How To Release Your Fear of Criticism

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. Welcome to today's episode of Shrink for the Shy Guy. Today we're going to be talking about a topic that is extremely important for you. If you explain experience, social anxiety, excessive niceness, worry about what other people think, and generally some sort of fear that holds you back from being you, expressing yourself fully, saying what you want, saying what you really think, disagreeing with others, ultimately being yourself. Right? And the biggest fear that arises for people that I work with is someone's gonna judge me, someone's gonna dislike me worse, someone's going to criticize me. And whether those criticisms are directly stated to you or they're stated behind your back to somebody else, or they're even just you imagine the other people are thinking them. They can all have the same effect of causing fear in you. And then as a result, you holding back, hesitating, not saying what you want to say, being overly pleasing, being overly nice. If you, that's. If you kind of bend towards the nice side of the spectrum, if you move a little closer towards the social anxiety pattern, then you just won't speak up, you won't share at all. You will just hold everything inside. And those two really often go hand in hand. The social anxiety and the niceness. And I know this because I lived it for many years, both of them a beautiful, delightful cage to live in. And so this is going to be an extremely important episode for you because you're going to learn how to. How to speak up for yourself, how to be more direct, how to be more real. Because you're no longer terrified of criticism of others. This is a super important life skill. And when it comes to putting your work out there, sharing your ideas more directly in a meeting, creating anything, whether it's professionally and putting it out there and sharing it with your group, your company, your team members, your clients, or, you know, your own personal creations, art, music, anything, anything that you would be able to put out there in the World photography, right? There's. There's an endless list of things that we hold back from because we're scared of being criticized. So I'm gonna give you some very practical strategies and tools that you can use today to strengthen this. By the way, if you're benefiting from this and you want more, then. In fact, this question actually came out of something I was doing with someone in my Mastermind program. So if you want more and you say, hey, I want to not just listen about this and hear about other people's stories, but I want to have my own radical transformation story, then go to doctorz.com that's-R A Z I Z dot com. There's so many ways to get started there. If you haven't already, you can get my free mini course. It's called Five Steps to Unleash youh Inner Confidence. It's got video, trainings and ebook, all kinds of stuff, absolutely free. Part of my Operation Mass Liberation goal, which is help as many people as I can to liberate themselves from social anxiety and niceness to become their most bold, authentic self. And you can also find out a lot more you can learn about this Mastermind program you probably heard me talk a lot about because that's the main way that I work with people. There's information about my books on there. There's this podcast you can find in there. There's a blog with videos and articles. Just endless resources for you if you want to build your confidence. So definitely check out DRZ. That's-A Z I Z dot com. Now let's get into how you can free yourself from this fear of criticism. Your fear of criticism, and therefore your. So your fear of criticism stops you from being boldly yourself. Right? So your ability to be boldly yourself will go up as your fear of criticism goes down. No duh. But here I'll show you with my hands. So if you're not. If you're listening to this. Did you know you can go to YouTube and type in Shrink for the shy guy? And now we have our episodes up on YouTube too. But. So I'm gonna show you something with my hands only for our visual viewers right now. But basically this is your ability to speak up for yourself. I have one hand going up here that increases as your fear of criticism goes down. So it's an inverse correlation for those in the scientific fields. So how do you decrease your fear of criticism? That's really the goal of this episode right now. I'm going to give you some strategies, but Before I do, I want you to think about where are you afraid of being criticized? In fact, this is the first step that I give anyone in the program that I'm working with in the mastermind of what to do with this is what, what are you actually afraid of? Any fear that you want to face, you have to start by turning towards it and saying, what is this thing that I've been running from my whole life? Right. It's like when you're in a dream, if you're having a nightmare where you're being chased by something. There's different techniques to work with, reoccurring dreams or scary dreams or nightma. But one of them is called lucid dreaming, which is. That's a whole nother topic we're not going to get into now, but I highly recommend looking into that. But in lucid dreaming is when you wake up in the dream and you become more conscious. And there's different levels of lucidity. But one of the first directives if you become lucid is to say, wait a minute, I'm running from something. I'm running from a wolf or from a murderer or whatever, right? Is to actually wake up in the dream and turn towards the thing that you're running from. Say, what are you? What is this? And it changes the whole experience of the nightmare can just dissolve. So in that way, this nightmare of social anxiety and niceness that you're living in can be dissolved by starting by turning towards the thing that you're scared of and saying, okay, what is this? And the way that you do that is you grab yourself a sheet of paper or open up a note file on your phone and you say, what are the criticisms that I'm most scared of someone saying to me and get specific here. Is there someone in your life? Well, I would not want my boss to say that I'm incompetent. Oh my God, I'll be terrible. You know, I don't want my spouse to say that I'm careless or self absorbed or withdrawn. Oh, that would feel so bad. Selfish. Oh no. I wouldn't want my mom to say, you know, or my dad to say, you're not, you're lazy or you're not achieving very much. Now, I'm not saying that this is exactly what people are going to say or have said to you. Maybe they have said it. I don't know, maybe they haven't. We live a lot of our lives in fear of what someone might say to us. So I'm not going to share that Thing because someone might say this. So forget about what someone has or hasn't said. What would you be most afraid to hear? Or even if someone was thinking it, even if they didn't say it to you, you'd still be really scared of that one. Okay, I want you to actually take a moment now if you really want to get the bang for your buck here with this free podcast, is to actually take a moment to write out that list. Come up with at least five. And if you say, I don't have five, well, then you, sir or madam, are very, very confident. But most of us have at least five things that would be hard to hear. Be uncomfortable. Be threatening to your ego would hurt. It would be uncomfortable, right? So. And if you're just listening to this and you're driving and you're not going to be able to pull out, you know, don't pull out your phone and start writing on it as you're, as you're driving. That's bad for everybody. So just do one in your mind. Come up with one criticism right now. That's the short version. Then go back later. If you really want to get the most out of this and really transform, come up with a longer list because you'll do the same process with all of them. So. But get one. So what's one? Right now, someone's going to think I'm stupid. Someone's going to think I'm ugly. I'm not worthy. I'm desperate. I'm needy. Get cut right to the core of it. It's not flowery. It's not five sentence long. If it is that long, cut right to the essence of what is the. What is the knife that would go into the belly like, oh, that got me. You don't. You don't really care about other people. You're only in it for yourself. That's one that would get me a lot until I worked on it more and more. Okay, so now you have your criticism, right? What does that mean? How do you work on it? Well, the first thing you want to do is basic exposure to the thing that you're scared of, right? Whether it's spiders or heights or rejection or in this case, criticism, you want to turn and face it, which you just did. And then you just want to stand there and look at it, right? Because what that's doing is that is sending a message to your nervous system that this is not fatal. Now, you know intellectually and rationally that someone saying you're stupid is not fatal, but your nervous system and Your emotional system and the young parts of your psyche don't know that, and they think it's very fatal. And so your survivor kicks in the gear and says, there are a lot of threats in life, right? There's I need. I need money to survive. I need to make sure I don't get, you know, attacked or hit by a car or eaten by a bear, and I need to make sure I don't get criticized. It just lumps them all in the same survival necessity category, even though it's not. And so we start with gradual exposure. What does that mean? Read or say the criticism out loud. You know, you're stupid or you don't really care about others, or you're too focused on yourself or you are lazy and don't get enough done, right? These are delightful. Isn't this a delightful list? But pick the one that's yours and take a moment and just settle in. That means really pause right now. And if you don't have any criticism, you're just kind of listening passively to this episode, you're not going to get very much from it. So I'm going to encourage you to actually play in this process with me or put on something else. Put on some music. Come back when you're really ready to make a change here. I know I'm very entertaining, but this isn't for entertainment. This is to make a significant change in your life. So let's do this. So what's that criticism that you don't want to hear or be scared to hear? So say it to yourself or read it out loud, look at it where it's written, whatever you, however you're doing this process, and then just breathe and settle down. What do you notice? What's happening for you as you do this? You want to now practice something I call the Peace process, which I teach in a number of my books. The Art of Extraordinary Confidence. Not nice. You can go to notnicebook.com to be able to get access to a recording where I guide you through this process for 20 minutes, but you basically just tune into where do you. When you imagine this criticism occurring, even if it's just in the minds of others, some part of you, basically, to put it in advanced psychological terminology, part of you is going to freak out and that's going to be experienced as tension in your ribs, hurting in your chest, a tightening in your stomach or increasing of your heart rate. Maybe your extremities feel like, I gotta go flee or fight or do something. Great, great, great. Whatever is occurring for you. You just stay. It hurts. Stay with it. You want to run out of the room, Stay with it. You want to go fight that person? Punch them in the face for criticizing you do that. That's called assertiveness. No, stay with it. Notice what I'm modeling right here. Full deep breaths into your belly, into your ribs. We're going to do just a couple moments of this here on the podcast, but ideally, you'd actually stay with it more, much longer. Stay with her for 5 minutes, 10 minutes. When I was doing this, I would read a criticism, and I would just notice as soon as I read it, oh, there's pain. Right? Because at the end of the day, you might feel fear, you might feel anger. Those are what I would suggest. Those are secondary emotions or those are reactions at the core of it, there's just pain. And it's not even pain. Maybe you'll, oh, I remember when I was five, this happened or something that. That might arise. But at the essence of it, it's just pain. You don't even need to explain it, because by bringing your attention and your mindful awareness to it and your loving presence to it and acceptance to it, the energy will dissipate and dissolve. Like all forms of exposure will become more at peace with this occurring. So that's the foundational step. Sometimes that's all you need to do. Furthermore. Okay, let's say you're doing this and you say, okay, now, is there anything else I can add to this process? Yes. Yes. So the criticisms that hurt the most are ones that you buy into and agree with. You might not actually, in your true values, your authentic self, really agree with it, but from your cultural conditioning, your programming, you do believe it. So let me give you an example. Someone says, you know, let's say you asked for something or you said no to somebody, and the person says, or you imagine they think you're so selfish. All you care about is yourself. You care about yourself more than you care about others. Some version of that. That's the criticism. You're so selfish. And there's, oh, there's so much pain. Okay, so be with the pain. Do the exposure thing. And also after a few minutes of this, you can gently start to add in this layer, which is investigation, investigating, a little, getting really curious about it. Okay, so selfish is bad, right? That's what this is telling you is, do I agree with this? What am I telling myself? And do I agree with it? That's the essence of the investigation. So, well, it's bad to be selfish. Okay, what, what is, what's the selfish thing? What did I do that's so bad? Right? And you could do this with selfish. You could do this with, oh, you're so lazy. Okay, what am I supposed to be doing right now? Or what should I have done here? You just start to get really curious with it. Almost like you're talking to someone else and they say, you're so selfish. And you say, okay, what is it that I did that was selfish? Or what is it that you think I should have done? Right? So you investigate. And it's like, well, you should have said yes to that person. They needed your help and you said, no, it's okay. Bad of you. Okay? And do you see how in order to do this investigation, you have to be doing that peace process part first? Or else you're just trying to do. You're all spun out. And when you're all spun out in your nervous system, you're not going to come to any real solution or resolution here. So when you're. You're. You're calming your nervous system and then you're saying, okay, so you're saying I should say yes to that person, so I should never say no to people who want something or feel like they need something from me. Okay? Do I really agree with that? Is that my reality? Are those my values? Or is that just some conclusion that I came to when I was younger? Is that something I took in from upbringing or the cultural field just absorbed as gospel, even though it might not actually be right for me? What do I really think is healthy in relationships? And this is where you bring in your adult self, because a lot of the fear of criticism and the insecurity and the tenderness is not yourself. Now, at age 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, right? It's you at age 5, at age 8, where you didn't have these resources, you didn't have the psychological maturity and awareness to have a sense of boundaries and differentiation, like, oh, that's that person over there. They have a different perspective than me. I don't have to adopt their perspective. We don't have any of that. We're just like, oh, my gosh, they don't like me. Oh, no, what do I do? Especially if it's coming from your family. So now, though, is the time to upgrade that and to say, okay, what do I really think here? What do I really feel here? What's really true for me here? And you start to define your own values. You define your own reality. You know, in my reality, it's important to say yes and it's important to say no. And as you're doing this, when you start to challenge the old programming or the old reality, guess what might be there for you? More pain. Yay. But that's the path to liberation. Liberation isn't just getting all hopped up at a inspirational motivational talk or event and saying, I can do anything. Yeah, great. Okay, you can do anything. Yeah. Now you go home and there's your spouse who is criticizing you. There's your boss who has a critical statement for you. They're speaking up in front of the group and no one is criticizing you, but you imagine they're criticizing you. So what happens to that pumped up state now? No, this is the real work. This is how you liberate yourself and it's willingness to go into the discomfort. There's one other technique I want to share with you and I often do this with people at my virtual or live events and it's fun. And basically it's this strengthening of your reality and it's kind of accessing a part of you that I think we all need, which is your defiant, bold, rebellious upstart, not going to listen to authority rebel. The rebellious rebel. There we go, inside of you. And so many people that I work with are so nice that this part has just been beaten out of them and they're just like, oh, whatever you say, sir. And there's not that rebel inside. And I love it. I got two kids now, they're just about. One of them's about to turn seven in a couple days and the other one's about to turn nine. And they both can have their rebellious or stubbornness, Right. All humans can. But the nine year old is pretty, pretty compliant, I would say. You can generally work with him and reason with him. It's like, hey, you want to get that thing right? So we got to make sure we do this so we can go there. And he's like, oh, that makes sense. The younger one, the six year old, almost seven, he's your rules. You know your, your reason, right? It's like, I want, we want, we got, we want to leave so we can go to the thing that you want to do, right? You want to go to the hike or you want to go to the movie, right? He's like, yeah, I do. And then meanwhile he's like, but I want to do this other thing. Well, if we do the other thing, we're not gonna be able to make it to that other this. Yeah, but I don't tell him what to do, right? So you can't turn. You can't reason with him. And when he's in that state. And so sometimes there's just like this defiant look. And sometimes I'll tell him, okay, we can't do this thing. Like, we have a laundry chute. It's like a little tube that you drop something from the second floor. It goes down to the bottom floor where there's the washing machine, right? Pretty cool. Never had that in the house before. The other day, he's like, I want to climb up the laundry chute. Like, no, you can't climb up the laundry chute. We don't want to get stuck in there. We want him to break the thing, right? Next thing I know, he's running around the corner, he's climbing up the laundry chute. So. And when sometimes when I come at him hard with a boundary, like, no, you're not going to do that. He gets look in his eye. It's like, you. How dare you defy me? How dare you try to control me? Right? That's what you want to access. And the way that you do that is basically all of these criticisms, the specifics, doesn't matter. Can all be boiled down to one thing. Who do you think you are? Right? You're stupid. You're selfish. Look at you. Who do you think you are? You're bad. That's the essence of all criticism. And the way that you challenge that is you breathe in, you stand up tall, you open your shoulders back. Maybe you put on a song that gives you a little bit of punch. Maybe some rap or something with a little. Some rock. You know, they got those. Those genres especially capture that kind of rebellious, like, stick it to the man, right? And you access that part of you, like, who am I? Who am I? Well, at the events, we curse, but trying to see how to do this without cursing. I'm cleaning up my ways in this podcast, by the way. Aziz Mother Effing Gaziporah. That's who I am, right? So who am I? Who am I? Aziz Mother Effingazipora. Who are you? Right? I know this is a silly thing to imagine doing by yourself in your car, but it's accessing an energy. And it's not necessarily exactly what you say. It's accessing that. Who am I? Who am I? And that's like, I belong here. My reality has a place here. And you're. I challenge. I defy the authority with which you are trying to imbue your reality to make it stronger. Than mine. No. And that, that right there is how you access that sense of power. So let's talk about how I'll bring this all together for your action step. You ready? So your action step is going to be to find a criticism, get at least one. Maybe a list would be better. And then on that list, pick one of them and say, okay, the first step is to turn towards it, which you already did by making the list. Yay. The next step is going to be the gradual exposure. Just expose yourself to it, be with it, do the peace process with it, sit with it. The suffering and the upset and the angst and the drama and the fear and all of that doesn't help. Have to be there. That's not in the criticism. That is in your response, your reaction. Just remember that as bad as it feels, we so often get caught up in the drama of how dare they have said that to me. And we get so righteously upset versus realizing they just said something. It doesn't have to trigger so much in me. And so just find that place of allowing people can think whatever they want. The more solid you are in your reality, the more at peace you become. And then to kind of practice pushing that energy out a little bit, do that last little exercise I guided three of you. Who am I? Who am I? Yeah, that one. All right, so that is your action step for today and for this week. Time for action, action, action. And I am so curious how this goes for you. If you also want to reach out to me, go to draziz.com,/a Z I Z and under the about section there is a drop down menu. There's a contact me. You can send me messages through there about how this is going for you and overall. Just stay in this process. Really apply what you're learning today and this will be one step closer to you becoming more bold, more free and more authentically you everywhere you go. So thanks for being with me today. Until we speak again. May have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level 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.