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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. I'm excited to be with you. We're going to be picking right back up where we ended last week about that feeling of that you're not where you should be or want to be in your life. And if you haven't listened to that episode, I'd highly recommend it. The quick, you know, 20 second recap is we have these unconscious forces you're programming from your conditioning. What you learned growing up, what you saw around you in society. I call it the cultural field. And you pick that up and then you feel this pressure that you gotta be somewhere. And you might say, no, but, Aziz, I want that. I don't feel like someone's telling me, I really want this. Yeah, but the pressure is that you're supposed to be there and you feel inadequate or there's something wrong with you if you're not there. That's the problem, not the desire. It's the inadequacy. It's the failure. It's the shame. Because then out of that shame and failure feeling nothing good comes. You either shut down and just give up and feel bad about yourself, which I did for many years, or you try with, like a frantic desperation, which I also tried. And ultimately you're not able to really create what you want either way. And the whole thing's a freaking illusion. It's just a voice in your head of the conditioning that's telling you. And I use the metaphor of a bus where you're the driver of the bus. Imagine like a big tour bus with a band on it, and in the back of the, you know, throughout the bus, there's different band members. And I kept on referencing the drummer in the last episode where it's the drummer that's telling you you're not where you should be. You should be in a relationship. You should have more money, you should have a better house, you should be fitter, you're too fat. You suck. Right? And we're like, okay, drummer, you're right, I'm terrible, right? And we're gonna, we're gonna shift that and I'm gonna show you how in today's episode. Super excited to be with you. If you've been listening to this show for quite some time and you feel like it's helping you and you wanna go further, I can't tell you how many people that I've worked with in my one year Mastermind program that produces radical transformations in people. We go through a process called the Confidence Liberation method that I developed over working on this for now, 21 years of study, including a doctorate in clinical psychology, and working with thousands of people in online events, teaching through my books, all that stuff. And what I found is that this method reliably produces results for people. And I can't tell you how many people that have gone through that program. Tell me when they first meet me. I listened to your podcast for like two years and now here I am. So if you're one of those people and you're like, yeah, this is cool. I'm learning, I'm making a little progress, and you really want to just take the reins and change this once and for all, then I highly recommend reaching out to me. You can go to doctoraziz.com that's-a ziz.com and click on the Apply now button. That's how you apply for the Mastermind program. You can also learn all about the Mastermind there and what's in it and how it works. And then if your application is approved, then we can have a conversation about you and the Mastermind and see if it's a good fit. So I love that. And Mastermind is like my favorite thing that I get to do because as much as I love this and sharing and being with you here, it's one way I don't get to see you. But working with people, seeing them, answering their questions, watching the transformation over time, hearing about their wins and successes, that's where it's at. So if you want that to go on that journey with me, I would love to do that with you, because that's. That's what I'm here to do. Okay? Now you're not where you should be and you suck and you need to fix it. What am I gonna do? Right. Well, that's. That's already part of the problem. That's what we've been discussing, so we gotta shift that first. And this is hard for people because they're like, no, but I'm. I don't want to give up. I don't want to be like, I don't care about being in a relationship. That's not true. I do care. Yeah. I'm not saying don't care. Become apathetic or something. What I'm saying is it's not in the caring. It is in the how you're perceiving and what you're doing is what I call the fundamental error. And I talk about this in the forthcoming book Doubtless, but the fundamental error is this. It's an error of perception. It's an error of belief. And the error is this. I need something, you know, in my life, circumstances, something out there to be different right now in order to feel okay. And therefore, if I can't make it different out there right now, then I can't possibly feel okay. Right. So we're not talking about that. You want it or you desire it or you want to go create it. Those are all beautiful things. It's that you have this story and the emotions that verify the story, that you have to feel bad until you're there. And for a lot of people, unconsciously, this is a motivation strategy. It's like, I'm going to withhold love, approval, optimism, enthusiasm, everything that's helpful for actual success and coaching and growth. I'm going to withhold all those ingredients, necessary ingredients, and I'm going to just have myself live in a state of lack of inadequacy, of emptiness, and that's gonna drive me to achieve. How's that working so far? How long you been doing that? A year? 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? 30 years? 50 years? So when do you acknowledge, like, how stubborn are you? Basically, for me, I realized that I'm pretty damn stubborn. So I did stuff like that in various forms for a decade or more. I mean, you know, there's different areas of life and different stages of development. I would say probably a total of two decades. If you, you know, probably from. I mean, there's probably still ways I'm doing it right? So I don't want to say that I'm above it all, but there is the dominant. That was my dominant strategy for a long time. Long, long time. And at some point you realize, wow, this is not working. There's got to be a better way. So what's. What's the better way? Well, first you have to see, is it working for you? Do you want to do something different? Scale of 1 to 10, how much do you want to do something different 10 being the highest, I'd say. Well, it depends what it is. I don't know. Is it gonna work better? Yes. Yeah. Because what you're doing isn't working very well. And even if it's producing some external result, results, it's probably creating a lot of suffering inside, a lot of pain inside, a lot of emptiness inside, despite maybe having some very beautiful things in your life. You know what I'm talking about. You just don't even see them, don't even feel them. Maybe we can acknowledge it intellectually, but we don't really feel a sense of gratitude and wonder or peace or love. It's just this kind of grinding, empty quality. And that's what we want to fix first. So how do we do that? Well, we start by filling the hole. And here's how we fill the hole. We tune your attention. This is where you make the unconscious conscious, which I talked about in the last episode, Carl Jung, quote, and you bring your attention. You slow down, you stop, stop what you're doing, stop the hustling, stop the running. It's like, I don't have time to stop. Yeah, well, this is the new way. The old way is you don't have time to stop. The new way. You do have a few minutes and maybe even do it right now. We'll do it together here. And you bring your attention to the emptiness, the craving, the grasping, the pressure, the sadness, the discouragement, the frustration, the pain. Essentially, there's pain inside of you right now, right, because you're in the relationship or you don't have the money, or you. Whatever, whatever the circumstances are that need to be, quote, need to be different in order for me to feel better. So let's focus on the pain inside, the solution to this problem. This took me many years to learn. So if you get this, you're going to short circuit. You're going to learn a lot faster than me. The solution is not in the. The circumstances. It's not out there. And this is so counterintuitive because you're like, no, no, no, no. It is out there. If I just had the girlfriend, if I just had the money, that would be great. But it's an illusion. It keeps going. So the solution is actually in here. We want to move towards the pain, not try to move the chess pieces on the board as fast as possible to get away from the pain. Move towards the pain of that emptiness with curiosity and compassion. That's the key word there. Become present with it and move towards it with curiosity and compassion. And Compassion is, in its simplest definition, to notice the pain of another and feel something. You care on some level, and there's an urge to support, contribute, help in some way. You may or may not act on that urge, but it's there. That's compassion. And this is self compassion. It's one of the most essential skills. It's a quality of being on your own side, or almost as I call it. It's part of the ultimate self esteem blueprint that I guide people through in the Mastermind program over the course of a year, radically transforming their self esteem and their ability to be on their own side. But this is a key component of self compassion and it's a skill. And I became obsessed with this skill because I had so little, I had none of it. I had self hatred. And that's a harsh word, I get it, but that's exactly what we're doing. You compare yourself to someone else and you say, look at him, he's in the relationship and I'm not. Look at her, she's so successful and I suck, whatever that is. It could be a big hard goal like achieving, you know, creating a business. It could be a small thing like, oh, look at them, they're, they can tell great stories in a social environment and I can't and I suck. That attack, that self attack right there in the form of comparison, you're discounting all your own positive qualities. You're amplifying and separating yourself. Like, look at, they're so exalted and above me and I'm down here in the mud like a wretch, right? And then you feel that self hatred. That is the absence of this compassion and that is what creates the whole or the void, not the life circumstances. You can have direct feelings about the circumstances. You can see someone holding hands with someone else and you could feel a longing. Or you think about your last partner and you feel lonely. You're lying in bed at night, you remember what it felt like to have a warm body, right, snuggled up against you and there's no one in the bed. Maybe you should get a dog. They're great at snuggling, right? But you know, your body is physiologically aching. I'm not saying that that's not happening. That's happening. And we want to increase your capacity to be with that directly. That aching, that longing. That aching or longing is a beautiful signal from life saying, yeah, I do want this. But the I suck because I don't have it. I can't ever feel happy, I'm miserable. That is what we're addressing here. That's the whole. That's the void, that's the pain that we're here to fill. And we do that with compassion and curiosity. Bring your full attention to it. And the curiosity part is not just a mental, like, what is it? What is it? Where does it come from? Is it from my dad? Is it from my mom when I was four? No, I don't mean that kind of picking at it, like picking at a scab. I mean, bring massive presence to it. Right now. Breathing in fully and becoming very curious. Like right now as I'm recording this, you probably can't hear it because of the noise canceling, but it's raining on my. On our roof. And now we have a skylight in my office. And I can hear a bunch of rain hitting the skylight. And if I pause for a moment, I can listen and I can hear the rain on the roof. I can hear kind of distantly outside in the woods. And that's the kind of curiosity I'm talking about. You're going to bring your full curiosity and attention right to that sensation. That's going to be like pulsing in your chest, in your stomach. Is it in your. Is it a pit in your stomach? Is it a squeezing in your neck? What. We get really curious. And if you're like, I don't know, man, I just. My. I just feel like my head going a mile a minute. Well, that means you've. Basically, your strategy to deal with the pain is to disconnect or disassociate from your body, from your emotions entirely. You wouldn't be the first person to do that. We actually have many layers of dissociation. First is an outer. Like, let me get super absorbed in my phone and the news and the drama of what's going on and who said what to who about whom and who's right and who's wrong. And then I'm going to eat some sugary food and then I'm going to get absorbed in this video game and we're so disconnected from ourselves. And then if you stop some of those distractions, the next layer closer in is like a really busy mind. Like, what about all those things that I just read and what's my next sugar? And oh, I shouldn't do this and I should do that. I need to get this done and blah, blah, blah, blah. We don't even feel. And then below that, there's actually sensations in your body, in your heart. And for many clients that I work with, that's like the first couple months of me helping them is like, really, can you even feel? How do you connect with your own heart? How can you have compassion for yourself, truly, if you're completely. It's like imagine a parent and a kid and the parents like out all the time and at bars and whatever. Like, how can they really be connected? And then if they are around the kid, they're just so in their head and they're talking and they're just like looking around and not even paying attention. And we want to get more and more courage is really what it takes to slow down and turn towards that kid and be like, how was your day? And you're doing that with yourself. Show me this pain. What's happening? I care. I want to know. And at first it's like a creepy crawly. I don't even know. So uncomfortable. Yeah, okay, let's just hang out with it. Just be curious. What is this? What's going on here? What am I telling myself? What is that drummer saying in the bus? What I feel, is it a squeezing in my chest? Is it a pulsing in my stomach? So you do this and for some of, you know, for you, this might be the practice for a while. And if you want guidance on how to do this, go to notnicebook.com Put your name and email in there to get access to the book resources page. And there's a piece called the Guided Peace process. It's a 20 minute guided audio that guides you how to be with yourself and your feelings. And if you do that every day for a week, you will feel a lot more and you'll have a lot more capacity, emotional resilience and skill. It's absolutely free. You can check that out. And let's say you're doing that. You know what, what then? Well, then when we're in that state of presence, we're being with the feeling, we want to say, is it true that I need blank in order to feel okay now? Is that really true? So here I am, I'm in my office or I'm at the gym or I'm sitting in my car or whatever. And I cannot feel happy. I cannot be okay because I don't have a partner or because I don't have X amount of money. Is that really true right now? I'd say yeah, Ziz, I feel really sad. Okay, well, I'm not saying you don't feel emotions, but this idea that you can't be. Can you feel sad and be okay? Do you have to hate yourself? But it feels like something's missing. Okay. Yeah. Well, what is it like to. What is the feeling of missing? Like, that's part of being a human. Maybe some part of us always feels like we're always wanting something. Right? And that's what Buddha and Buddhism is all about. You want too much stuff, dude. Want less. Right? And look, I'm not saying that you shouldn't go create and achieve things, but this. We might want to get a little more familiar and comfortable with the state of wanting or desire, because that's a big part of life. And I think the path to true confidence is we certainly don't want to attack ourselves and hate ourselves because we don't have something in our life yet. And then maybe even a higher level of liberation and mastery is that we can be with the desire and be patient as we go out and create things. Because all meaningful things in life take time. And sometimes the path is very winding, especially when it comes to big goals. The mystery of relationships, who you're meant to be with and when and how it all goes down, and career and life, the road, you know, the path, you know, who. Whose life doesn't fall off the blueprint, by the way. That's another illusion we do is we look around, we see all these other people, and they're, oh, look at him. He's rich. He's married. He's got two beautiful children. Oh, now. And they're traveling. Oh, he's on blueprint. All right. I can't tell you how many people that I've worked with who are rich and they have a family and they have two beautiful children, and they're suffering. Their confidence is low. They're unhappy. It's not the circumstances. And sometimes getting everything you want and having this life go according to blueprint. People, like, just fall apart at age whatever, 40 or something, and this massive midlife crisis. Who am I, really? Maybe I want to leave it all behind. Right? So, no. No one goes through life with this skipping along that you imagine everyone's life path is winding. Everyone, Even me, even you. All of us. So we want to be with that longing until we can really. And you might even just drop this one into the. Into the pond to see how the ripples go. And you say to yourself, and this is all in a state of presence and curiosity. You're not trying to just force this on yourself. You're just being really curious. Is it true that I can't feel good until that happens? Is it true that I have to feel bad about myself? Is there another way to see it. Why? Who makes it so he might say, well, everyone would think this about me if they. Everyone would think I'm bad for not being in a relationship. I remember I worked with a gentleman who was a virgin and he was in his 40s, and he's like, oh, my God, Aziz, have you seen the movie? 40 year old version? Like, this is unacceptable in society, and I have to feel terrible about myself. Everyone would judge me. Anyone who knew this would feel pity or despise me. Certainly women. I could never reveal this. And I said, you know, maybe so, maybe so. I don't. I'm not saying you need to go post this on social media and tell everyone on a first date. I don't know. I mean, there's complexity there. Right? I get that. And we could explore all those options. But I do know one thing, which is. And I don't. I don't curse on this show anymore. But f. That, you know why? How dare you talk to yourself that way? How dare you turn on yourself that way? Right? Think about this. Think about this. When you have a good friend, a best friend, a partner. And you know, there's a. I'm referencing a lot of Buddhism in this episode, but there's the vicissitudes of fate. And one is praise and blame. One is fame and disrepute. Let's go with fame and disrepute. Everyone thinks you're great, and then everyone thinks you're terrible. You know, imagine people who are canceled or whatever, and they. They said the thing that in the cultural zeitgeist was the wrong thing to say, or they did something and maybe they made a mistake. Maybe it was a shortcoming. I don't know. And everybody turns on their friends. Turn on them, their boss. They get fired. You're awful. You're awful. You're awful. They come home and they're crying and they're like, oh, my God. And their partner holds them and says, honey, we're gonna get through this. I see you. I love you. That's a lucky person right there. And you can do that even if you don't have someone that's doing it. You become that for yourself. And you must. You have to. No one else will. And you'll never. I mean, we can't expect and rely on the world around us and the circumstances to be just so. You must become your own ally, your own inner champion on your own side, your own best friend. You must truly develop that. Opening your heart to yourself, creating that compassion. And the truth is, there is so much complexity to this. And actually multiple clients I've worked with in that situation, it's so much complexity to it, right? You know, there's anxiety involved in it. There's. They psych themselves out. They have ambivalence around moving towards and moving away. There's, you know, there's all kinds of complexity to it. And what if we strip it from, like, good or bad, worthy or unworthy, and just be like a human experiencing this conflict of desire and fear around sexuality. How much depth, how much, you know, and maybe that's one of his core journeys, his core things to overcome in this life, to face, to grow from. We all got him. We all got stuff that we gotta face in this life and grow. So my question for you is, are you willing to be on your own side? That's the core. That's how we start to fill this hole. And then I'm going to share the last thing you can do in this as your action. Step here. Time for action. Action. Action. It's not really the last thing you can do. There's a million things you could do. But the next thing you can do is as you're really being with yourself, really feeling really calming and slowing down, you say you just drop this one into the pond and you say, I don't need blank in order to feel okay now. Right? So, you know, I don't need to be in a relationship in order to feel okay right now. And you could play with this if there's a bunch of resistance. You could say, what if I don't need blank in order to feel okay now? What if another thing is to remind yourself of a deeper truth, which is whatever you want is possible now even before the circumstances change. So you could say, even though I'm not in a relationship, even though I don't have this thing in my life, whatever it is, I can feel peace right now. Peace is possible even though blank and whatever the blank is is your life circumstance. And then you just be with that. Maybe there's thrashing, there's fighting, the mind gets active, and you just keep staying with it with curiosity and compassion. You let the storm settle, and you'll start to see more and more and more the truth. And then from this place in your life, whoa, look out. Your ability to create magnifies your ability to just act with more guidance, more trust, more confidence, more ease, more effectiveness, more efficiency. It all starts to open up. So I hope this serves you in your life. It's been a pleasure being with you here today until we speak again may 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.