How To Keep Going When You're Discouraged

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. The show to help you break free from social anxiety, people pleasing and self doubt so you can speak up, connect and be 100% you. I'm Dr. Aziz, sharing tools that have transformed my life and thousands of others. Let's all liberate ourselves together.

Hey, welcome. Today's episode of the show. It's good to be with you. Maybe based upon the title, you're feeling discouraged in this moment. Maybe not, maybe not. Maybe this will be something that you'll use later. But really what I want to help you do in this episode is to be able to keep going in the process of building confidence, overcoming social anxiety, and whatever goals are within that larger category. Right. Because as we grow in confidence and have less social anxiety, improve our self esteem, our sense of value and worth, you might have some very specific things you want to do. Whether it's creating relationships, for me when I was younger, it was dating was a big one. Being in a relationship, being able to pursue what you want in your career, speak up for yourself, have boundaries, whatever it is, these very specific goals are going to be a part of a larger process of you becoming more boldly yourself, more confident, more authentically you. Right. So that's the larger process. And though like any larger process, it's not a one day thing and it's not a straight lineup. So in today's episode, I'm gonna give you some very practical guidance from my own experience and working with clients over the years that really helps you stay in this process. And then you, you know, in terms of what to do in this process. There's other episodes of this podcast which if you're newer to this show, welcome. It's good to be with you. Everything I'm sharing here are the tools I've learned over all these years that have helped at this point, thousands of people shift these patterns. So that's the first big takeaway. I'm getting ahead of myself. Anyway, just listen to other episodes of this show and if you want even more specific guidance, I highly recommend going to my website. You can find more resources there as well as if you're ready to work with me directly through my unstoppable confidence Mastermind. It's a, it's a group program that really step by step guides you through, through making a radical change. That's a process too though, right? So whether it's with me, someone else, on your own, we need to stay in that process. So just to be clear, in this episode, I'm not going to get into all the weeds of exactly the things to do. There's a lot of other ways to learn that through this show and what I just said. But.

Let'S say you're doing stuff right, you're taking actions, you're trying things and is every day just crushing it, winning, right? No, no. There might be some days where you feel more uncomfortable. There might be some days where the fear gets the best of you and you don't take a bold action that you wanted to take. You don't speak up in the way that you wanted. You had a plan in your bedroom of what you're going to do. When you got into the meeting and you were like, no, I can't, I can't do it right Then maybe you felt self critical or you put yourself out there, you tried to connect with someone in a social setting, at a party or something and man, I didn't really feel like I could do it, or the conversation didn't go well, or they seemed disinterested, or I asked, you know, tried to connect with someone and they didn't want to seem to have anything to do with me and they walked away. Or I asked someone out and they said no. I spoke up at work and someone challenged me and I got quiet. You know, I tried to go for the sale and the person said no. There's a thousand ways this could show up in our life and this is part of the process. And I think that the kind of typical default, let's say way of approaching this kind of process is, well, there's two. There's maybe what you tell yourself in your head and then what you feel and do. And so most of us, if it were a multiple choice test, you know, and let's say you experience a setback, whatever the examples of setbacks I just gave you, right, Pick one of your choice. You experienced that setback, they said no. What do you do? Option A, collapse into a pool of self hatred.

And beat yourself to do better next time. Option B, become hopeless and discouraged and say, nothing I ever do is ever going to work. So why try? Option C, eat a pint of ice cream. And option D is, you know, persist, learn something and keep going. Right now most of us hear that, we're like, duh, man, it's D, obviously, okay? That's what we, that's our game plan. And as Mike Tyson says, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth. So what happens is we get into the experience, something goes south, maybe we do persist a little bit and then you know, whether it's later that day we've tried a number of times or a couple days, or we get tired or something happens.

And then it just falls apart. All the wheels fall off the bus and we, what I would call circle the drain. And that means we start to go towards. There's a gravitational pull towards a terrible belief system, terrible identity. Story about yourself, story about the future, story about what's going to happen. And the story is, is bigger than just what's going to happen. It's also who you are. Right? It's like this bad stuff's gonna happen to me and that's because I'm undesirable and I'm a loser and I'm incapable and. Right. So it's, it feels really bad. And it's, it's your go to. Now a billion other people might also have that as their go to, but it's still, there's slight variations whether it's a catastrophic future or alone forever or worthless and no one ever wants to be my friend or whatever that is. We'll circle the drain and it's got this gravitational pull like a, like a heavy planetary object. Boom. And then we're like, yeah.

I can't fight it. It's true, it's true. I'm doomed.

And then we stop. Or we put it on ice, we put it on pause. We lick our wounds in our cave for a day or a week or a month or a year. And sometimes we are just straight up in that bottom of the drain place, like it's never going to work, so why try? Or we're like, not in the drain, but we're an inch from it. And that's in some sort of COVID story. Like I'm just really busy at work right now, okay? I don't have time to look at my dating life. I mean, I totally would if I had the time, right? And you know, it becomes a holding pattern that goes on for weeks, months, years. And that's what ends up happening despite our plan. Right? So we don't want to choose. We want to choose option D, but we end up choosing option, you know, A, B and C, right? Is this, is this familiar? Right? And this is what's typical. And this is what most people will do. And that's why for most people, especially these long standing patterns of social anxiety, people pleasing niceness, they kind of just persist indefinitely. And there's this fantasy also near the drain. The fantasy is like, well, somehow in the future it'll be different. I'll get a Different job and it'll all change. I'll move to a new city and it'll all change. And I can't tell you how many clients I work with who's like, that's what I tried. And you know that social anxiety thing, it moves with you. So we need something else, right? We need to stay in the process. So how do you keep going when you're discouraged? Well, the first thing to do is to stop doing something, right? There's this urge. Maybe if you're like this, right? We either collapse and distract ourselves or go into terrible ruminative thinking or we go into hyper drive, like frantic action mode. And the most powerful place is to. Is to just pause and be like a mountain, right? A mountain in the storm. I want you to. My favorite place in the world is Mount Hood. And I love going out there. And so I see Mount Hood, I see the moon above it. I can see a specific place on the Timberline Trail that goes around that mountain. I've done that trail many a times.

And you are this mountain. And there's this storm that's coming through.

And then we want to build our capacity to weather that storm.

And that's the most important skill, it says. No, the most important skill is my approach skills or my conversation skills or my assertiveness skills. Yeah, I mean those are important. You'll build those, but you can't build them if whenever there's a storm, just imagine that there's like a mountain, right? I said you are the mountain. But let's say you're out on the mountain and a storm's coming and you just like freak out. You know, there's stories like this, actually. People that are climbing hardcore mountains and they start to freeze to death. And right before the moment they're gonna die, they will. This is a common pattern. People will take off all their clothes and just like walk away from their camp and go freeze. And one of the reasons why is because there's some sort of.

Their body temperature, they don't feel it anymore. They're already one step in the grave, right? And there's something about, who knows what's going on in their psychology that they just want to like, move into that maybe they're slightly delirious or delusional, right? So imagine you just like panic and run around the storm and ah, get. Rip off all my clothes. It's like someone having a bad trip and that never goes well. Side note, if you're having a bad psychedelic trip, the last thing to do is just taking off all your clothes and running frantically through the streets. It's probably not going to end well. You need your friends and your sitter to sit you back down on the couch and be like, here, drink some mint tea and tell me about what you're seeing. So we need to do that for ourselves. And one of my favorite tools for this is a noting practice where you basically, I would literally set a timer for like five minutes on this one. And you sit and you breathe and you note. Basically. I call it five channels. Right? So imagine your. Your thumb is channel one, and that's your breath. Your first finger is channel two, and that's thinking. Your middle finger, channel three. That's feelings. Because f. My feelings, man. No. And then your ring finger is like physical sensation or touch. And then your pinky is hearing or sound. Right? And why do I pair it with fingers? Because you can kind of have your hands in your lap and just gently tap a finger. Just whatever you're noting. Oh, I can come back to my breath or sound. We're coming back to channels one and five. Breath and sound. I'm running through this kind of quick here, but you can re listen to it to get it. This is something I teach in my mastermind program in depth. So, okay.

Breath, sound. And then of course, the storm. Never gonna work out. Okay, Thinking.

Oh, I feel so terrible inside. My chest is burning. Okay. Feeling.

Right. And we note that. And what that allows you to do is just weather the most intense storm. Because in that storm, I call this the doubt storm. There is no. You're not gonna climb to the top of the mountain in that place. If it's a raging storm. You want to hunker down in your camp and then get out of there. You don't want to take your clothes off and run around naked, as we discussed earlier. You want to just hold it through because the storm will pass.

And then. And you can, you can. You know you have influence here, right? In a real storm, there's kind of just like it's going to do what it's going to do. But with this, if you do this noting practice and maybe you have other things you do, like get outside, go for a run or go to the gym or something. And when you notice it coming up, say, oh, up. Thinking, as in, like, we're not going to solve that right now. We're not going to address that right now. We're not going to pick at it right now. And of course, there's an urgency inside. It's like we have to solve it right now and it's going to try to hook you. And the game here is to notice how it tries to hook you and not let it and come back to whatever it is that you're doing or noting. Like the practice I just suggested there.

And then, and then there will be like a little break in the storm and then we run out and solve it, right? No, no, no, no. Actually the next step is you gotta recenter yourself because part of what causes the storm is not the adverse situation, the. No. The rejection, the failure, the unwanted outcome. It might seem like that I feel terrible because they didn't like this or I'm not succeeding at this or I, you know, I, that's why I feel terrible. We feel terrible because of our reactivity to that event.

Right. In other words, you don't feel pain because of the. No, you feel pain because of how you react to or what you do with that. No.

And so we have to recenter ourselves and see what am I doing with that? Not what I put on paper, not what I intellectually think and would say is the right way to be with it. And what I tell a friend to do with giving them mindset tips. Like what? Let's be real, let's be honest, what am I actually doing? Well, I'm extremely attached. I need this to work out or I'm going to die, or I'm not safe or I'll be alone forever. Okay, well if I'm playing the game that way, then every time I go out to take an action or a risk, I'm going to feel the storm. Right? If it's that high stakes, if it's that much of my self worth is on the line every time I go talk to somebody. And trust me, I know this because I live that for many years. It's real hard to get yourself to go out there and do it a lot and not feel extremely discouraged.

And so we have to see, okay, how am I playing this game? Right? Another way I like to say it is my suffering is not in my circumstance, it's in how I'm steering. So how am I going to play this? How am I going to steer it? And you can't answer that when you're in the middle of the doubt storm, by the way, that's why we started with that first step. How do I want to steer this? And there's no right answer here, but you connect with yourself like maybe I want to have more fun, maybe I want to enjoy this process. Maybe. Look, I know it's not about getting to the result. I tell myself it's about getting into the relationship or getting this business outcome, but the truth is I'll get into that relationship, I'll get the business outcome, and I can feel just as miserable right after if I keep running the same pattern. Right.

Right. It's like you get the thing, but what creates your confidence, your fulfillment, your joy, your peace is not the thing. We've all gotten things and then felt just as anxious afterwards. Right. Maybe there's a temporary day or week of euphoria or relief and then it's back to the same old. Because it's not how, it's not the circumstances, how I'm steering. And then if you steer, grabbing the wheel with white knuckles and freaked out like life's gonna f me, I gotta, oh my God, here we go. Every day is combat with the world, with life, with others. You gotta survive. Then you'll be doing that whether you have five bucks or five million dollars.

You might say, no, no, dude, if I got the $5 million, I'd be chilling. Seat, seat, laid back, maybe even let that AI drive for me, man. Hands off the wheel, cool as a cucumber. Okay, all right, Maybe, maybe. I've seen a lot of counter evidence to that though, I have to say. And maybe you could look at your own life, see what really has transpired, has gotten. Giving us something completely changed everything, right? No, it's in how we're steering. So we got to choose that.

And then we have to center ourselves on the one thing that you can control, my friend. The only thing in this God forsaken cosmos, this, this joke in which I'm so affected by everything, but I don't control it. Why, God? Why? Right. Well, so what is that one thing? I think we can both agree that you don't control whether the person says yes or no, whether you get the cookie or you get the slap on the hand, whether you get what you want today or something adverse happens. Come on, really? Do you really control it?

Okay, so then what do you control?

Well, I would say the only thing you control is how you show up.

That's it. And that's a combination of the actions you take, but also this, like where I'm coming from, like I was just talking about how do I want to steer. You can call that your attitude, your mindset, but it goes way beyond the mind. Right? It's really about the heart and how you're relating to life.

Right? Because if I'm coming in attached, I need this to go a Certain way or I'm doomed.

You might say I'm already destined for failure there. Right. I'm going to be graspy. I'm going to, I'm going to get hit with a major storm right afterwards. Or at best, I get through with some relief. Whew, I made it. Storm didn't get me. Right, right. So this. So then the question is, in fact, maybe this would be a great action step. Let me ask you in the action step section. Time for action. Action, action. Your action step is to answer that question.

How do I want to show up in this situation? The one that you might feel discouraged about not, oh, I got to get this outcome or else. Okay, yeah, yep, that story's there. But as I'm in this process, how do I want to show up? And again, something happens, you might fall off. The doubt storm comes. That's why we recycle and go through this process again. You recenter yourself, you see the gap between how you want to show up versus what really happens. How I want to show up is saying, you know what? I don't need something from this person. I'm just here to connect and be curious, see what arises. Cool. Feeling good. You go into a situation, they're like, I don't want to talk to you, weirdo. And then you leave and you're like, I hate myself and it's over. I'm going to be alone forever. Right? Okay, no problem. And it feels like it's the end of the world, right? But it's really no problem. It's just, oh, there's a gap. Like that's, that's where the growth is, man. That's the process.

That right there. And we want to hustle to get to the end and have, you know, win the video game, get the prize. And we think that's it. And that's like the point. But in that case, just like press the button, get all the things. And in a die, it's like if you. There was a game I played when I was a kid called Metroid for the Nintendo and you like type in the right code and you can have every weapon.

Every life point. Just be the most Uber decked out character. You kind of run around the game and then you're like, yeah, well, all right, I guess we'll turn it off now. What are you gonna do? He's stronger than everything. It's fun for a minute, right? So it's the journey, man, not the destination. I know you've heard that before, but hopefully now you're really feeling it in a deeper way, and you want some support on that journey. That's what we're doing, man. Changing lives each day, each week, each month in the Unstoppable Confidence Mastermind. So check that out. You can go to my website, you can learn all about it, you can apply there as well, and maybe you and I can have a conversation about it, see if it's a good fit. Regardless, though, stay in the process. You will. If you can stay in it long enough and learn as you go, you will absolutely create a life of more freedom, confidence, authenticity. I know this deep in my core from my own experience and seeing so many other people do it. So until we speak again, may have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. We'll talk to you soon.

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 socialconfidencecenter.com.