How To Smoothly Talk With Anyone

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 conversation mastery, specifically how to smash smoothly talk with anyone. This is an incredibly valuable skill. Whether you want to use this for your personal life, for connecting with people, feeling just more socially connected, then using those connections over time to create better relationships, deeper friendships. Of course, social, smooth connection is essential when it comes to business. Whether you want to network and create strategic partnerships, or you want to develop new clients or customers, or work, work with vendors or have people maybe be more open or supportive in promoting you. I mean, the list is endless. The more socially confident and comfortable you are at connecting with people, the more you can grow in business. Of course, in your career, in the job, the organization that you're in, the people that get promoted more are not necessarily the ones who are the best technically. In fact, I've seen tons of people like this that I've worked with over the years who are technically more skilled than many of the people that are above them in the organization. The issue is that they have been very technically skilled, head down, driven at their desk, and they didn't socialize with other people. They didn't talk before and after the meeting, they didn't speak up in the meetings. And as a result, they were seen as a very skilled in this one aspect of the technical profession, but not leadership material, not someone they'd want to be able to go out there and be the outward facing marketer or in sales or anything like that. So if you want to grow in your business, in your organization, your career, you want to develop deeper friendships. And of course this probably goes without saying, but if you want to date, if you want to develop romantic connections, if you want to find love and create a deep, lasting relationship, you got to be able to talk. I mean, it's going to be hard, it's going to be hard to dance your way into that, even if you're A super badass dancer, which most people I work with do not see themselves as that. Not at least not yet. Not until they've come to one of my live events and we've had them dancing. Then they're like, oh, I guess I can do this. But you know, trying to develop a relationship without talking to people you're attracted to. Good luck. So I'm excited to share some of the best stuff I got with you about how to smoothly talk with anyone. And I'm going to share some key four or five life changing ideas that will truly transform your entire social life and therefore your life. So this is relevant because right now we're doing the Super Early Bird for my next live event, which is called Supremely Confident Conversation Master. And it's hard to say which event is my favorite. I love all of them. This one though, I have a particular delight in because we do so much fun stuff here and you can see such rapid progress in this area of life because conversation, confidence and talking to people is just a skill. And most people have more of this skill than they realize. They're just not accessing it in the moment because of anxiety, because of self doubt. So not only we teach people the skills there, but, but then we have them practice it and we get to see rapid results. And I guarantee that if you're at this event and you dive in and do the activities and play full out, you will do things there that you've never done before or that you thought were impossible for you. If you see yourself as not a social person, too introverted, too shy, too socially anxious, too weird, don't know what to say too whatever, you're gonna shatter that story, shatter that old identity in the best possible way so you can break free and break out and be you. So I would love to invite you, I am inviting you. I would love for you to come to this Supremely Confident Conversation Master event. It is in April, April 17th through the 19th. I had to look at my calendar over there, 17th through the 19th in Portland, Oregon. We're doing the Super Early Bird for just a couple of weeks here where you get 90% off the ticket, where it's 197 for the super Early Bird. And then after a couple weeks here, it will go up to the early bird for $997 and then the full price for $19.97. And I think this is a phenomenal investment even at the full price of $19.97. However, if you are considering going and on the fence about going now is the best time to do it because you have that incredible discount and that can cover all your flights and accommodations and everything. And I mean, what is it worth to radically shift your sense of confidence talking to people? I think if most people realized how much they'd get out of it, and if they knew with certainty that they would grow like crazy in this area of their life, absolutely, they'd invest any amount. The biggest fear is our own doubt. I'm gonna get out there and it's not gonna work. Oh, I don't know. I can't do it. I've always been this way. And so if we do what we've always done, then we get what we've always get gotten, and we end up being who we've always been. But that's not the game that I want to play. I'm constantly evolving, growing and changing, and hopefully so are you. And not only do we want to change slowly and evolve slowly, let's turn the dial up and speed that shit up. Because that's one of human superpowers, isn't it? To speed up everything. Humans are obsessed with going fast, aren't we? I mean, how fast can we transport ourselves? We're just trying to get faster and faster and faster modes of transportation. That's been the story of humans from as far back as we've been developing things. And now we're like, pushing the edge of like an airplane ride. Oh, my God, four hours to get there by airplane. Ah, it's like that would have taken you four weeks or a flight across the ocean. Might have taken you a month on a long seafaring voyage or something or more, and you might not have made it. And now we're like, when are we going to develop, like beam transmission and teleportation? Come on. And then, you know, the crazy thing is humans will be teleporting. We'll be teleporting at some point, perhaps. I don't know, I'm not a. Not a physicist. And then those humans will be like, oh, man, it takes like four minutes for the teleporter to boot up. And then you have to teleport to, like, the teleportation station, which is like a 10 minute walk from where I want to go. Ah, this is terrible. And they're teleporting, like across the world. I don't know. Just a possibility. In any case, we're not here to talk about teleportation. We're here to talk about conversation mastery and you and me hanging out in Portland. So to get your ticket, go to SocialConfidenceCenter.com and then click on the Events tab and you can find access to that socialconfidencecenter.com and then the Events tab and click on Supremely Confident Conversation Master. You can also go to Shrink for the shy guy shrinkforthy guy.com and under this episode, there'll be a link to it on the side of the sidebar of the page of the Strength for the Shy Guy page, there'll be a link to it as well. So we made it easy for you to find it and go ahead and get on that before the super early bird is done. So let's talk about how to smoothly talk with anyone. First things first, which I've already been touching on in this episode, you gotta overcome the story that says it's not possible. Yes, it's possible. Any story in your mind that says you can't, you can't grow in this way, you can't change, you can't do it for whatever your reasons are, that's complete and total bs. That's a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is. This is how it is. This is who I am. And I know that because I lived that so long in my own life, at least a decade and then a decade where it was the strongest. And then I'm always rooting out fixed mindsets here and there. So it's not like it's that we're done with that. Our mind wants to keep going back to that. The truth is you can grow, and you can grow in anything. The truth is conversation, confidence, like any form of confidence, conversation, fluidity, skill, smoothness, ability, knowing what to say, knowing what to ask, knowing how to be, knowing how to make eye contact, all of that is just a skill. To be specific, it's a series of small skills that make a bigger skill. Just like playing the guitar is a skill, you know, rock climbing is a skill, and they're made up of a bunch of specific elements, right? So to play the guitar well, you need to know how to make chords with your fingers. You need to know how to move between those chords quickly. You need to know how to do progressions on scales going up and down so you can play notes that go together. You need to have another skill of moving your right hand, which is either plucking the strings with your fingers or playing it up and down with a pick. So there's picking skills, there's finger picking skills, there's chorus skills, there's progression skills, there's scale skills. That's why people who are the best at guitar spend hours and hours and hours and hours, you know, practicing going up and down on scales. And here's the thing. The reason they're so freaking good at it is because they do what most people don't want to do. Myself included, because I know how to play the guitar, but I never had the discipline. Back when I used to play the guitar, I hadn't cultivated the level of discipline that I have now in my life, and now I have not. I'm not dedicating it to the guitar. I'm dedicating to other things in my life. But back then, I would just, like, go play the songs that I liked, so there was a level of discipline. And then I would repeat again and again and again playing the songs that I liked. But I didn't apply the discipline to really master the guitar. So I got okay at it. I got proficient at it. But to really master something, we need to learn all the sub skills. And whether you want to master conversations, which I think is a highly valuable use of your time, or you just want to get proficient at them, to get good enough results in your career and your social life and your dating life, that works, too. You're going to have to learn the sub skills and practice the sub skills. But that's all that it is. It's a bunch of sub skills. And anything in your mind that's saying you cannot, and sometimes it's an actual story, sometimes it's just a feeling, a feeling of dread, a feeling of aversion, a feeling of being closed off, a feeling of resistance. In fact, you can even just run a thought experiment about, like, coming up to Portland to learn this stuff in a way that's gonna be a thousand fold stronger than what you and I are doing right here. We both know that. I mean, learning an audio from a podcast is so different than being immersed in a room for three days and nights, just practicing this stuff all the time. But just imagine doing that and see what comes up for you. There's some resistance, right? And that resistance is often emotional, and that's really what we're fighting up against here. It's not that you can't learn this stuff. It's that part of you is like, oh, man, that's uncomfortable. That's what most people are doing. They're like, yeah, I want to be an expert guitarist. I want to play the violin and make beautiful music. I want to be a rock climber or whatever the skill is. But how do I do it instantly with no effort? That's what we're looking for. How do I do it instantly with no effort? And just take a moment to think about that with say, an instrument or a language, something that we all know that you need to put time and effort in or the gym or getting into a certain shape or running a marathon or whatever it is. Yeah, I want that, but I don't want to run ever. Yeah, but do I have to practice rock climbing and do pull ups and stuff to get better at rock climbing? Do I really have to pick up a guitar and play it to get really good at the guitar? Can't I just like look at it and buy one? Set it on my wall? We know that it's absurd and yet that's what we're trying to do with conversation confidence and conversation mastery. We're like, you know what, I'll just talk to some people here and there, which is not that often at the rate that I've always done for my whole life to get to where I am. And I'm just not good at it. I don't know why. It's because we haven't put in the time. We haven't put in the energy and intention to do it. Effort over time equals results. There is no other way. Now, you can speed up the time element in that by doing some of the things I'm gonna share with you in this episode and getting around the right people in community and practicing and getting mentorship and teaching and guidance. Investing in it. I mean, if you invest in yourself and your growth, you speed up the time component big time. But it's still effort over time. You can't buy something. There's no silver pill or silver silver pill. There's no magic pill or silver bullet. But I like the idea of a silver pill. There is no silver pill that you just take it with no effort. You get what you want. Who was I? Oh, there's a client in my Mastermind program who was just sharing the other day how he went in to get some sort of checkup and he had an issue with his blood glucose. And he's not an overweight guy by any means, but for whatever reason, he was having an issue with blood glucose. And so he's talking to his doctor about what his options were. And his doctor was sharing like, well, you know, you can make some these changes to your diet and exercise habits or we can give you this medication. And he's like, oh my gosh, I want to do the diet and exercise and the doctor's like, great. Most people don't choose that. Isn't that crazy? Most people just want the pill. So. But you are listening to this. You are different, my friend. Let's not just look for the pill, because that's not going to work anyway. Let's put in the effort over time to get the results that we want. And results might not be that sexy of a word to you. So results is a category. What goes in that category? What if developing your conversation confidence gets you friends, better friends, more friends? Or what I think most people really want is deeper friendships? We don't want a thousand friends that we're all superficial with. We want a couple of friends or more that we can go deep with, that we know what's going on in our life. That doesn't mean you're always talking about serious topics all the time. But you can, you can laugh and you can have fun. You can watch a movie together, you can just fuck around. Or you can talk about how you're feeling, what your dreams are, you're a sick parent, how to deal with that. You can talk about something that's really meaningful to you at the same time. Or results might be business growth for you, career growth for you. More income, more prestige, more connections, more success, more victory, more fucking winning in the business world, in your career. How gratifying and satisfying and empowering is that? To know that you can grow, you can become more than you ever thought. You can excel, you can contribute more, you can earn more, you can impact people more, you can lead more. Or another result is love. Conversation mastery equals more love. You're gonna be able to find a better partner, a better fit for you. You're more selective in your partner choices. You're gonna be able to say no to someone that's not a right fit. Cause you're not all desperate. Cause that's the only one you get. Cause they're the only one who approached you. What if you could approach them? What if you could be the selector? That's the gift that comes with conversation mastery. So hopefully that's inspiring to you enough to put in the effort over time. Let's talk about some of the key ways to do it. One is assume approval. Assume approval when you approach someone, when you talk with them. The biggest mistake we can make that makes us the opposite of smooth, which would be tense, anxious, awkward, nervous is we're assuming disapproval. Just think about that for a minute. Let's say there's someone over there that you want to talk to. Imagine anyone if you're someone who's interested in dating women, you imagine a woman that's very attractive to you. If you're a woman interested in dating man, imagine a handsome, dapper man. Whatever your type, whatever your preference, with all the personality traits that go along with it, imagine maybe it's a business connection, a networking thing, someone powerful in your organization. Whatever it is, a social interaction. Just imagine you're going to go talk to somebody and you know for sure with 100% certainty that they're just going to be bothered by you. They're going to be like, what do you want? You know, kind of dismissive, upset, irritated with you. How pleasant is that interaction going to be for you? And how much are you going to want to go do that? How appealing is that gonna be? Not very. Right. How likely are you gonna be to do it? Not at all. So we need to flip that. We need to assume approval, because in that situation, you're assuming disapproval. And that's what most of us are doing subconsciously, 99% of the time and 100% of the time when we're feeling socially anxious or in inhibition around talking to somebody. So you ought to flip that and assume approval. So let me ask you this. Who do you hang out with where you automatically assume approval? A friend, a colleague, a buddy, a sibling, a parent, a child, a dog? Who do you just assume that they're gonna love? You know, it doesn't mean they love everything about you, and you can just do anything and they're never upset with you. That's a fantasy. But, like, you know, for the most part, they're like, yeah, I love this guy. Yeah, I love this woman. She's awesome. That's my mom, or that's my friend, or that's my sister. That's my brother. That's my dad. So how do you move? How do you talk? How do you act? How do you interact when you're coming from that place of assuming approval? You want to study yourself over the next couple days when you're assuming approval in a certain relationship. And just watch what you do, watch what you say, watch how you move. Then you want to consciously bring that to situations where you're just meeting someone brand new and consciously bring in that they're going to love me, they're going to approve of me, and not just like a affirmation or a mantra or a mindset, but a behavior, a way that you are. So if you tend to make jokes when you're with someone that you love, then you tend to make jokes even with someone you just met. You tend to carry yourself, you tend to move. And even just sometimes. I've had this with clients. Just saying the words assume approval in their minds before they go talk to someone shifts something in their body. This is powerfully transformative in your social life and helping with social anxiety. The next thing you gotta be able to do to become smooth at talking with anyone is you gotta be able to lead the conversation. I like to call it driving. You can't just go, hi, how's it going? Or worse, stand there and wait for someone to come approach you. Might never happen. So you gotta go talk to that person. Be like, hey, how's it going? I'm Aziz. What's your name? Now, in that moment, you've started the conversation, but you can't just sit back and be like, hey, I'm Aziz. Entertain me. It's not gonna happen. You have to be able to ask questions. You gotta be able to lead the conversation. Now think of it like starting a fire. You gotta put some of the. You gotta get the sparks going, get a little flame going, and you're gonna add some little twigs to it, and then they're gonna start adding twigs, too. And if they don't, well, then that conversation you can add for a while, and then you just gotta move on to someone else. But most of the time, we don't wanna add anything, or we don't know what to add, or we're just so sure that they're disapproving of us that we don't just consistently start asking questions. You gotta be willing to lead the conversation. Now, how to do that? Well, there's a simple formula that I have for you in that there's only two things that you could say. And you might say, that's ridiculous. There's thousands, millions of things I could say. Well, really, they fall into two categories. There's only two categories of things you can say. Statements or questions. Everything that comes out of your mouth is going to be either a statement or a question. So what you're going to do is make a series, a combination of statements and questions. Hey, how's it going? My name is Aziz. What was that? That was a question and a statement. How's it going? That's a question. My name is Aziz. That's a statement. What brings you here? Question. Now, sometimes people are like, oh, my God, those are such ordinary, boring questions. You gotta come up with something crazy. No, you don't. No, you don't. Because the pressure to come up with something Crazy. Makes you not talk to anybody ever, because you're like, I don't know if that's good enough. I don't know if that's weird enough. I don't know if that's different enough. I don't know if that's distinct enough. Just start with something real simple. The key is in your energy, in your eye contact and your body language. If you're assuming approval and you're warm and you're like, hey, I'm here to talk to you. That's what you're saying. With your body, you can start with anything. Hey, what brings you here? Oh, I'm just here to make some connections for my business. Great, because now you can follow up with them. Oh, what sort of business are you in? Notice how I'm asking a question, another question? So you're listening for their response, and then you're providing more statements and more questions. Now we go in depth in this into. In the Supremely Confident Conversation Master event in April in Portland, we go super in depth into not only coming up and practicing statement questions, but specific techniques to help you never run out of things to say, how to always know what to say next and how to do it in a way that is very engaging for the other person. And we do some fun exercises with that too. So you can go real deep with statements and questions. And I also cover that in my course, Social Mastery Inside of Confidence University, which you can find out about by going to TheConfidenceUniversity.com so we have statement question. Then. Another key aspect is to follow your fascination. Follow your fascination. So oftentimes we get stuck in conversations that don't go anywhere, that are boring, that are just asking the basic questions, which is a fine place to start. But then you gotta steer it right. You gotta go to something that's engaging for you and for them. So the best way to do this is follow your fascination. So you just start to share more and ask more about the things that are really interesting to you and what's going on in the conversation. So the person shares, like, oh, you know, I just finished traveling this last week. I got home. Oh, yeah, where did you go? Oh, I flew home to India to be with my family for two weeks. Let's see the colleague of yours at work. Okay. They flew home from India to be back with their family. Now, what are you most curious about there? Because at that point, most people ask what they think they should ask. Oh, how was it? Or, oh, yeah, that's mainly what people think they're supposed to ask? That's. That's. What do I think I'm supposed to ask there? How was it. How was it with your family? Those kind of things. But what if you felt like, what are you actually interested in here? What would you actually want to know? I know this is a totally hypothetical situation, so you might be like, I don't know. I don't know this person. But let's say you did. What would you want to learn? What would you want to find out about them? So here's some random things that come to my mind that I would be interested in. Wow. How long is the flight to India? I bet that's long. Let's say I know this colleague has kids. Whoa. How long is the flight? You know, 15 hours. Crazy. With your two little kids, how did that go? Because I have little kids myself. I'd be like, holy shit, sounds intense. What did they think? Was that the first time they went to India, Your little kids? What was it like for them? Great. And then I could share. I happened to have gone to India when I was young so I could share a story about what it was like for me. I have a couple vivid memories, you know, many vivid memories. Actually, there's a couple that I would share with a person. Like, I remember. Blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, what was it like for you? So now we're connecting in a much more engaging and interesting way versus me just asking the questions that I think I should ask make sense. Okay. And then the other key thing I want to share with you is you gotta share more. One of the biggest pitfalls in conversation confidence is people think, well, I'm just gonna keep it on them. I'm just gonna, oh, how was your trip to India? Okay, great. And then I'll ask more. Oh, great. Oh, great. Oh, great. Keep it on you. Keep it on you. Keep it on you. And then all of a sudden, we're gonna have this deep connection. Now, being curious about the other person, asking lots of questions is a tried and true technique. It is a tried and true relationship builder. It helps people feel seen, acknowledged, valued, like you're interested in them. It's extremely effective for bonding and connecting. However, on its own, completely, it is insufficient. Because what's happening is they're gonna feel warm and connected for a while, and then they're gonna be like, who the fuck is this person? I don't know anything about them. So it's a good lead in. It's a good starting point. But you also got to share some of yourself too. And you got to share more freely. Because a pitfall I got stuck in for many years, and you might relate to this as well, is I'll share, but only when someone asks me, I'll share. They have to ask the right question to unlock and then I'll share. And then so oftentimes I didn't share very much at all because people weren't asking or they weren't asking the right question or the right way. And then I learned something profoundly shifting in my conversation, confidence and relationship building, which was to share more spontaneously. So that's another key tip to talk with anyone smoothly, share more spontaneously. Little just silly example of this. Just the other day I was driving home with my family and right before we got home, there's a cleaner's just right down the street from my house. And I was like, ah, I got some shirts at the cleaners. So I pulled into the parking lot and I was like, wait here everybody. And I just hopped out. I mean it was literally gonna be like one or two minutes. And my six year old son Zaim was like, which he's into these days. Like any delay, anything that doesn't go his way, he's like, ugh. Which I find humorously adorable in any case. So I go into the cleaners and there's a woman there and I've seen her, you know, drop, and I drop off my shirts and pick them up and she's like, hey, how's it going today? How's your week? Or how's your day going? And this was a Saturday and I was like, really good, spending the day with my family and it's really sweet. Now I'm sharing there, right? And that you could say, good, how about you? Great, okay, bye. And that's fine, that's fine. If you're just picking up your clothes, you don't need to have a deep conversation with the person at the cleaners. But why not just share more freely? And this is just something I've trained myself to do. I just do it all the time. I do it naturally. It's become habitual for me. But. So she asked, how's it going? I said, I'm having a great day with my family. And that's a little more right. But I thought, why not just share the story? Because it just happened with my son Zaim. So I told her about like, hey, we just got in here, it's going to be a one minute stop. And my six year old was like. And then she laughed because I think she has kids too. I'VE seen her kids are around there when she's working because I think they own the cleaners. And she laughed and she's like, I know what you mean. And then we leave. I leave. But do you see how there's a moment of connection there? That in itself is valuable. Now it's also valuable because you're practicing and building a skill. And it's also valuable because imagine you're doing that with someone at a business contact or conference or a potential client, an account for your business. And you can connect like that, you can share, you can become more human to them, more relatable, more likable because they get to see you and know you. And this is not just success stories, but you know, some challenges in your life too. And depending on the environment, what you unpack in that situation might be bigger or smaller. But yeah, if you want deeper friendships, deeper romantic relationships. Yeah. Then as you bond and go deeper with that person, you do share your challenges. You don't keep those hidden as well. So let's turn all this into action. Time for action. Action. Action. Your action step today is to consciously practice what one of these five tips that I shared with you. Okay, so just to review, one of them is assume approval before you go into an interaction. Number two is lead the conversation, be willing to drive. Number three is use statements or questions consciously. Just become more aware. Is that a statement? Was that a question? Was that a statement? I'm gonna ask a question. Just become, just start to note that more. Number four, follow your fascination. And number five, share more spontaneously. These are powerful life changing skills. Apply them all over time, consistently and everything will transform for you. And I'm telling you the biggest obstacle is not these skills. The biggest obstacle is the story that we have that says I can't change this or maybe it's going to take 15 years or let's bust through that, let's transform this in 2020. So the best, most powerful, most effective, efficient, speedy way to rapidly transform your conversation conf all forms of confidence is going to be to join together with a group of like minded people with me, who's someone who's been on fire about how to transform our confidence for the last 18 years. And really let's do something about this three days, I promise you, you're going to leave there a different person. So go to shrinkforthshyguy.com to claim your ticket at the super early bird price. You can also go to SocialConfidenceCenter.com and click on the events tab to go there as well. And until we speak again, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're 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.