Dr. Aziz (host of The Art of Extraordinary Confidence) addresses social confidence and the common fear of strangers. Using a personal anecdote about his young son, he reframes social anxiety as a form of fear and offers a specific exercise: when you see strangers, mentally imagine a rich inner life for them to reduce threat perception and dissolve fear. The episode closes with encouragement to try the experiment and share results.
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Do you feel nervous or anxious before meeting new people? Approaching someone that you don't know very well? Maybe being introduced to someone that you haven't met before? If so, are you scared of strangers? That's what this episode is all about. You gotta watch this to learn how to be free of that right now. Welcome to another episode of the Art of Extraordinary Confidence. I'm your host, Dr. Zies, and this is the show for you if you want to maximize your confidence in every area of life that matters. And today we're going to be focusing on social confidence. And if you're benefiting from these shows and these episodes, click below to subscribe. We're putting out a lot more as well as clicking like so we can spread the word of confidence. And today I want to highlight something and I'm going to use language that we don't normally use. Earlier in the intro, I said, are you scared of strangers? Now, most of us as adults, if someone said, are you scared of a stranger? We'd say, no, I'm not. I'm tough. But if someone said, hey, do you get social anxiety? We'd say, oh, yeah, right. Or do you feel nervous around someone that you haven't met before? Yeah, right. And so we can say, we're social anxiety. We're nervous. That's just fancy words for fear. And what the truth is that we're just scared of strangers. Now, why are we scared of strangers? Why? I mean, that's a complex topic that's gonna be more than just a short episode here. But I'll tell you a brief story that highlights that this can go beyond even our guesses and theories as to why we are. Sometimes we just don't know. Case in point, I was down by the river over the summer with my son Zaim. At the time, he was about three and a half. And we had an awesome day at this little creek area near the river. And at one point, we were walking back to the car to get something, me and him. And you go on this little path up and down a little creek area, and you get to your car and he's got a stick from down by the river. Because what kid doesn't want to get a stick down by the river? And he's carrying it and he's like, if anyone. If I see anyone on the path, I'm going to whack him with my stick. And I thought that was an interesting statement. So I thought I'd find out what was happening. So I said, oh, interesting. You're going to whack them with your stick, huh? He's like, yeah. I said, oh, why do you want to whack them with your stick? And he said, I'm going to hit them with my stick before they hit me first. I said, oh, do you think they're gonna hit you with a stick? And he said, I'm gonna whack them first before they can. So that was a yes, right? He thinks that they're gonna hit him with a stick. And I said, are you afraid they're gonna hurt you? And he didn't really respond to that one, but it was obvious that he was. So we started walking up the path and sure enough, there's like this, I don't know, a couple young women coming, and they're like, la, la, la la la. We're going to the river. And they come around the bend and they're like, hi. And I'm like, hey. And he's like, standing off the side holding a stick, like, just watching them go by. And then they walk right by him. And I said, did it seem like they wanted to hurt you? And he said, no. He said no. So he kind of acknowledged it, but then he held his stick for the next person. So he wasn't convinced, he wasn't sold. And I thought this whole little exchange was fascinating because he. I mean, he's just been born that way from, you know, man, talk about nature versus nurture. I can see it in my two kids. He is like, ah, strangers. And my other son, Armand, who's younger, is just like, hello, everybody. Hi. Right. And that's just how they came out. And that might just be how you came out. And I have guesses as to why. I think Zaim is extremely sensitive. He feels things a lot more strongly. He probably feels energy, he feels his body sensations, he feels fear more. I mean, he feels everything. The dial is just turned way up, right? So maybe someone's walking by and he just feels more than his brother and he gets scared more. So that might be your case. That was certainly my case. I was a very sensitive kid. Sensitive now as an adult. So there's a million and one reasons why we might be scared of strangers. And finding the root cause is probably not going to eliminate the fear. Here's what I would suggest that we do to. And of course, there's tons of stuff in these other videos about exposure, about friendly greetings, saying hello to people as you go down the street to see that the world's a friendly place. A dozen and one ideas you can find on this Channel. But there's one thing I'm going to share that's new here in this video and that's to just take some time. When you're out today doing your errands or whatever and you see some strangers, not even strangers you're going to interact with. Just there's that person, there's that middle aged woman, there's that elderly man, there's that family with their kids. Just take a moment and imagine that you could just zoom in and just get into their head and see a story from their life. Now this is all made up, right? We don't know who knows what's going on with that person, but you just take a look at them and just notice that. And maybe you just imagine that guy as a kid playing baseball, maybe getting made fun of at school and you look over at that middle aged woman over there and you imagine her looking in the mirror and criticizing herself or imagine her laughing at her wedding, right? It just. Who knows? It's whatever comes to your mind. But we're flushing them out. We're seeing them as these whole complete, complex rich people just like you and me. They're not this like weird one dimensional, two dimensional, harsh, rejecting, angry, perfect being that just like hates everyone. And that's how we treat strangers often when we're scared of them. And guess what? They're not gonna whack you with a stick. They're just going about their life. They're just struggling in the ways that we are. They want to feel happy, they want to feel good about themselves. They want to have a sense of meaning and purpose and self worth and find happiness and find love and find some reason for being here that inspires them to wake up in the morning. They want to be free of pain in their body. They want to be healthy. They want to feel alive and vital just like you. Just like me. So just see people with this more depth as you walk around today and watch as it can start to dissolve that fear of strangers. Awesome. So share below in your comments what you learned from that little experiment. And I can't wait to see you in future episodes 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.
