Dr. Aziz presents a short instructional YouTube video teaching a simple technique—what he calls "emphatic declarations" (Tony Robbins-style "incantations")—to generate emotional states on demand (example: courage, boldness, compassion). He demonstrates saying phrases aloud with increasing volume, body posture, and repetition ("I am courage", "I am bold", "I am compassion"), encourages active practice (30 seconds, matching tone), and points viewers to his book The Solution to Social Anxiety and to email him about results.
Chapters
Hey, Dr. Aziz here. Today, I'm going to share one powerful technique with you that can help you generate a certain emotion or state in yourself that you can use when you need it in your life. Now think about that for a minute. If you could. If you could. I'm going to show you how in a second. Let's just imagine. If you could generate an emotional state in yourself, what state would you choose? What would be most useful for you? You know, for me, a state that I've used again and again and again in my life and is boldness or courage. Now, that's defined as being able to do something in the face of your fears. Now, ideally, we'd be able to eliminate all our fears and never feel scared again. But the reality is, the way we actually do that in our life is to do the thing, even though it scares us. And the most powerful emotional state to get you to do that thing is courage. Right? Boldness, willingness to try and put yourself out there. So what state would you choose? Another state that I often need for myself and for others is compassion. I need to find a place of forgiveness and empathy and understanding and compassion for myself and those in my life around me. So that's another state that you might want to generate. But how can you possibly generate a state or an emotion? Right. We tend to think that emotions or feelings just happen to us, so something good happens and we feel happy. Someone compliments you and you feel proud or excited. Someone criticizes you and you feel down or uncomfortable. But that's not exactly how it works. There's actually many steps in between the outside world and our emotional state. And I think that's a huge conversation I can get into. But for now, I'm going to share one simple technique that you can use to generate that emotion when you need it. So let's take courage, because I'm a huge fan of that. And who could not use more courage in their life, right? What would you do with that courage? Would you address someone that's been maybe not treating you right? Would you be assertive with them? Would you tell someone really how you felt, whether it was positive or there was a challenge in the relationship? Would you compliment that person that you really found something attractive or interesting, but you just. You kind of held it inside because you didn't want to come off in the wrong way? Or maybe you'd go talk to that person in the first place if you had enough courage, what would you do with that courage? Good. Hope that gets your mind rolling about what you might do with it, the next step is, well, how do we generate it? Now this technique is so simple that sometimes we discount it and we say, ah, it's got to be more complicated than that. But trust me, it's not. And the only thing that's going to make this technique not work is we don't really apply it. We do it kind of half heartedly or half assedly and say, well, that didn't work. So check this out. If you do this, it can have a powerful effect on how you feel. And what it is is what I call emphatic declaration. And that means you state something with emphasis and emotional intensity. I learned this from Tony Robbins. He calls them incantations. And it's different than an affirmation because an affirmation doesn't often have that level of emotional intensity. It's just words, just things that we say or read. So this is a way to actually generate the feeling. So let me demonstrate and I would encourage you to actually not just watch this passively, but actually do this along with me. Now if you're in a place right now where there's other people around, you might feel self conscious because it's going to involve saying something out loud. Then I encourage you to pause this and watch it later or watch right now, but commit to yourself to apply this later. Because this isn't the kind of thing where you just watch it and something happens for you, you have to do it. And that's probably the case for everything that I teach. So check it out. Enough preamble and building up to it. Here's what the technique is. You state the emotional or state that you want in the way that builds it to your identity. So you stay I am courage. Which is the most simple way to do that. I am courage. Now you can start low level. I am courage. Do I feel more courageous? Not really. You can also increase the intensity to have more of an effect on you. So if you say I am courage, that starts to feel a little better. Just raising the volume of my voice.
I am am courage.
I feel. Notice how I put a little bit of smile or intensity to my facial expression with that one. What about if I were to use my body?
I am courage.
Now I'm starting to feel more empowered, right? What if you just take it. That was like maybe a four or five out of ten. What if you ratchet it up to a seven, eight to a nine to a ten, Right? What would that look like? Well, usually we have a cap on ourselves, right? We're like, well, that Might look strange. What if someone heard me? Right? But who gives a shit, right? Because, like, if you can do this and generate this power in yourself, then you can do things in your life that other people are never able to do just because they're not willing to be a little strange or unusual. So what if we took the lid off?
What if we said I encourage. I Aziz see here, feel and know that I encourage. I am courage. I am courage.
Can you imagine doing that just for. That was about, what, 10 seconds? What if you did that for 30 seconds straight and replace the word courage with bold? I love doing this with bold.
I am bold.
Before I want to make a phone call that's challenging for me or work with someone that I'm not sure how I'm going to do it, or if we're stuck or something like that. Or maybe before I go, give a talk to a big group of people. You should see me. I'm like a crazy person in my car.
I am bold. I am bold.
But I don't care because that gives me the power and the ability to. To do so much more in my life. And it's really relatable because everyone wants more of these things. Now, obviously, if you're doing this with compassion, it might have a different tone. You want the emotional intensity to match the tone.
So you might not yell out like, I am compassion.
If it works for you, that's great. But I might, when I do that, when I put my hand on my heart and I say, I am compassion. I am compassionate. And it's really about finding your way to that emotional state through repetition and intensity. So I strongly encourage you to do this. They're called emphatic declarations. You can also learn more about this in my book, the Solution to Social Anxiety, where I talk about this and it goes in depth about how to do it. But the most important thing is to do it. You don't need to do more research. You know, enough right now. Commit to doing this. This is how I start every morning. When I first get up, I put on some loud music and I just yell these things out. So go ahead and apply this in your life and send me an email. Let me know how it works for you. I look forward to talking to you more in the future until we speak again. Know that you're awesome.
