a future video about how you can proactively do this and eliminate all fears in advance. At least get them down to a place where you are totally willing to take action anywhere, anytime, and speak up with authority. So make sure you go check out notnicebook.com to get that audio. And also check out drazeez.com where you can get five steps to unleash youh Inner Confidence. And let me know in the comments down below how this serves you in dealing with someone in a place of authority who scares you. You know? And then what are you using from this video? Share down below so we can all grow together and until we speak again, may have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awes.
