How To Love Yourself

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.

Hey, welcome to today's episode of Shrink for the shy guy. I'm Dr. Aziz, and today's episode is all about love. Yes, as Dean says, you are nobody until somebody loves you. Those are pretty powerful words, pretty true in a lot of ways, I believe, especially the part about gold not bringing you the happiness that you seek, but it really comes from those connections, those relationships. And this is something that's verified not only throughout time and philosophy and psychology, but also in interviews with people on their deathbeds. They tend to focus on not their career successes, how much money they earned, or even their exotic travels, but instead they focus on their connections, their wives, their partners, their husbands, their children, their grandchildren, who they connected with, who they impacted, who they touched in their lives. And I believe it's the same for all of us, although we can get wrapped up in other things. And so that statement of you're nobody until somebody loves you is very profound, very true. But sometimes we hear that and we're like, oh, God, I'm single, I'm a loser. And that's not the direction that I want to go with this today. I want to take those exact same words and change the meaning slightly. You're nobody until somebody loves you. And the question that I want to ask you is, do you love you? Do you love yourself? And this is a very powerful question. This is one of the most important inquiries I believe we can make. Because if you do not love yourself, and I say that, and it sort of makes it sound black or white, right? Like all on earth, you either love yourself or you don't. But the reality is, it's a knob. It's a gradient. It can go from zero love, total self hatred, up to complete love and acceptance for ourselves. And the reality is that most of us kind of waver somewhere in the middle there. And if you imagine a dialogue where 0 is no love for yourself and 10 is, well, a lot of love, where are you? Where do you hover? Where's your center of gravity? I know when I was younger, before I even came into the world of psychology, before I even looked at any self development, I lived in a state of pretty perpetual self loathing. I was probably around a 2 in that range from 0 to 10, maybe 2 to 4. Sometimes I'd feel pretty good about myself if I did something or I accomplished something. But for the most part, There was a constant stream in my mind of self criticism, of looking at other people and imagining and assuming that they didn't like me, of completing something, an art project, an assignment, even a performance in a sports event like soccer. And the critic would remind me that it was okay, but it could have been better. You should have done more. You weren't quite good enough. And I was quite the perfectionistic person at that point and am still, I guess, to take Brene Brown's term. I'm a recovering perfectionist and have been convinced of the necessity to let some of that go. And maybe you can relate to this. The other day I was talking with a client I've been working with, doing some coaching, and he is very successful in his career, has earned quite a bit of money, more money than he would need to live comfortably for the rest of his life. But he's like a doer in the world. He wants to do more, so he's not going to settle for that. And he has a perpetual sense of dissatisfaction with himself. And here's the thing, he went on a date recently, and that's what we were talking about. And this woman was engaged, interested, found him enjoyable to talk to. And he left that experience feeling baffled, baffled as to why she could want to talk with him, why she would even find him attractive, a woman as beautiful and artistic and intelligent as her. What could she even possibly see in him? And it wasn't like a false, humble thing, you know, oh, geez, I'm lucky because she likes me. No, he really was baffled and almost to the point where he was suspicious. Have you ever had that? And then so he started to wonder, hmm, is she after me for my money? You know, is she a gold digger? What's happening here? Because he started, he couldn't take it in. It did not fit with his model or map of the world. And if you remember my interview with Brad Pentagraft from a number of weeks back, he talks about a model or a map of the world and how the map is not the territory. So he has a map of the world. And in his map it is. I'm not really lovable. And so if the reality, if the world around him does not agree with that map, and there's a person that says, hey, I love you, or at least I want to get to know you and see if there's a deeper connection, maybe she already loves him, I don't know. That doesn't jive with his map. So he has to either change his map or do what most of us do, which is just change reality, right? No, that's not. She's this, she's that. I don't trust her. I better end this. This is not going to work. She's just in it for my money. And so the level to which you can turn that knob up, you know, from a 1, a 2, a 3 up to a 6, 7, 8, and I would say 10, but jeez, hard to be perfect, right? But even just getting it several notches higher from self hatred and self loathing and self criticism up towards self compassion, empathy, love, respect, acceptance for yourself, just moving it a little higher has a profound effect on your entire life. And we're not even getting into confidence right now, but absolutely your level of confidence, your level of anxiety. I was doing an initial session with a woman just the other day and she was talking about some aspect of social anxiety. I can't quite remember, but something about when she's in a conversation, she doesn't have something to say, she gets really anxious. Very common for social anxiety. And this self criticism kicks in. God, why are you being so quiet? People think you're boring, you should be able to talk more about this stuff. What's wrong with you? And then we were talking about self compassion in that, basically turning that knob higher. And she said, do you think that if I start to. Is that all I need to do? If I start loving myself and accepting myself more, then this will go away and I'll be more comfortable with quiet. And I said, well, not only do I think that that's true, I actually think that the more you love and accept yourself and relax, you'll actually start coming up with things to say. Because the inhibition, the restriction, the tightening that blocks you off from just being spontaneous and sharing and being free in yourself comes from that self criticism, that self attack, that self judgment. So I'm hoping you're getting a sense of the value of loving yourself and it's not just some sort of new age feel good thing, although it does feel good, but it's also a very practical, pragmatic way to excel in your life, in the world that you're in. So if you want to develop more powerful relationships for business, that requires love for yourself, to know that you have something to offer that you can contribute, that people want to talk to you. If you want to create an outstanding, amazing relationship, romantic relationship that requires a higher level of self love, because the level that you'll let in from someone else matches the level you feel for yourself, I'm going to say that Again, so if you looking at that knob, if 0 is you don't like yourself, and 10 is you really love and accept yourself, you, if you're at a three, that means you kinda are, you know, you pretty much don't like yourself. It's lower. You're at a three. And then someone comes along and she says, hey, I think you're great. I want to hang out. And she loves you, and it looks like a six or a seven. You're not going to be able to let it in. You're going to do something, you're going to distance, you're going to avoid. You might break it off, you might sabotage it, you might pick a fight, you might do something because some part of you is like, this is not real. This cannot happen. I must maintain this, my map of the world. So whether it's business, relationships, friendships, if you want to just feel more empowered to do something in the world, to take on a project, to start that charity, to create that art project, to write that book that's inside of you, all of that comes back to this knob. So that is the power of self love and self compassion. And I hope at this point you're on board and you're like, yeah, you're preaching to the choir. I want to love myself more. But, man, that critic has a life of its own. And if that's where you're at, that's great, because in the next segment, we're going to get into, how do you turn that knob up? How do you start to love yourself more? There's very practical tools, strategies, and tips that will actually give you practices to make that a reality for you if that's something that you're committed to. So stay tuned. We'll get into that right after this. Hey, Dr. Aziz here, and I want to take a second to commend you for listening to this podcast. By listening to this, it shows me that you are taking your life and your destiny into your own hands. When I started to do that over 10 years ago, everything shifted in my life. And what helped me more than anything else was to learn about shyness and how to overcome it, starting with reading books. And I read a lot of books. Some of them were pretty good, but I felt they lacked a real, authentic look at the challenges facing men who are shy. So I decided to write one. It's called the Solution to Social Anxiety, and it lays out in clear, simple language what causes us to feel anxious and more importantly, what we can do about it. It's full of powerful tools, key insights and illuminating stories from my own journey and from the journeys of the clients I've been working with over these last years. It's an honest look at social anxiety from the inside out. I truly believe that it can help you on your path towards greater social confidence. And I strongly encourage you to pick up your copy today. You can get it on Amazon.com in paperback or Kindle and you can go to socialanxietysolution.com to find out more. That's socialanxietysolution dot com. Welcome back. Now we're going to get into how how to increase your level of love and acceptance for yourself. And the thing that I'm gonna narrow in on this segment is self compassion. Before I do that though, I wanna answer a question that I received via email that the answer is right on topic with what we've been talking about in this episode. And now it's time to ask the shrink. So here's the question and unfortunately I don't have the person's name, so hopefully you will be able to identify your question says hi Aziz, I just read your free ebook and I was impressed with what you discussed. Oh yeah, I have several issues concerning confidence and I could relate to almost all of your words. I also am striving towards being great with women. I have bought countless products and listened to many audio files from dating coaches. Theoretically, I know what it takes to attract a woman, but in practice, I haven't the mindset. I'm sure you can relate. I have a fear of approaching and even more of keeping conversations interesting. The conversation bit applies to all areas of my life. My worst example is social pressure at work where I feel I am always in a constant battle to keep my co workers and superiors happy with my work. I assume previous jobs I've had where I've been fired have made me this way. I really need help and feel you are a great help. So unfortunately, I don't have the name. But this question directly applies to what we're talking about and it might seem like it doesn't. Well, he's got a challenge with women. He's got a challenge at work. He's worried about keeping happy people happy, his co workers and his superiors happy. Anxiety about being fired. But really, honestly, all of this comes down to that internal knob. Because if you think about that, that insecurity that we feel around a woman, it's not really about her. Now, a very attractive woman or a woman that we're really drawn to, it might bring out more insecurity, but it's still not about her, not in the least. What happens is when there's that woman that you're drawn to, that you want to talk to and you want to start a conversation with her and you're terrified of approaching her, what's happening is that knob. It's becoming very apparent where it's at. And if your knob is low, then you don't think much of yourself and you don't think you have much to offer. And worse still, you know what you're most scared of? Of approaching that woman. You're not most scared of her reaction. You're not most scared of her rejecting you. You're not even most scared of her maybe harshly criticizing you or saying, get away from me, you creep. I know, that's some of the fantasies that we have, right? It's going to be some horrible. No. What you're most scared of is what happens after the experience. You're most scared of what's going to happen in your own mind and heart after you talk with her. And especially if it's a no, if it's a rejection. Because if that knob is low, you tear yourself up, don't you? You criticize yourself. You say, that was stupid. Why did I say that? And it's vicious. I know I dealt with this for so many years and I say in the past tense because it's 90% better, but it doesn't mean I'm free of self criticism and self attack. It can creep in there. I just have more and more tools to deal with it. But I can be stuck in it for hours before I start to identify and shift it. It used to be days or weeks and I used to have no tools to help me with it. And that might be where you're at. And that's why I want to get into how do you increase this? But to further answer this question, it's going to be increasing your self compassion. The more you can be compassionate and loving with yourself, the more relaxed you're going to be with women, the more comfortable you're going to be at work and the less you're going to be scared of getting fired and the less you feel like you need to impress or please people in order to maintain their love. That's just a reflection of a lack of self acceptance and self love. And we're going to get into how to increase that with this concept of self compassion. So. Krista Neff is a researcher from the University of Austin, Texas, who's been doing research work with self compassion for over a decade Now, I'd imagine. And I was so intrigued by her work. I actually did my dissertation and my doctorate degree on self compassion because I found this to be such a powerful force in my life and all the lives of the people I was working with. Basically I was like, wow, everyone kind of hates themselves. What are we going to do about this? And so she has, through her work she's defined self compassion and the definition in itself is profound and very helpful. The first part, it's a three part definition. The first part is self compassion is an attitude of self kindness, of treating yourself with kindness, respect, empathy, support. And here's the kicker, especially in the event of a setback or a failure, it is in those moments that we're the most likely to withdraw that kindness from ourselves. We might be kind to ourselves when nothing's happening, but as soon as that person says no to you, or you give a presentation and you stumble over your words or anything that might be seen as not perfect, perhaps quote, a failure or a setback, then self compassion just goes out the window, right? This kindness just goes out the window and it's replaced with coldness, anger, frustration, brutality towards ourselves, abuse of ourselves. Really. I mean, if someone were talking to a child in the way that you talk to yourself in your head, that would be labeled as abuse. So it's very serious, very significant. So self kindness is the opposite of that. And that's why you talk to a child that you loved. Hopefully if you have a child in your life or a nephew or a niece, and you're connected to them, that's what you offer them, it's kindness. The second aspect of self compassion is common humanity. And that is the ability to recognize that whatever you're struggling with is part of being human, that it's universal and everyone has challenges and suffers in some ways, and that it's not evidence of your own personal inadequacy or flaw or badness. So for example, if you were to give that talk and you stumble over your words, the common humanity would be everyone gets nervous before giving a talk. Everyone has bumble over words and no one likes to do it. It's very uncomfortable. It's an unfortunate thing for humans to deal with. That's in stark contrast to what we normally do, right? Which is withdraw ourselves from the human race, make it all about us. No one else has this problem, why am I such a fuck up? What's wrong with me? I'm terrible, I suck. And we're off to the races with the self criticism. The third part of Self compassion is mindfulness or mindful awareness. That means being able to notice that there are thoughts going through your mind that are self critical and not over identifying with those thoughts. That's just a fancy way of saying don't believe everything you think. So after that talk, if you're like, you're stupid, you suck, what's wrong with you? And I lived in a place of over identification when I was younger, before I even heard of cognitive therapy or that I could even challenge what's going on in my mind if those thoughts were happening. If I was being critical in my mind, that was fact, that was absolute truth. So if my mind said you suck, you made a terrible fool of yourself up there. Everyone thinks you're an idiot. I would emotionally react as if that was all absolutely true. I wouldn't even question it. And that's what the mindfulness part is, being able to step back and say, okay, wow, there's a lot of self critical thoughts happening right now in my mind. Okay, let's see if I can just watch those or maybe even bring in more self compassion. So those are the three aspects of self compassion. And if you can start to commit to bringing those into your life, self kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness, you can start to influence the voice in your mind that tells you that you suck. And that's going to in turn influence your relationships with women, with friends, with superiors, with co workers, your level of comfort at work. And we're going to get into some fascinating research in the next segment about self compassion, about how it actually prepares you to deal with life better. Take more risks, do more, succeed more, and all the rest right after this. Hey, what's up J dawg?

Hey. Sup, woozy?

Nothing. Did you spill coffee on your shirt? No. Well, then what happened? Check.

I was at this coffee shop earlier just doing my thang and then this girl walked in and damn, man, she was fine. So I was just looking at her and she saw me and I was like, sup?

Not with my, not with my mouth. I didn't say it, but I said.

It with my face, you know?

Yeah.

Then she walks right by me and man, it is on. And I said, sup girl, where you going? And she turned around, man, and then she looked at me and then she threw her coffee on my face.

Dude, damn.

I know she couldn't handle it, man. I think she was intimidated by me or something.

No doubt, man, she wants you. At least he tried. If you're tired of not trying or getting rejected, go to 30days to dating mastery.com to learn how you can succeed with women. That's the number 30. Welcome back. In our last segment here, I want to get into a few interesting findings from the research around self compassion and then give you one practical tool to use to start increasing your self compassion today. If you want way more in depth descriptions of this, I recommend checking out Kristin Neff's book called Self compassion. And it's got some subtitle which I don't remember, but it's look up Kristin Neff N E F F Self compassion. You'll find just a wealth of resources in her book. And if you want to see how this stuff applies directly to social confidence, then check out my book the solution to social anxiety. Break free from the shyness that holds you back. It has a lot in there about self compassion and self acceptance. In fact, there's a whole chapter dedicated to self acceptance because I believe that's one of the biggest pieces of overcoming shyness is that self acceptance. And you'll learn how to apply that to social confidence issues. So either way, just check out one of those. I mean, any research you can do in this area will help you. And the more you can love yourself, the better life gets. The most challenging thing is we often believe that this is just something that is that that's just how it is. But self compassion and love for yourself is a skill and you can learn how to develop it. And I'm going to get into an exercise in just a moment about how you can do that. But before I do that, I want to share with you some fascinating research that Neff did in her lab there in Austin, Texas around self compassion. And one thing that stood out to me, which is one I often share most, I'm going to share it here, is just how self compassion is an antidote to self doubt and allows you to take bigger risks and be bolder in life. So there's an experiment that they did in her lab there in Austin, Texas, in Kristin Neff's lab, where they set up a condition where people would feel criticized. They basically had them record a video of themselves and then they had someone give them feedback that was neutral. And it was all set up, it was phony, the feedback was already pre created and they didn't give them negative feedback because they know humans well enough after doing this work for a number of years that if you give someone neutral feedback after they talk about themselves, it feels negative, doesn't it? Like, let's say you share a bunch of stuff about yourself and then someone Says neat. It doesn't feel very good, does it? It feels negative. So they set that up as the negative condition to get people into a state of feeling criticized or uncomfortable. And beforehand they measured people's level of self compassion with a self compassion measure. And they found that the people that had lower self compassion, that is the people that were more critical, the knob was lower. Remember the knob we were talking about earlier? They were more restricted in the next activity that they did. They took fewer risks, they put themselves out there more and they were more reserved, more inhibited. And that is incredibly significant information for developing your confidence, overcoming fears and anxiety. Because if you've learned anything from this Internet radio show or anything from my website, or even just anything from your experience of trying to overcome your fears, the biggest hurdle and the biggest thing you can do to improve is to face your fears, to be bold in the world, to take those risks. And without self compassion, taking the risks gets harder and harder. And it might seem obvious to you why, but I'm just going to state it. The reason that is is because if you are attacking yourself after each failure or setback, then you're not going to want to take any risk that could lead to a failure or a setback. It makes it that much more painful because honestly, if we fail at something or we have a setback or we don't get what we want, there's naturally some disappointment or frustration which is part of the process. It's human. But then on top of that, if you add self attack and self loathing and I'm a bad person and shame and all this stuff, it gets pretty sticky, pretty messy, pretty quickly and hard to deal with. And so the result is we just tend to avoid it. It's incredibly important to increase your self compassion. Let's talk about now in this moment, how you can do that. And in fact that is going to be your action step for today.

Time for action.

Your action step for today is to do a self compassion exercise. In fact, I would actually suggest doing this exercise once per day for the next seven days. It only takes about five minutes. So pretty easy to fit into your schedule. It's just a matter of desire and motivation would be the main obstacles to doing it. And the exercise is a self compassionate letter. So what this is is you sit down for five minutes at the end of the day and you just write a brief letter to yourself, addressed to yourself. And you speak and share with yourself in an attitude of as much compassion as you can muster. Kindness, support, empathy, understanding, love, acceptance, appreciation, and you can even focus on things that are challenging and no one's going to read it. You don't have to worry about it being cheesy sounding or oh my God, if my friend saw this, they'd think I was a weirdo. Just do it someplace private. You could even store it in a locked file on your computer or something where no one would read it. And really be as if you were talking to a child that was struggling or suffering. Hopefully you could find compassion and love for a child. Some of us, some people are so blocked off they can't, but hopefully you can do that. Deer Aziza, I'm sorry that you were struggling today. It's really difficult when you give that talk. And I know that you looked around and it looked like people weren't interested. And my heart goes out to you. That's really painful. No one likes to do that. I think you handled it really well. You kept going, you were engaging and it's never fun to have a group of people and I know you felt rejected. I'm sorry. I love you. You're a great person. Something like that. It's so foreign, isn't it? To talk to ourselves that directly and that lovingly. But that's exactly what this compassion is designed to do, is help you become more familiar with that. So that's your action step for today is to write yourself that self compassion letter and to really commit to doing a practice of this for seven days in a row. And if you do this stuff, this is the exact route, if you want to know how to raise that knob from a 2 to a 4 to a 6 to an 8 is to do this kind of stuff. And I have dozens of these things in the book the Solution of Social Anxiety. But even you can find their self compassion blogs for free on my website, Social Confidence Center. There's so many ways, even in fact, just Google self compassion or get Kristin Neff's book the most important thing is action. As always, right? And if you say I don't like myself and it's just because I suck, that is not true. That the only reason that you're not liking yourself more is that you're not engaging in the practices that will help you increase that self love. So that is our show for today. Thanks for listening and until we speak again, know that you are 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 socialconfidencecenter.com.

Sa.