Not Where You "Should Be" In Life?

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 the show. It's good to be with you. Today we're going to be talking about something. I think it's going to be very powerful and helpful for you, which is the feeling of, well, a whole host, honestly, of negative feelings that can arise from one perception, which is that you are not where you want to be in your life. And maybe it feels like you're not where you should be in your life. Is. Is this something you can relate to? If so, and first of all, you're not alone. If so, I think huge amounts of people feel that. I've certainly felt that in my life. And I'm gonna break down in today's episode what are some of the sources of that and how you can really shift it so you can ultimately get to what you want, which is not just to where you want to be in life. Right. That might be part of the agenda, but to feel better now. Right. And I think that's really the angle we're gonna come at in, in today's episode. Yes, there's things we can look at about how you can achieve more. That's in the realm of productivity, performance, achieving your potential. Confidence is a big part of that. Right. But there's no amount you can achieve, there's no rate at which you could be achieving, and there's no way to sustain that achievement so fully that you don't have to do the inner work. And the inner work is the most important work. And the inner work actually leads to a much more accelerated and sustainable progress in your outer life. So I'm super excited to share with you in today's episode how we're gonna break this down. First thing I wanna start with is a quote by Carl Jung, which I love, which is until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. So you, me, everyone around you is being driven. You're being lived right it might seem like you are in charge and you're in control and you're making choices and it feels that way. And you are to a degree. And then you have these strange moments where you're doing something you don't want to do. You're going to the fridge and grabbing something you don't want to grab. Why is this even in my house? Why did I even purchase this? You know, it's 11pm and you're shoving something in your face and you say, aziz, I never do that. I have total control. Maybe you drink one more time, you only want to drink. Maybe you say something you don't want to say. Maybe you do want to say something and you avoid saying it in the moment. Maybe you act out of anger. Maybe you lose your cool. Maybe you have a panic inside even if you don't show it to anybody, right? You realize that maybe I'm not in total control. If you think you're in total control, wait, wait. You'll see. You just have a short memory span. Because I'm sure if you look back and you'll see moments where you're not in total control. So what's happening? There is. There's these forces that are driving us now. The most common is what you might call our programming or our conditioning. These are all the things that you learned, you picked up, you concluded about yourself, about life and all of it. How you're supposed to be, what you're supposed to achieve, what you're supposed to want or not want, how you're supposed to move, how you're supposed to dress, how you're supposed to talk, what kind of career you're supposed to pursue? Are you supposed to be a nice person or a good person or a funny person or a spiritual person or a successful person or a business person? How much money are you supposed to make? There is a massive amount of information that you've downloaded that you might call your unconscious blueprint. Who you're supposed to be. You with me. So far, this is probably not too earth shattering. This is pretty basic, but it's important because even though you might know this, we forget and we have the illusion that the conscious me is driving the bus. And I'm totally aware of everything that's going on. And I want you really think about it as like a bus, right? Whether it's a school bus or a Greyhound bus, I don't care, whatever. Imagine a bus, a tour bus of your favorite pop star, right? It's a big bus and there's a driver of the bus, but that the bus isn't empty. There's a bunch of other people on there. I think a band tour bus is actually a perfect metaphor because a band has all these different characters in it, right? You know, there's a guy is the angry one. There's the wild one, there's the sex addict one. I don't have that part, dude. No. No way, man. Right. We got the crazy parts, we got the timid parts. Maybe there's like the, you know, the guy who's only confident when he's holding his bass guitar, but then he's all socially awkward and uncomfortable outside of that, right? All these different characters on the bus. And I want you to imagine there's this large bus full of all these characters, and you're not even aware of a lot of them. But what they do is they influence the driver. They talk to the driver, they yell at the driver, they plead with the driver. They say all kinds of things. And you are driving, sure, but you're getting all this input from back there. Are you aware of it? Are you listening to it? Are you conscious of it? And that's what Jung said when he said, make the unconscious conscious or it will direct your life. And then he says you'll call it fate, which is fascinating because you are being lived. Is true on two dimensions. The first level is what I just talked about, where your unconscious programming is running you. But we can grow in our conscious awareness, become more aware of that, liberate ourselves from more and more of the programming. And then you get this stage of personal empowerment, self development, transformation. It's like Tony Robbins world, right? Which is beautiful. It's awesome. You're the captain of your ship. I teach this at all my events and all my clients. And there's another stage beyond that where you realize, oh, yes, that's true. I'm the captain. I'm steering. I have more awareness. There's always stuff in our unconscious, but, you know, you have a lot more choice around your programming than in the past. But something much more beautiful is happening, which is you're still being lived, but not by your unconscious programming, but by a spiritual divine forces of intelligence or creation. And that's what I would call spiritual confidence. That's what I talk about in my new book, which will come out at some point. Get off my back. It's close. It's very close. Doubtless. How to Believe in Yourself and Trust in Life. And as we lead up to the release of that book, I'll be sharing some more about that in podcast episodes. But that is another way that we're lived. But if we're not, if we don't make the conscious. The unconscious conscious, then life will just. We'll just live out our programming and we'll say it was fate. Oh, I was destined to be with that person. Oh, I. That's just how it needed to go. But you were. You chose that person because you were trying to fix your mom. You know, you chose that person because your dad was critical and abusive of you, and so you found someone to be critical and abusive of you. We're destined to repeat these patterns until we shift them. Now, why am I going on and on about this? Right? Well, this whole idea of where I'm supposed to be in life and look, I'm not saying that it's. You know, my dad wants me to be a doctor, and I don't want to be a doctor. That's one kind of supposed to. That's already a certain level of awareness. But a lot of what you. You want, like, you don't even think anyone else is making you. You want it. That is still your unconscious programming. Now, I'm not saying you don't want what you want. And then it gets all confusing. Do I really want it? Oh, my God, I'm so confused. No, there's some things that you might really want and you don't need to know why. And sure, a lot of it might come from our conditioning. There's nothing we don't have to fix everything and spend 75 years in Freudian analysis or something. But what we want to do is realize a couple of basic things. One, a lot of what I want or think I should have or must have or must achieve in my life is conditioned by the cultural field. That means society around me, my family, growing up, my upbringing, whatever that is, and it's not my own fully my most authentic self. It's also just made up. I think that's really important. Now, you might say, But I feel like, no, Aziz, I remember. You know, someone might say, I want to be in a relationship, and I'm not. Aziz, are you telling me that wanting to be in a relationship is just made up by the cultural field? I mean, don't have a natural desire for that. Sure, sure. I'm not saying that you don't hunger for that, but we got to get really curious here because, yes, you want the relationship, but even that is culturally conditioned. I mean, this whole idea, this whole idea of romantic love, of finding the one of having a nuclear family with just that one, you know, these are pretty modern concepts. Marriage was very different just a couple hundred years ago. Marriage is very different across different societies. And some, you know, for a lot of history, a lot of marriages were chosen by family for barter, for advancement, for resources, for protection, for power. People would have, you know, all kinds of different experiences sexually outside of their relationships. And that was accepted, that was allowed, that was considered normal. I'm not saying you got to go reinvent the wheel and come do some sort of crazy polyamory thing, although you could if you want. But what I'm saying is that that's the. What this comes down to is we got to question this. I need this. And it's got to look like this. And it's supposed to look like this at this time. Because if we don't question that and we don't realize that that's just the freaking drummer in the band on the bus saying some stuff, then we're in permanent suffering and we can't get out because we believe it's the voice of truth. It's reality. It's unquestioned, unquestionable. It's fact. And it's not. It's made up. Other people made it up. And now you're actively making it up every day. Now you might want to go achieve that, and that's great. So if someone wants to be in a relationship, or someone wants to start their own business, or someone has an idea of where they want to be financially, or they want to go, you know, live in this house, or they want to have more friends, like they, you know, there's a lot of things that when I talk to people, they don't have their life circumstances in the way that they want. Great, let's. Let's focus on creating those, and then we can build confidence to take action, to make progress towards that goal. And how do you actually do that? What's the fuel to do that? Because the pattern that I see more often is someone is in a state of self hatred comparison, chronic compulsive comparison to others, and feeling inferior, feeling discouraged, feeling hopeless. And then maybe out of that inferiority, there's this surge of frantic action to get there faster, to prove myself, to show that I'm not a nobody. And it's not working. You know, either they gridlock, they just kind of get frozen. So to put it into a specific example, say someone's not in a relationship and then they want to be. You know, they just. They look at people that are walking down the street and holding hands and they're like, oh, God, I suck. I suck okay, from this place. And they, okay, I should go do something. This was me, by the way. So let me stop pretending like, oh, these clients that told me. Although I have had clients that told me. But let's talk about me, my numero uno client, which was, you know, I'm looking around, seeing all these people, and I'm thinking, I can't have that. There's something wrong with me. I suck. I'm less than those guys who can date. I'm a loser. And there was like a kind of a hopeless, helpless, just drain of energy. And I see that happen all the time. That might take the form of just kind of discouragement. Maybe it's more avoidance and delay. Like, I'll try later, or, you know, I'll move to a new city or some elaborate plan. Like, I'm gonna get really good at my job and make a lot of money, and then all the women are gonna come to me. Or for me, I'm gonna spend hours practicing the guitar, and then the women are gonna come to me, right? So some sort of. That's all emerging out of, like, it's not never gonna happen. The other way I've seen it go is you. You know, you start with that. I'm not where I should be. I suck. Look at that person. He has what I don't have. And then it. Out of that inferiority comes like a frantic action. Okay, let's go. I'm gonna go talk to a million women. I'm gonna get on all the dating apps. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that, you know? And again, that might seem empowered, but it's often frantic. It's desperate, it's. And so instead of the. Imagine a car, instead of its wheels being gridlocked, it's like spinning its wheels in sand or in snow. It's not really going anywhere or, you know, lurching. So you get somewhere and then you sabotage it. You get somewhere and you sabotage. You get somewhere and you sabotage it, right? Why is this happening? You know, Does God hate you? It's your bad luck. And I would say that what's happening here is you're being driven by these unconscious forces. You. You believe in the illusion of your inadequacy because the drummer on the band is telling you that unless you're in a relationship, you suck. You're a nobody. You're a nothing, right? That's. You're fully plugged into the cultural field. You believe it. Hook, light and sinker. And then you hustle from that place or you shut down from that place. And so it's destined to. You can't get out of that pit. They say, no, no, no, Aziz, if I got into the relationship, I would be out of that pit, and I would tell you, that's a good plan. And I followed that plan. And millions, hundreds of millions, probably billions of humans have also followed that plan over the course of history. And here's how it goes. And tell me, if you've experienced this in your life, you do make some progress. Maybe you do date, maybe you do get into a relationship, and then are you whole? Complete, fulfilled, joyful, grateful, relaxed, peaceful, happy, loving, laughing. Life's amazing every day, maybe for a minute, maybe for a season, couple of weeks. Depends on how much the euphoria of initial infatuation is. And then I need this project at work to go this certain way. I'm. Look at that guy. He's so much better. Look at her. She's such a powerful leader, and I'm a nobody. Oh, and if it's not that, it's like, look at my body. My body's not as fit as that person. Oh, look at him. He's really muscular. And without missing a beat, the drummer in the back of the bus is telling you, well, you got that, but you need this. And now you got that, but you need this. You know, I had a real powerful reminder of this where I was at a mastermind retreat of my own just recently. And there's a gentleman who was sharing there. And he was. One of his challenges was romantic relationships, right? He'd been married. He'd gotten a divorce a couple years ago, and he was, you know, really got to a place of being. Okay, being signal, signal single. He had a great relationship with himself. He had a son. You know, he's able to spend more time and just be present with his son. You know, he felt like he was in a really good place, and he's dating a little bit, nothing serious. Then he meets this woman, thinks she's amazing, starts to fall in love. They date for, you know, not that long, three, four months. And then it kind of fizzles, falls apart. And he is just. He's like, man, it stirred up so much for me. I was feeling pretty good. And now I'm just, like, longing and aching and missing and all these things from my past. And all this stuff got stirred up, right? And as we explored it more, it was basically, I. It's been three years. I'm probably never Going to find anybody for the rest of my life. I'm never going to be in a relationship. And beneath that is I need to be in a relationship in order to be happy. Now, of course, you and I both know that that's crazy, right? Right. But I'm listening to this guy. I remember having those exact same thoughts and feelings. And now here I am, many years later, I'm in a beautiful relationship. I am so grateful and blessed to be with Candace. I feel like it's one of the best things in my life, if not the best thing in my life. And, you know, that doesn't mean it's not without challenges, not without growth needed, not without fears. Right? But even if you just say, yeah, yeah, there's some challenges always in life, but that area of your life, you know, what number would you give it? You know, 1 to 10 in terms of how awesome it is and how grateful you are, 10 out of 10, great. But we were doing hot seats at this mastermind. He was doing his hot seat. Guess whose hot seat was next? Me. You know what? I was gonna focus on a business challenge. I needed something to be different in my business, and I didn't have the time. And this was getting in my way, and that person was getting in my way, and I. And I can't be. I can't relax. I can't feel at peace until I get this thing fixed in my business. I'm not where I should be right now. And I'm just listening to this guy. I'm like, oh, my God. I had the exact same thought before I was in a relationship, and now I'm in this relationship, and it's amazing. I'd be like, that's so amazing. Now let's go focus on this, right? And we don't miss a beat. And we're going to keep running this program again and again and again until we do something different. And I want to share with you in part two, very next episode of what we're going to do differently, how you can do this differently. But first, we had to lay this groundwork of understanding. So how do you put this groundwork of understanding into practice? Time for action. Action. Action. Your action step for this week is going to be to listen to the drummer. Now, obviously, that's a metaphor. We're talking about the forces in the back of the bus. What is the voice that's telling you that you're not where you should be, that you're supposed to have this thing that you can't be happy until you have this thing, like, what is going on there now? What I found is that voice has been there for so long for many people. It's so convincing. It's so embedded into the fabric of how you see yourself and life and everything that we almost can't even hear it. Or if we do slow down and listen to it, we're like, you know, it's just saying facts, man. I mean, what, do you want me to question this voice? No way. It's da boss. And yeah, I want you to question. I want you to listen to it. I want you to get curious, maybe even write it down. So you're saying, what, you can turn to the drummer. You know, you're driving the bus, so don't keep your eyes on the road. But you can ask him or her. You can say, hey, so what is it I'm supposed to do? And where am I supposed to be? Okay, this, this. Oh, I'll tell you. This, this, this, this, this. And you're not doing that. And this, this, this. Okay. And you're saying I need to achieve all these things and be here and have these life circumstances just so, right? Yeah. Okay. And if I'm not, then, well, then you're a loser and you suck and you should feel bad about yourself. Okay. So my external environment needs to be this exact way in order for me to feel. Okay. Is that right? And keep going. Keep asking questions as if it's a person outside of you. That's what you're gonna do. This is building awareness, and this is what's gonna set you free. And in the next episode, we're going to talk more about the specific steps you can take to truly liberate yourself from this. You can feel total enthusiasm and joy with where you are in your life and what you're moving towards. You're always growing and evolving. I'm not saying you don't want a relationship and you can't create that, and you just gotta settle in your life. No F that. You want to create something extraordinary, and so do I. And you are, and let's do it. But we don't do it from this place of inadequacy, self hatred, and extreme pressure on ourselves. So thanks for being with me today. Until we speak again, may I 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.