How To Motivate Yourself To Take Bold Action

Welcome to Shrink for the shy guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence, first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Hey, welcome to today's episode of the show. Today we're going to be talking about how to motivate yourself to get yourself to do things that are uncomfortable or bold actions that you know will benefit your life and build your confidence, how to do those things in the most effective, empowering way. Because you know if you listen to the show for any length of time, you know that one of the antidotes to social anxiety is bold action, because confidence is a byproduct of bold action. So if we take bold action, we will build confidence. Now, that makes sense as face value. And then it's like, okay, great, but how? And then we run into this, like, yeah, but I'm really anxious and I'm freaking out inside or I feel tense or I'm constricted. And what if I try to get myself to do something and then I can't? And, you know, oh, my gosh, now I told myself I should because I got to take the bold action, but I can't. I guess I'm so weak. What's wrong with me and I? And we can kind of get bound up in that way. So this episode is going to help you discover the most effective way to get yourself to take those actions. If you're benefiting from this show. I have one request for you. It's absolutely free to listen to this show. Been doing it for years. You can go back through the archives. I don't know how many years, six years or something like that. I come to you weekly, relentlessly, and the request I have is, can you share this with someone in your life who comes to mind that would benefit from listening to this episode or this show? You can let them know about it. Hey, check out this show. Or check out this episode. And another way that helps get the word out to people is if you give it a review on itunes. So you can just go to itunes or wherever you're listening to it. Maybe it's on Spotify or something, and just give it a review, a rating, so that people can see it and it spreads the message so we can all liberate ourselves together. So let's talk more about Action. This actually came because there was a client in my Mastermind who was asking me, you know, he said. He took something I said to one, one client in there about make OMOS more important than Bold Action. And he had some questions about that. So let me clarify. Omos, in case you're not familiar, is the acronym that we use a lot in the Mastermind stands for On My Own side. And what that captures is this. It's a big focus of the Mastermind is retraining your brain and your mind and the patterns of focus so that you stop being so critical and negative towards yourself and finding where you're failing and what's wrong with you and why you're not enough and actually find a way to treat yourself well with self compassion, with self respect, with love, with care, with what you. With empathy, just what you do with someone that you actually love and care about. And it's surprising to people how much is actually effective. I had one person who was completing their first year in the Mastermind who was like, you know, I just, I remember you talked about this OMOS thing, but I am shocked at how much it seems to be like the universal theory of everything for confidence. And I laughed. I was like, it kind of is, right? You know, you think about it. Yeah, treat yourself well. I mean, but it sounds simple, but as you know, there's levels of complexity to applying it in our lives. And so what I was saying to this one client who was kind of beating himself up to get himself to take action, I said, well, hold on a second. So if you beat yourself up and say, what's wrong with you? Come on, you know, you're a loser. Just get out there. You're fat. What's wrong with you? Go work out that kind of intense pressure on yourself. It might work, but it also might not. And it sets you up for a lot of pitfalls and it could backfire on you pretty easily in a couple of ways. One, you beat yourself up and you still don't take the action. And now it's just gotta turn up the heat and it keeps beating you up even more. And then it beats you up for not taking the action. Or you're kind of tense when you take the action because you're beating yourself up. And maybe you don't get the outcome that you Want. And then it says, ah, what's wrong with you? You suck. You should have done better. And so if you're coming at this from a place of self criticism to motivate yourself, then you're gonna be, it's not sustainable and you're gonna be in a lower energy, lower power position to begin with. Another way to say this is you can't beat yourself into confidence. You can't sustainably long term beat yourself into taking long term effective action. And yet this is what most of us do most of the time on default without even noticing it. That's just how things are. We have a punishment negative attitude towards ourselves. In other words, we're bad parents towards ourselves. You know, we're exasperated and unempathic. Come on. Oh, why do you always do this? Why'd you do that? What's wrong with you? That was a terrible mistake. Oh my gosh, you're so disorganized. Oh, you're so stupid. Oh, you're so lazy. Oh, things are gonna go bad because you're not smart enough. Oh, you're gonna mess this up. Sure, you got people coming to this thing, but no one's gonna want it. Oh yeah, you might get the date, but of course it's not going to go well. Sound familiar? Okay, so that source of motivation is what I would call toxic fuel. Dirty. It's dirty fuel. And so what that's going to do is it might make the engine run, but it's going to gunk it up, it's going to corrode the, the pipes and the doohickeys in the engine chases. I don't know. I don't know anything about cars. Get off my back, man. Anyway, but it's going to mess up your, you in this case, the pipes and all that stuff is your own emotional well being and it doesn't work long term. And then you eventually settle back down to, you know, kind of where you were. And then the stories crystallize, solidify and enclose you in and say, you see, I've always been this way. And that my friend, is the point all along. Because self attack to try to get yourself to do something different might seem like you really, really want it to be different. But you don't. The whole thing keeps you in neutral ville where you take one step forward and one step back. Two steps forward, two steps back. Lose the weight. Gain the weight. Make the money. Spend the money. Lo the money. Make the money. Big tax bills. Lose the money. Get the clients, lose the clients. Get the relationship. Lose the relationship. You're in and out, up and down, up and down, up and down. Eventually you might just sort of get more stuck and not even go up and down. You just kind of stay where you are. That's neutral. And self attack is coming from neutral and it keeps you in neutral. It's not really about wanting to make an effective long term change. It's about wanting to keep the status quo. And a lot of people will say they want change, but they really want to keep the status quo. Right. You've heard this story? Maybe, maybe not, I tell it a lot. But a man's walking down the street and he hears this high pitched moaning sound. It's disturbing. And as he keeps walking it gets louder and eventually sees that it's coming from this house up ahead. So he gets, he's on the sidewalk, he walks towards the house and he looks up on the porch and there's an old man in a rocking chair and there's an old bloodhound dog laying on the porch next to him. And the dog is just laying there moaning and it's loud and the guy says, excuse me sir, is your dog okay? And the old man just looks down at the dog and says, oh yeah, he's fine. The guy on the street says, why is he moaning so much? The old man says, ah, he's just laying on a nail. And the guy in the street says, why doesn't he move? And the old man says, yeah, must not hurt that bad. And that's what most of us are doing, you know. Oh, it's terrible. Oh, I want this to change. Oh, it's so awful. Oh, I want something different. But we don't really want. Well, maybe a better way to say it is we want something more. We want the certainty and the safety of the status quo and the known and the stability. We want that more. Then we want the change, then we want the new outcome. Because the new outcome is exciting, it's different, it's unknown, it's instability, there's energy there, but there's also risk there. There's potential pain there, there's loss or disappointment or hurt or overwhelm or what if I can't handle it? Or what if I lose it? What if I get it and then I lose it? And then I'll feel bad. What if I feel embarrassed? What if I fail? And so we want the certainty more than we want all that. In other words, we want certainty more than we want a rich, full life experience. And so we use self criticism. Looks like we're trying to motivate ourselves. We go one step forward, one step back. Make that sound with me. That's the sound of living in neutral. There's something better. There's something better, my friend, and that's going to be using a higher quality fuel, optimal fuel. So instead of me just telling you, let me ask you, what do you think would be optimal fuel? And I do this with clients, they often know they're just not doing it. And some way I help them. Access is, say, great. You know, do you have a kid? And if they don't have kids, you know, do you have a nephew? Do you have a niece? And if you don't, you know, let's say you had a little brother or little sister or you just imagine you're, you know, you're with a kid for a couple weeks, you're running a summer camp or whatever. You know, how would you want to be, how would you want to guide them? What if one of them is scared? One of them, you know, just. Let's go with that summer camp analogy, right? Let's say you had this pack of this gaggle of 7 year olds for the day when you're out in the woods, I don't know, camp on Awana. What's the one? What was that? I don't know. Maybe no one ever saw this weird thing. It was from Nickelodeon. It's called Salute youe Shorts. God, I gotta go watch some YouTube videos of that now. Oh, it was such a bad show. But I liked it because when I was a kid, anything I could watch on TV was, was just inherently awesome because I was watching something. But there was this kid. Was his name Sputnik? Anyway, I think he had a mullet. Anyway, he was the tough kid in the camp. In any case, if anyone knows what I'm talking about, there's a weird reference for you down memory lane. Anyway, you're at a summer camp with little kids and at one point you're gonna have them do this little hike and they gotta walk across this log at some point over a little creek. And it's not that scary at all. It's a pretty wide log and a lot of the kids are doing it. And then there's one kid, little, Little Jimmy. And little Jimmy's like, I don't want to walk across the log. It's scary. I'm going to fall in the creek. What do you do now? Not, not, you know, the exasperated way you might treat yourself. But what's going to be most effective? Hey, you're Getting paid here as a camp counselor. Got to bring your A game. What are you going to do with Jimmy? All right, Jimmy. Well, we all crossed and we're going to leave you, you little coward. What's wrong with you? Or, come on, come on, Jimmy, just get across the log. It's not that bad. What's wrong with you? You always got to throw what's wrong with you in there. It's just high quality fuel, right? What would you do? For reals, what would you do? What would you say? What would you do with your voice? Okay, a lot of ideas, right? And if you literally don't have any ideas and you're probably still in neutral and you, you know, the ideas aren't coming to you, but if you're in a more energy rich state, you'll start to come up with them. You'll have ideas. And you usually want to do this experiment with people. They'll think of things. So you say, well, maybe I will go back across the log and offer to hold his hand as we go across. Maybe I'll say, hey, I think you can do it. I know you can let me walk behind you or walk in front of you. What are you worried about falling in? Maybe get curious about what are you afraid of? Are you worried about falling in? Who knows? Maybe the kid had an experience where he did fall and it hurt himself or whatever, right? You know, how can we help you with your balance? You know, maybe you take a longer game approach and you hold his hand as you go across this log, but you make a note in your head and say, you know what? I'm gonna help Jimmy with his balance. By the time this summer camp ends in a week, I'm gonna make him a log crossing master. And you kind of take this playful goal of saying, you know what? I'm gonna. Every time there's an opportunity to build this balance, maybe not over something scary, but over just some grass. We'll set up some logs on grass and have the kids running up and down him, and he'll do it, no problem. And then before he knows it, boom, he's going across the creek without even thinking about it. Damn, I'm good. I should be a camp counselor. No, I don't want to hang out with that many kids for that long. You crazy? I got two. It's enough. Get off my back. All right? So do you see what I'm saying, though? You see what I'm going at? That is high quality fuel. We want to start to access the high quality fuel. So back to that question that the man of the Mastermind was bringing up. And he said, so you're saying you should only take action from a place of omos. What should I do there? In fact, let me actually read you his question here. I'm going to pull it up right now. His question goes like this. So I've heard Dr. Aziz mention this on many occasions, namely the idea that take bold action. Taking bold action will only work if taken from a place of almost. That's not an exact quote, but it's how I understood the lesson. My question is, can you please explain this more? For example, I recently did the exercise where I asked strangers for $100. That's a rejection practice exercise that we do in some of my courses as well. At some point before doing it, I had the thought that this won't transform you, but just do it anyways and we'll see what happens. I also had other more positive thoughts. But that one thought that I. That's one thought that I had. Is that an example of taking action from the wrong mindset? What are the correct and incorrect attitudes one should have before taking bold action in the world? First of all, that thought is really not that negative. This won't transform you, but just do it anyway and we'll see what happens. I mean, it's. You know, his safety police is throwing a little bit of a pessimistic outlook in there, but another part of him is saying, well, just do it and see what happens. So, I mean, that's pretty solid fuel. Maybe you could leave off the. This won't transform you. But here's the thing. The solid fuel is not. And almost in this regard is not the absence of critical thoughts. I mean, your mind is going to generate thoughts and some of them are going to be critical. And the more scared your safety police is that you are. So if you're going to go do something. So for him, asking someone for $100, it's a risk, right? It's uncomfortable. He's going to get rejected. That's the point of the exercise. And so the part. And that's the goal of the exercise. The goal of the exercise is to help neutralize our phobia of rejection, which everyone in the Mastermind. I helped them just completely shift this over the course of the year so they can be much more bold and free and expressive, which is, you know, it's okay if someone says no to me. It's okay if someone doesn't like me. And the only way that we really get that in our nervous system and not just some theoretical idea in our head is to actually viscerally experience rejection repeatedly and realize that we can survive. And we got it. And it's not about us. And we're okay, so he's doing the work, which is awesome. Well done. Shout out to Michael. Okay, so now we're doing it. But before he's gonna do it, there's a part of him that's been avoiding rejection for much of his life, right? So it's freaking out. It's like, oh God, bleh. Right. And when we're scared, the safety police acts up. And it can act up in the form of self criticism, negative predictions. It's not gonna work. Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. It's gonna say whatever it can in whatever way, shape or form to get you to not do it. So it's going to predict a negative outcome. It's going to predict what's the point. It's not going to do anything. You suck. You're terrible. You're embarrassing. How could you do something like this? Whatever. It just going to try. It's like an animal just thrashing around trying to do anything it can to survive. And it thinks that getting you to not take this risk is going to help you survive. But there's something more to life than surviving and just getting through it, right? And you want to thrive, you want to live. And so you got to take these risks, you got to go for what you want in life. Even if you're going to get no's. Especially because you are going to get no's along the way. And we all know this intellectually, but here is this man who's building the muscle to really take it on and live that way with courage and confidence. So when you're going to take these actions, just anticipate that that voice is going to be there, it's going to say all kinds of stuff. So what do you do? Well, it's very different in the realm of acceptance and commitment, training act they call it having a thought versus buying a thought. So your mind spitting out all this stuff, are you like, oh yeah, that's the safety police. It's scared. All right, you know what? And then you say what you really want to believe here. Like, you know what? I don't know, long term transformation. Let's just focus on right now. I know that if I just. The more I practice this, the more it's possible I could feel comfortable with this. So I'm gonna give This a shot and test it out. Here we go, Right? The other voice could still be there. No, it's not gonna work. I was like, okay, all right, I hear you. I hear you. I'm aware of it. But it's not. You're not like, oh, okay, hold on a second. Let me get out my notebook and write down this wisdom. What's that? I'm a loser. Okay. No, you're not buying it. It's just noise, and you're labeling it for what it is. This is my safety police that's trying to stop me from taking all risk. And then once you've done that, you move forward and take the action. Now, what I'm talking about here is there's the safety place that's saying, it's not gonna work out, right? And then you're like, oh, I'm so scared. Oh, it's gonna be so bad. And you're in that moment. It's almost like you're about to jump off the high dive or the cliff dive into the water, and you're like. And then what people will do is say, like, come on. Like you're gonna. Don't be a coward. Don't be a loser. Come on. You gotta just go, let's go, let's go. Right? And that's the whole metaphor of Jimmy crossing the log. And that's like, we put this pressure on and this dislike, and it's almost like you're, you know, you're terrible unless you do it. And then you'll get my love and approval. It's like that kind of parenting. And that's the thing that we really want to consciously change and say, no, I'm going to use a more optimal approach. I'm going to treat myself with more kindness. Yeah, it's freaky, dude. Rejection sucks. It's uncomfortable, but it's worth it. Because if I can build this muscle, then I can experience more freedom in my life, and that's what matters to me. And so you can focus on what you value. I value freedom. I value expressiveness. I value authenticity. I value boldness. I value courage. I value connection with others. And so if my fear of rejection is preventing me from connecting with others, then I'm going to do what it takes to break free so I can live out this value of connection with others. And you claim that. And that's how you start to access more optimal fuel and being more on your own side as you take these actions. So speaking of actions, talk about your action step now. Time for action. Action, action. So your action step is going to be to intentionally practice more optimal fuel the next time you want to take an action. So what that requires is you to say, well, what is a more optimal form of fuel? So talking to yourself with more kindness, focusing on the result or what you value, these are more optimal forms of fuel. Focusing on that vis what you really want is a better form of fuel. What else comes to your mind? And this is where we use that example of how would you motivate someone else? How would you motivate a team member or a spouse or a friend or a kid? And then you're gonna have all the answers right there. You're just gonna take one of those and apply it to yourself on the next bold action that you want to take in your life. Make sense? Fantastic. All right. Thank you for being with me today. This is a thought that came to my mind, which is if you're not already part of our online Facebook community, we have a 100% free community on Facebook. It's called Confidence Warriors. And if you go there, just go to Facebook and type in Confidence Warriors. You can request to join part of the group. It's a great way to share about what you're learning from these episodes. Stay part of the community and really get some more support and connection as you go on this journey to the more confident version of you in the world. So go check that out and 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.