How To Reinvent Yourself with Steve Chandler

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.

Welcome to today's episode of the show. Today you're going to learn some powerful insights from one of the most down to earth wisest people that I've ever had the privilege of speaking with. And one of the things that we're going to be diving deep into in today's episode and today's interview with him is this idea that you are a verb, that you're not a noun. We tend to think of ourselves in this fixed way, like I am this, I am nervous, I am awkward. I'm not a good conversationalist, I'm not confident, I'm not good in meetings, wherever your area is that you're struggling with your confidence. I'm not good at sales. I get nervous on the phone. And when I work with people day in and day out, I will hear them use this language. And what it does is it takes a process, a verb, a moment to moment, way of. In each moment you're acting, you're doing something. So when you're picking up the phone to call in that moment, you might feel nervous. And that's true in your experience, right? But then later on when you say, oh, I always get nervous before phone calls, now you're taking this very active, ongoing process and smushing it down into a static, permanent way of being in the world. And that's where your identity can get locked in place. That's where you can really get stuck for a long time. And so Steve has got some brilliant ideas about how to work with this, how to break through this. I mean, he's one of the world's top coaches and it's gonna be an honor to speak with him. So without further ado, let's jump into our guest expert interview for today.

Expert interview.

Today's guest expert is Steve Chandler. And Steve is a pretty amazing guy. He has written over 30 books and that have been translated into over 25 languages. He is a coach, a personal success coach, public speaker, business consulting. He's been used by CEOs, top professionals, major universities, and over 30 Fortune 500 companies. So he's an incredible speaker, really down to earth guy. I personally have benefited tremendously from learning from, from Steve. And I thought it'd be fantastic to have him on the show to do an interview so we could pick his brain about confidence in business. And he's got some interesting thoughts about reinventing Ourselves and how to really transform ourselves to be that more confident person. And the beauty about Steve is he lives this himself, and so he's able to put himself out there in a really high level, but also just to be really down to earth. So I'm so excited to have you on the show. Thanks for coming, Steve.

Well, thank you, Aziz. It's a real privilege to be on your show. I admire your work. You do such great work in the field of confidence for people in the world. So I'm really happy to be here.

Fantastic. So, you know, one of the things I love to start with is you teach a lot about how to build courage, how to create courage. In fact, I received an email from you, I think it was this morning. I'm on one of your sort of inspiring email lists, and it was about calling on courage and building courage, and I thought that would be a great place to start. How can we build courage?

Yeah. So this was a hard one for me to learn. And when you said described me as an expert earlier, it was kind of funny to me. I'm an expert in feeling really scared. I wrote a book about fear and courage called Fearless. And it took me years and years to understand that courage isn't some kind of personality trait or some kind of character trait or something that I've either genetically got or not. Courage is something available to everybody, and it can be cultivated and grown. And where we go wrong is we keep thinking we have these permanent characteristics, like, I'm cowardly, I'm nervous, I'm an introvert. I'm not good on the phone. I'm not good with people and things that we describe as permanent characteristics. And really, they're just temporary situations. They're just temporary states of mind. Courage is something anybody can cultivate. You don't have to be a courageous person to demonstrate courage. Cultivate it, build it up. And so that was the good news for me in my life, was learning that. And I had a coach myself who taught me about that and taught me how to leave my comfort zone and start to experiment with different ways of being and not get stuck with all these negative beliefs about myself that I was a certain way. And what he showed me was we invent ourselves all the time anyway, so why not just invent yourself as you go along to be the person you really want to be instead of being stuck with all these stories about who you are as if that were permanent?

That's a really interesting statement. We're inventing ourselves all the time.

What do you mean by that, well, we make up right from the start, from the time we're children, we look around us, we see how other people are being. We hear how they're speaking, we're watching how they act and move. And we start to pick things up from other people. And we keep creating personality that fits for us, that doesn't embarrass us. We might pull a little something from a movie star that we like or someone we admired in school. We find that we're acting a little bit like that person, and we're always creating this. There isn't anything permanent that pre existed in us. We're creating it as we go. Now, once we get around the junior high school or high school level, we've pretty much put it all together. We've pretty much created a social being or personality that we somehow can live with. We can use it to navigate in society and to get along and not embarrass ourselves too much. But this is an illusion. This is all a creation. And that's the good news, because it means that we're not stuck with it. We can keep creating. And now, as we're older, out of high school, we can create based on what we want to accomplish and what we want to do. We can be who we need to be in order to do what we really want to do instead of being stuck in who we think we are.

And what you said there was really interesting, which is that we kind of create this social self to avoid embarrassment or making sure that we don't feel bad. And that's, I think, why we preserve it into our adult years. And so the question that someone might be having is, okay, so if I choose a new set of behaviors or way of being in the world, then what if I embarrass myself? What if something like that bad happens? And then I'll feel rotten and uncomfortable? And how do I deal with that?

Yeah, well, it's always possible. You know, anytime you interact with other people, there's always a risk of embarrassment. So that's always possible. But that's not going to stop me from experimenting. Now, here's something that I only learned a few years ago. And given how old I am, I'm pretty lucky that I've learned this at all. And that is when you leave your comfort zone, all growth, all exhilaration, all joy, all personal growth occurs outside your comfort zone. It doesn't occur inside your comfort zone. Most people try to live inside their comfort zone. They wake up and they subconsciously try to execute a Groundhog Day. You Know the Bill Murray movie where he lives the same day over and over, and people just live the same day, the same year, the same life over and over and over because it feels safe. And they've learned how to live that way. Now, they also will agree with you when you tell them that all growth takes place outside your comfort zone. So if you want to grow more confident, or if you want to grow stronger physically, or you want to grow in any direction, you want to be better at something, public speaking, singing, acting, selling better at sales, you have to leave your comfort zone or you'll never grow. That's where all the growth happens. You can test that out in things like playing a musical instrument or testing your strength by going to a health club. You'll never grow your strength if you don't add weight to that bar. It'll always stay the same. Now in life, we're afraid to leave our comfort zone because when we picture leaving our comfort zone, we picture some huge change. Like we picture going from someone who's afraid to talk to other people at a business gathering to someone who's going around and slapping people on the back and laughing and telling jokes and gathering people around them. And we think, I'm afraid to do that. I can't do that. That's just not me. And what we've done here is we've pictured something so far outside the comfort zone that the mind shuts down and says, you can't do that. That's not safe to do that. And we don't do it. Now, here's the thing about all growth happens outside the comfort zone. You don't have to go very far outside comfort zone to grow. You can just go a little bit outside, and that's. That's where growth happens. So I don't have to see if I'm lifting a bar of weight. I don't have to double the weight on the bar to grow muscle. I just have to add a little tiny bit more, and then in a month and a tiny bit more, and the muscle will grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. And the same is true with building my confidence. I don't have to go from zero to a thousand in confidence. And that's what people picture when they picture leaving their comfort zone. All I really have to do is leave it a little tiny bit. So, for example, when I was writing my first couple of books, I was afraid to write a book. I didn't think, who am I to write a book? I mean, I was 49 years old. I hadn't written Any books. Once I had been a total failure in life. Who wants to hear from me? Who wants to read a book I've written? So I was afraid to write one. And yet, through a variety of circumstances, there was a publishing company who had given me an advance for a book. So rather than sit down and write a whole book, which was intimidating me and scaring me, that would take me way out of my comfort zone, I realized I somehow stumbled upon the method of waking up and only writing a little tiny bit. And what I would do is I put together 30 minute sessions with my book and I'd visit my book for 30 minutes and then leave it. And it wasn't long before the book was written. And so the question was, can you sit down and write and take notes and work on your book for 30 minutes? And the answer to that, well, yeah, I can do 30 minutes. That doesn't intimidate me. And could you write an email to someone? Yes. Okay. Why don't you write an email to someone, a pretend person, and that'll be a short chapter in your book. Oh, okay. So there was a tiny bit outside my comfort zone. And by doing that, I finished the book. And I discovered I could do that in any area of my life. I used to be afraid to give talks and stand in front of the room. So I practiced with little tiny versions of that and built up, built up, built up. So the key to leaving your comfort zone is leave it only a little tiny bit.

We're going to pause for just one moment, take a quick break, and then jump back into our interview with confidence expert Steve Chandler.

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Yeah, I think that's incredibly helpful because to try to leap into the deep end is scary and we can sort of drown out there. And so I think that's really helpful to build up that ability, that confidence over time. And I'm curious about the small steps. Have you seen, you know, to use the analogy of doubling the weight on the bar, have you seen People or have you personally at times done something like that, just taken a huge leap or a huge plunge? And, and what are your thoughts on kind of more of the jumping in approach rather than individual approach?

Every once in a while there's been things I've done that have scared me and they've been huge jumps. Every once in a while I've seen people do that. Not necessary, you don't have to. So for example, there was a woman I was coaching years ago and she was terrified of leaving her job to go into coaching full time. And so I said, well, don't leave your job. Instead of jumping into the profession, why don't you create a little bridge from where you are to the profession? And so she began to set up a little tiny coaching practice on the side where she'd coach over the lunch hour, sometimes on a Saturday morning, sometimes in the evening, and really got her side practice built up enough so that she had the confidence to then go into it full time. So you can build a bridge, you don't have to leap across the Grand Canyon. You can build a bridge and walk across. That's my point. And when I work with clients, I want them to. So there was a woman I was working with and she was about to give a talk to a bunch of leaders and she was, and she wasn't really scared, but she, she told me she wasn't a real people person or wasn't really good one on one with leaders or something. And I said, okay, so when you get to your talk, get there early and as they come into the room, make sure you shake hands with everybody, look them in the eye and thank them for coming in the room. And she said, well, that's not what I normally do because I'm an introvert. I'm this, I'm that. And so she's trying to sell me the labels she's put on herself as the reality and the truth about how she operates. I'm trying to get her to step just a little bit outside of her comfort zone and say all you have to do is reach out, shake their hand, thank them, look them in the eye and thank them in a real nice way for being in the room that day and coming to your course and thank everybody who comes in and don't hide behind the podium or sit there in the green room and wait until you're announced or something like that. And so that's just a small step, but by doing that it starts to get her warmed up to realizing that I can be a person who Talks to people. And I don't have to make some kind of radical personality change. I can just start to go a little bit outside my edge.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the beauty of what you're describing here is when you really get this and start living it, it's amazing how effective it is. And there's so many areas that I thought I did the exact same thing you're describing. Oh, that's not me. I'm not attractive enough or I'm not smart enough or capable enough to do that. And then by simply moving towards what scared me, slowly then I would build up that confidence, that courage, that ability. So it's very simple in its concept, but then when you apply it, it has a profound effect. There's one thing I'm curious about that I think it's a fear that a lot of people have that holds them back. You sort of touched on it when you said that that voice in your head when you wanted to write one of your early books said, who are you to write a book? And I think people have that feeling around or that thought that idea around a lot of different things. Whether it's writing a book or giving that talk, or just even looking people in the eye and shaking their hand when they walk in the room like you mentioned with that woman, they say, who am I to do? Who are you to do that? And underneath that there's a sense of there's something wrong with me, I'm not quite enough, and people are going to see through that and find me out. And I'm curious, what are your thoughts on that kind of common human fear and how do you suggest people might work with that?

Yeah, you're right. That's very, very common. People get really focused on themselves as a permanent entity when actually they're nothing but a collection of actions. So what I like to do is help people move from being a noun, which is this permanent thing is a noun, into being a verb, which is ongoing action. So for example, I had a person say, I don't think I am generous enough to use your system for selling, which was a service based system. And he said, I just don't think I'm a generous enough person. And I said, well, that wouldn't matter because I don't care what you're like as a person. So I only care about what act of generosity are you willing to perform. And that's a complete difference. So I want to set aside who I think I am and drop the question of who am I? Because I'll never Know the answer to that, because that. That'll just send you in circles. That'll send you in circles for the rest of your life. Well, you're whoever you make yourself up to be. Well, what's permanent? Well, you tell me. And so it'll go on and on forever and ever. And it'll keep me frozen where I won't take any action. So I want to look at not whether I'm a generous person or I'm a brave person. What act of bravery would I like to perform? What act of generosity would you like to perform? So perform enough acts of generosity and you'll realize that performing an act of generosity has nothing to do with whether you think of yourself as a generous person or whether you don't. And nothing to do with that. And it gives you so much freedom. Because now I'm not trapped in always asking, well, who am I? Is this really me? Doesn't matter who I am. So if I bring to an event just kindness, warmth, and a loving presence to people, and acts of kindness, acts of warmth, acts of listening, acts of generous listening, these are states of being. These are not permanent personality characteristics. I wanted to leave those at the door. So if I go to a family event where I don't know who to be or how to act, I want to say, listening is who I am, or praising, acknowledging people for what I admire about them is who I am. So I want to have some verb, some action, be who I am. And not some, I'm an introvert. I'm a sad person. I'm a victim. I'm someone who had a difficult past. That is the problem. Just thinking that is the problem in life.

Absolutely. And I think when you think that, then that kind of creates. I like that idea of a noun versus a verb. It kind of creates this fixed, crystallized structure that then cannot be fluid.

You're right. It freezes you. Yeah. It traps you in your own limitation. And it's a limitation that you created with your own thinking and speaking. So it's like you've created a cage around yourself that you're now stuck in by how you think about yourself. And the answer is, you don't have to think about yourself at all. A lot of people think, well, I need to learn to develop more positive beliefs about myself. No. No, you don't. What do you want to do? What actions do you want to take? Go do those. And forget this self obsession. Forget how fast drop the fascination you have with what your permanent self is, because you don't have one.

But it's so safe in that cage. It's so safe. What would you say to someone who maybe not consciously but sort of unconsciously, there is that desire to remain safe in the moment? I've been fascinated by this as I've been studying it more and more in myself and others. And I've been calling it the Safety Police, where there's this whole variety of voices that we'll have, whether it's telling us that something really bad is going to happen out there or that sort of dismisses us as sort of cynical mockery of our desire to do something different, or just the straight up, the policeman that sort of just beats you down, tells you that you suck and you're not good enough. So it's all these elaborate ways that we stay in that little safe zone. And then so courage, as we're describing it, is just the action. It's not a state, it's not who you are. It's just the action you can take, the act of courage. And so how does someone, you know, there's that moment, there's that precipice where they want to take the act of courage, and then there's these voice, you know, oh, you can't do that, you suck. And all that stuff's getting built up inside of them. How do they just take the plunge? How would you guide someone through that? That is all the time that we have today for the interview with Steve. We're actually gonna pick back up with more of that in next week's episode, so stay tuned for that. And before we end today, we gotta end with our action step.

Time for action.

Today's action step is to look at where you are turning yourself into a noun. What's one area where in the past you've turned yourself into a noun and had that fixed personality that Steve was talking about where you said, this is just how I am, this is just who I am. This is just the way it is. And really just find that one area. You don't have to do everything all at once. You can just find one area and really look at it, examine it, say, is that really true? What is more true? What is the verb underneath? How can I free this up, kind of break the rigid structure and get back to just being in the flow of life, where I can be constantly evolving and changing and shifting and developing. Find that one area for you, and then I want you to step into that this week. Step into being more of a verb, really, looking at how you can flex your personality, your actions, your way of being in the world, really become curious about what's possible for you. That's your action step for today and you're gonna learn even more about how to do that in next week's interview. So stay tuned for that and I'd love to hear your comments@shrinkforthshyguy.com send in your questions there. There's a hotline you can call on that site as well if you want to leave me a message. And and I look forward to speaking with you and answering your questions in future episodes. And so until we talk again next week, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know that you're awesome.

Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who 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.

Sam.