Dr. Aziz argues that self-criticism doesn't improve performance, it just drains you. Try easing up on yourself for a month and notice what happens to your anxiety, energy, and confidence. People report feeling better almost immediately.
Hey, Dr. Aziz here. And I was just sitting at my desk in my relatively new, swanky office. It's got a little recording area back there. It's awesome. And I just finished a call, and I wanted to share something with you that I think could really help you. And here is the gist of it. Are you ready? Go easy on yourself. I mean, I. It's a message you've heard from me before, but I don't think we can hear this message enough. We are so hard on ourselves. And what was coming up in my session with a client was just realizing, like, dude, life is hard. There's so much going on in our lives, especially in this day and age. I don't know, maybe it wasn't any easier 100 or a thousand years ago. Probably wasn't. But we have our own unique pressures. Even though we have the comforts of food and running water and all kinds of luxuries that people didn't have or maybe people still don't have in places in the world, there's still a lot of demand on us and pressure in our lives. We need to function every day. We need to pull it together. We need to go to work and earn money and show up in the world. And no matter how you feel, you got to kind of just be there. And you need to be responsible. You need to be on top of things. You need to manage email and handle people or upset people or bosses and dynamics and drama in your workplace and the politics of it, not to mention the social connection of it, and being able to connect with people which might, you know, stir anxiety up or be uncomfortable. We have to manage all of that. And then at the same time, we have to be managing our health, and we got to make the right choices in a world where there's thousands of options all over the place to eat, like the easy, sugary, fatty thing that just tastes good to make you feel better, but then you feel worse over time. And then we judge ourselves for it. Like, to just to take care of your health is challenging, and you gotta work out and find time to work out, and you gotta make it work, and you gotta prevent injury, and you gotta do all that. And then on top of that, we gotta work with our moods. So maybe you wake up in the morning, you're feeling tense or anxious, and you're like, what the fuck? What do I do with this? And then you got to work with it throughout the day, or maybe you're feeling sad that day or feeling scared or frustrated. We got to manage all that and then if you have kids or family members that you're taking care of, that's a whole other level of demand on you. You got to be patient and present and loving. It's a lot. Whatever your life is, it's a lot. And we want to go easy on ourselves. Just take a breath in right now. Just let go of the demands on yourself. What if you didn't need to be perfect? What if right now you were okay just as you are? What if you were already enough and maybe you're feeling scared and that's just that you being scared, you're still enough. Maybe you're feeling stuck in your workplace, you're not able to excel or grow in the way that you want. And so we kind of beat ourselves. Like, come on, man, come on. We lean on ourselves day in and day out and it's exhausting and it drains your energy and it drains your confidence. And we have this kind of backwards logic that says, hey, okay, leaning on myself, if I lean up, if I ease up on myself, then I'm going to be even less functional, I'm going to achieve less, I'm going to be less, people are going to like me less, Everything's going to fall apart. And it's this unquestioned assumption, it's an unquestioned belief, It's a story and it is absolutely false. But don't take my word for it. Experiment with it this week, just for a week. I'm playing a game right now. Well, I don't know when this video is going to air, but in June, just finished. When am I going to post this? I don't know. Whenever this is posting. In June, I did a game with the participants in my Mastermind program. The unstoppable confidence Mastermind. It's awesome. It's a year long program. We get on the phone every week, we come to my lab events, we go deep and their lives transform. And in the month of June, we decided to play no judgment June. And that's when, whenever you notice yourself judging yourself during this month, you caught it, you paid attention to it, you tried to shift it. You use one of the tools that I teach to work with it. And maybe you want to do that too. Maybe you just want to catch it, just go a little easier on yourself just a little bit. So run it as an experiment for this week. What if you eased up on yourself? What happens if you find that you become a crazed, sociopathic, binge eating, cruel, torturing animals, maniac? Then you can go back after a week and nothing will be destroyed in your life. But you just might find that not only do you feel a lot better, you start to feel more confident, start to have more energy because you're not fighting yourself so much. And then the world really starts to open up. So this week, go easy on yourself and share below what works. What do you do when self criticism comes up? Where do you notice it coming up? What have you found to be helpful? Any questions you have as well. And I and of course, subscribe if you like this so you can watch more of these, because I'm putting out a lot more stuff for you for free to help you transform your confidence, because that's what I'm here to do. I love you and I'll talk to you soon.
